Forbidden Music

by Michael Haas

  It seems quite remarkable that in a book that purports to pass judgement on current German music, even after the death of Mahler and the success throughout the German nation of his Eighth Symphony, he omits it with the belief that ‘the music of Mahler is German music with an accent, the oriental cadence and above all, the gesture of the eastern, indeed, the extreme eastern European Jew […] so that his music makes the same effect as a clown from the [Jewish cabaret ensemble] Budapest ‘Orpheum’ reciting Schiller's poetry. […] Mahler has no idea how grotesque he appears wearing the mask of the German Master, which highlights the inner contradictions that make his music fundamentally dishonest.’ And so he goes on and on. Mr Rudolf Louis, author of German Music of Today, hails from Munich, that citadel of the arts and the city in which the questionably German premiere of Mahler's Eighth Symphony took place. Its unparalleled success reflected if anything a huge demonstration of Mahler-admiration, a true apotheosis in view of the premature death of the artist. According to Mr Louis, however, ‘whoever has a positive opinion about Mahler has forfeited his credibility of being taken seriously in an appraisal of western music, culture and the occidental races, and blind to the unbridgeable abyss that exists between them and Mahler's music’. Mengelberg [and others] should take note!

  Both [the public] composer and private individual Karl Goldmark must be informed by Mr Louis that ‘artistically and culturally he lacks all instincts for German culture which must remain strange and alien, as it is to any foreigner who lives his entire life in Germany’. So, there you are: both Goldmark and Rubinstein are through their provenance strangers to German culture. Mendelssohn's spiritual compositions were already dismissed in the first edition of his book as ‘decidedly slick and inwardly shallow’. He's had a slight reprieve in the newer edition as now he's only labelled ‘slick and inwardly mushy’. As such, one is inclined to suggest that Mr Louis is somewhat outwardly slick himself. I was further amused to note that in the new edition, the dismissive remark has been removed that made reference to Richard Strauss being born in the year that Meyerbeer died. In compensation, he manages a sleight-of-hand by hardly dealing with Arnold Schoenberg at all – remarkable for a composer who, regardless of what one thinks of him, obsessively occupies the entire musical world in furious discussion and debate. He's quite content to reject his sextet Verklärte Nacht as trivial and makes the point regarding his later works that ‘one is either dealing with a madman or a criminal’. It can be seen as a blessing that such musical tendencies (pace Wagner) are only rarely expressed these days in Germany and enjoy limited resonance – indeed, are usually countered. Mr Louis's book doesn't really gain much even with a second printing. There are many omissions. Its pretentiously styled subjectivity, hasty conclusions and cranky dismissals only appear all the more lurid. Let's simply agree to put this new edition – not really improved – quietly to one side.28

  Mahler and Korngold

  Julius Korngold and Mahler were on friendly terms, but not necessarily close friends. A fair representation of the relationship is offered by Julius's son Erich in a letter to Arnold Rosé written on 3 January 1918: ‘That the friendship between Director Mahler and father was true and based on mutual respect and understanding is something I have known since childhood.‘29 Apart from the odd individual letter in various European archives, their correspondence remains a mystery. The International Gustav Mahler Society in Vienna has a single photocopy of a letter from Mahler to Korngold that appears to indicate that it was one of 113.30 Julius Korngold's memoirs quote copiously from letters he must have had in front of him at the time, but what happened to these after the ransacking of Korngold's home by the Nazis in 1938 remains unknown. Not only is this valuable correspondence missing, but also items from the musical estate of Eduard Hanslick which were entrusted to Korngold. Mahler's regard for Julius's son Erich is well known, as is his recommendation that he be taken away from Robert Fuchs, his own teacher at the academy, and be taught instead by Alexander Zemlinsky.31 Julius was suspicious of this recommendation initially because of Zemlinsky's closeness to Schoenberg. But what Korngold's writings (such as his review of Louis) make clear is that though he disagreed with Schoenberg's ideas, he held him in high esteem, influenced, no doubt, by Schoenberg's closeness to Mahler (to whom Schoenberg dedicated his Harmonielehre). Considering Edward Dent's description of Julius quoted earlier, it is ironic that both Korngold and Schoenberg became close in Californian exile. Schoenberg's letter of condolence to Erich following Julius's death gives us a hint of the power of Mahler to bring together what had previously seemed irreconcilable.

  Julius Korngold's understanding of Mahler's music is unique. Their relationship was professional rather than personal, but it was a genuine friendship with a collegial closeness that was useful to both. Mahler knew when to feed Julius information for his own ends and Julius was more than happy to comply. Mahler leaked his intention of leaving the Vienna Opera, an astute move that resulted in a three-page blast against Mahler's detractors in the paper on 4 June 1907.32 Later, Mahler passed on his opinion of his successor Felix Weingartner as ‘at best only a dim-witted conservatory student’, a view he knew Korngold would use. He duly did, and ultimately had Weingartner driven from the post to which he only returned once Korngold was retired.33

  In his memoirs, Julius sees Weingartner's support of his son Erich as nothing more than the machinations of a clever opportunist currying favour with an influential father. Erich's dilemma was palpable. As an attempt to calm the situation, the fifteen-year-old prodigy dedicated his Sinfonietta Op. 5 to Weingartner, who conducted its premiere in 1914. Mahler's dismissive remarks about Weingartner amounted to a well-placed cuckoo's egg, and his high regard for Bruno Walter (who lived on the next floor below Korngold in Vienna's Theobaldgasse) guaranteed that he remained Julius's musician of choice. When Richard Strauss, as director of the Opera after the First World War, had gone so far as to engage Erich as a conductor to gain relief for himself and Franz Schalk from the huge burden of nightly performances, Julius saw only plots and intrigues. His steadfast loyalty to Mahler remained, despite the fact that he had been dead for years. De facto, Julius found no subsequent opera director worthy of comparison, and if they showed a genuine interest in his son's works, he was convinced it was only a ruse.

  Richard Strauss, who was ordinarily not given to bouts of anti-Semitism, was sufficiently piqued by Julius Korngold's unremitting attacks to call in Erich for a dressing down, accusing Julius of wishing to remove him so that a ‘fellow Israelite’, meaning Bruno Walter, could take over. The popular view, as expressed in an article by the piano professor Richard Robert in the Wiener Sonn- und Montags Zeitung, was that Julius was giving good reviews to those who promoted Erich's work and poor reviews to those who did not.34 To outsiders, it was starting to look suspiciously like a cabal. From Erich's perspective, his father's loyalty to Mahler meant that some of the finest performers refused to take up his works for fear of attacks in the Neue Freie Presse. This impossible situation prevailed until he trumped Julius by changing direction and began updating and arranging popular operettas by Johann Strauss, Leo Fall and Offenbach, a move that gave him greater financial independence as well as an ersatz father-figure in the stage director and impresario Max Reinhardt.

  Julius Korngold's passion for Mahler was a dilemma for his son. Far from taking Mahler as his model, Erich preferred Puccini and Richard Strauss. Recordings of Julius and Erich speaking are revealing. Julius speaks the immaculately articulated German of Vienna's leading opinion makers: he had honed a style of delivery that was originally meant to be heard in Vienna's law-courts (and his brother, Eduard Kornau, was a well-known actor). By contrast, Erich spoke with a Viennese cadence much coloured by an accent of Jewish Czech-German; it lacked any hint of pretension or self-importance.

  Julius wrote extensively about each of Mahler's symphonies (it was he who nick-named the Sixth Symphony the ‘Hammerschlag‘35), and what he has to say about each is revealing. We can
assume from reading Julius's memoirs that they reflect conversations with Mahler. Surprisingly, they are not always uncritical. But his article on Mahler's Third Symphony published in the Neue Freie Presse on 17 December 1904 gives us one of the most deeply sympathetic treatments of the man and his music. It reveals not only Korngold's innate understanding of the music but also his personal closeness with the composer. It opens by describing a painting at an exhibition at Vienna's Secessionist Gallery: ‘A piano with its lid raised shows us waves rolling evenly into the background. A horrifying sea monster with its front paws extended threateningly rises out of them: it is half sphinx and half water-snake. Above the painting hangs its title The Symphony. One can but smile at the thought of the sympathetic visitor adding The Mahler Symphony as a welcome clarification.’

  Korngold also considers the Strauss–Mahler duopoly in Austria and Germany at the turn of the century. Strauss was born in 1864 and was thus a few years younger than Mahler. At the time, the two were viewed as the musical Janus faces of the age, and during Mahler's lifetime they enjoyed a kind of friendly rivalry far more pronounced than generally perceived today. What adds piquancy to our reading of Korngold's comparison is that the full extent of Strauss's unblushing opportunism would not have been known to him at the time. Korngold would have been unaware of Strauss's playing on Cosima Wagner's anti-Semitism to keep Mahler out of Bayreuth. With Mahler long dead – and blacklisted from 1933 – Strauss was able to reign more or less supreme in Nazi Germany as their grand old man of music. With hindsight, Korngold's article looks far more balanced than it might have been had it been written thirty years later:

  Why does Mahler have it more difficult than Strauss? One places the two composers often enough side by side as the apex of modern musical genius. Strauss, however, has until now not only been modern, but also modish. Isn't Mahler also a brilliant technician, virtuoso orchestrator, in possession of a gloriously deep musical spirit? Of course he is; but he is all of these things in a very different way from Strauss. One could say that Mahler is both more conservative, and more advanced than Strauss. Strauss on the other hand is the more potent ‘new German’ musician. He strides through paths that were trodden fifty years earlier by Wagner and Liszt. The symphonic poem, which takes its very existence with the introduction of extra-musical content, was called into being and placed next to the symphony. Mahler has not broken completely with the formal conventions of symphonic architecture. He simply believes that new art, through its combination of widely varying means of expression, must heighten the subjective musical response [of the listener]. To this is added minutely detailed realism within the framework of the multi-movement symphony. In the middle of structures that the great masters have [already] made familiar, we hear the most daringly modern musical-poetic vocabulary and it is this that primarily alienates – indeed, that needs to alienate. This battle between old and new appears to be fought on sacred ground.

  We must inevitably turn to two other composers who are central in helping us understand Mahler: Berlioz and Bruckner. Their symphonic styles also wrestle in a similar way with the infiltration of poetic ideals. Mahler studied with Bruckner, and thus one hears not only the foundation of solemn religiosity which intensifies into insistent speculation, but also a child-like naivety in certain passages – all of this is present in addition to quite obvious compositional similarities. Nevertheless, Mahler's true progenitor is Berlioz, with whom his similarities simply mount up. As with Berlioz, we find with Mahler the tendencies to resort to representational means; the casual adding to the number of symphonic movements; the consolidation of vocal and instrumental elements; the far-flung sound fantasies; the mixture of the bizarre with the exalted and the primitive: ‘the sulphuric bolts of irony’ as Heine called them, all interspersed with voyages that bound between heaven and hell. Mahler belongs to the tribe of Berlioz, just as Strauss belongs to the tribe of Liszt. And the harder one looks, the higher one sees the walls growing between these two musical dynasties. Mahler looks for broad subjects that he melodically varies and spins out; Strauss works with motifs and minuscule motif particles that he combines in complex polyphonic escapades. Diatonic thinking remains at Mahler's core, while with Strauss it's chromatic. If Strauss sounds cacophonic by cleverness and contrariness, Mahler sounds cacophonic by conviction. And while Strauss remains firmly committed to ‘the artistic'; Mahler's need is for naivety, naturalness, in fact nature itself and the folkloric. The preference of this composer for the poetry of the folksong has been a feature of his music for far too long for it to be thought a mere affectation.36

  This observation gives Korngold the perfect lead into a discussion of the Third Symphony:

  Mahler rejoices in nature awakening. The sun caresses the composer's hyper-receptive sensitivity, he bends over to smell the gentle scent of the flowers and to listen to the tales told by the animals of the forest: ‘like a sound from Nature’, writes Mahler again and again in his score; a natural sound is sought also in his reflections, his extravagancies, his search for the exceptional that he manages to wrestle out of his music. It would appear that with Mahler's arrival, ‘Modern Music’ attempts to free itself from the entanglements of debased compositional techniques, high-flown artiness and overladen sound-fixations. And the most telling element is to be found in his 5th and latest symphony: Mahler jettisons the very principals of ‘new music’ by discarding the poetic programme. Premonitions of this development could be noted even earlier. Yet if Mahler employed symphonic programmes before, it was so that he could dispense with them later. And so it is with his Third Symphony. Goodness! He virtually immerses himself in all that drips out of these leaking symphonic riddles; indeed, we find ourselves playing the equivalent of Symphony Charades. There are secretive mysterious entries everywhere for which we have no keys; sound-painting and horrifyingly realistic passages that can only make sense if they mean [my italics] something as music. And then we have the unexpected appearances of vocal movements, which clear paths that allow the purely symphonic movements to stumble along behind. For example, in the Fourth Symphony we have the final movement's folksong of ‘Heavenly Joy’. In a manner of speaking, one was led through three dark rooms towards the flicker of a tiny candle. If we are to set the Hamlet of programme music across from a compliant Polonius, then at least he should tell us if he wishes the fog of music to be understood as a weasel or an elephant. Mahler doesn't wish to tell us in his Third Symphony, though especially in the third movement there is no shortage of weasels and any number of other creatures. At one point it was once called ‘What the animals of the Forest tell me’ and had, along with the rest of the symphony, a poetic concept. Indeed, the entire symphony was once called ‘A Summer Morning's Dream’. The first movement would have been entitled ‘The Arrival of Pan'; the second, ‘What the Flowers tell me’. In the third, we're able to hear what the animals have to say. The rounds of Zarathustra from the ‘Drunken Song’ offer ‘What Man tells me’. The fifth movement enters with the chorus singing a text taken from the Knaben Wunderhorn: ‘Three tiny angels sang’. This movement once carried the heading ‘What the angels tell me’, and finally the last movement which was formerly headed ‘What love tells me’. Yet, what does the music of the Symphony tell us? Perhaps at first it's worth noting that the composer Mahler is not able to be understood completely without also understanding the characters of the brilliant conductor and ingenious opera director who inhabit the same person. [With the Third Symphony] we are confronted with an extraordinary apparatus: in addition to the huge orchestra which is augmented by every kind of percussion, glockenspiel, tuned bells, we have Flugelhorn and a side drum off-stage along with solo voices, women's chorus, and a boys’ choir up in the gallery. And in addition, the score abounds with performance instructions which do not solely apply to dynamic and meter, but also expression and even how one should play the instruments. And all of this interacts ceaselessly at just the right time, right spot, usually upon an invisible set: it offers the appeara
nce of being expressive even if this is not immediately apparent from the musical notes themselves. Thus it is the creative conductor, the modern, expressive conductor who speaks out of his own conception of the music; in point of fact, certain sequences and musical gestures seem to come from the very indications he makes when conducting. All of this is bound up inextricably with the musician as a master of stagecraft. Julius embarks in a more detailed breakdown of the symphony and at the end of his article returns to Berlioz's influence, concluding with the pronouncement that the Third Symphony, pace Berlioz, should be entitled, ‘Episodes from the Musical Life of a Composing Fabulist’.37

  There is much here that speaks from the time and process of assimilation. Quite apart from the association of the German soul with nature and the forest, the most telling sentence refers to Mahler's preference for the use of folk material having been a feature for too long to be taken as 'mere affectation’. The philosopher Hannah Arendt makes the point that Jews often saw nature and art as being socially and politically neutral, impervious to the obstacles they encountered elsewhere and thereby offering an easier path to assimilation.38 Korngold's observation is to be understood in this context, but Mahler's love of nature was genuine and innate, not an attempt to ‘fit in’.