Forbidden Music
Page 16
But Auernheimer's attack dated from 4 July 1918, a decade after Schoenberg's Book of the Hanging Gardens (1907) and Erwartung (1909), and six years after the most quintessentially Expressionist of musical works, Pierrot Lunaire (1912). It also came long after the 1908 suicide of the Expressionist artist Richard Gerstl. Nor is consideration given to the Expressionist movement Der blaue Reiter, founded by the painter Vassily Kandinsky in 1911, which was a continuation of Dresden's proto-Expressionist movement from 1905 called Die Brücke. If one takes 1905 as a starting point and the Lukás–Bloch debate in 1937–8 as its last gasp, Expressionism, no matter how it was understood, dominated the European cultural environment for nearly 35 years before flaring up again in numerous postwar exile compositions. That music should latch on to this movement before literature and theatre is a result of the painter Gerstl's direct influence on Schoenberg.
To understand how it was seen at the time, it is worth looking at extracts from Auernheimer's article. He begins as follows:
There are quite a few myths being circulated about Expressionism these days – not only from this movement's literary and artistic leaders, but also from its most indoctrinated followers, not to mention the large number of camp followers who all hope that they won't find themselves left out. Yet nobody really knows what to make of this dark, violent sounding word ‘Expressionism’ other than noting that it seemed to enter the German language around the same time as ‘Bolshevism’.
An explanation of what Expressionism might mean was offered in a lecture given in Berlin by one of the movement's most fervent followers, the writer Kasimir Edschmid. It is about this lecture that Auernheimer writes, quoting Edschmid, that ‘stagnation has been the state of things since Romanticism’.14
Auernheimer deplores this generalisation and asks what happened to four generations of developments that included ‘Naturalism’, which the Expressionists call ‘Impressionism’. He then goes on to write:
The young artists of today don't want to represent the world in the manner of artists in 1890. Instead, they would rather impose their own ‘vision’ created by emotion. They try and differentiate themselves from earlier exponents by insisting that ‘the world is out there already and it would be pointless to reproduce it’. They propose instead that the poet focus on ‘creating something eternal’. Naturally, there is nothing to disagree with here, though they shouldn't argue that this idea only appeared as recently as December 1917. […] What Edschmid calls the ‘relationship with eternity’ was already referred to in Goethe's day and then, a bit later, we came to recognise such ambitions as simply being part of ‘human nature’. […] From Edschmid's general introduction follow the specifics. Names are named and called out with the blissful partisanship that Expressionists see as their own rather endearing entitlement, as indeed it ever was with all youthful movements. Heinrich Mann leads in this particular dance; he's seen as some sort of ‘head boy’ within the Expressionist school, which is fairly amusing if one recalls that Heinrich Mann […] is already 40 years old. For the Expressionists, however, he has reached the outer realms of human existence with one foot practically in the grave.15
Auernheimer goes on to name the authors on Edschmid's list of Expressionists: ‘[Frank] Wedekind, [René] Schickele, [Walter] Hasenclever, [Paul] Kornfeld, [Fritz] Unruh, [Alfred] Döblin, Georg Heym, [Franz] Werfel and [Georg] Trakl.‘16 All are significant German writers and he follows with intriguing observations regarding literature following art and the actual position of Expressionism vis-à-vis Impressionism:
Only music has not been touched by Expressionism, perhaps because music was always expressionist. But what the devil is Expressionism? Literally translated, it is ‘The Art that grows out of Expression’. Translating less literally, it appears to mean that it is that art which within expression seeks and finds its own Ends. ‘Feeling’ is back to being the basis for everything, just like in the days of the Romantics, and the youngsters today couldn't give a fig if the worldly weight that they lug around within themselves has anything to do with reality or not. The call of life doesn't register with them; rather they harken only to the sound of their own warbling and twittering. They also feel, not without some validation, that naturalistic art cannot be true to itself, since it can only represent what nature has by chance placed together and thus, the only thing that can be represented are objects without meaning. Art, according to them, should not concern itself with the outward appearance which is constantly changing but the eternal inner truths which they alone are able to translate. If left un-fashioned into art, these inner truths remain mere philosophy. […] The Expressionist is less concerned with painting a person than representing a person and painting them ‘as if they wore their heart on the outer side of their breast’.17
The rest of the article dismembers the assumed uniqueness of the Expressionist agenda (‘wasn't Sturm und Drang just Expressionism in the eighteenth century?’) and its ‘fatuous negation’ of Naturalism-Impressionism, a movement that Auernheimer defends using both Émile Zola and Gerhart Hauptmann. Auernheimer concludes that artists have always tried to connect to basic human emotions – it was ever thus: ‘Goethe in conversation with [Johann Peter] Eckermann once said, “Young people today seem to think that alongside the black round centre of a target, there must be another that they should aim for instead. They are wrong. There is only one bull's eye.” This is what the Expressionists, even with their new-fangled weapons, must still discover for themselves.‘18
Despite Schoenberg's reputation as the Expressionist composer par excellence, it is equally unsurprising that he would seek to impose some organisation onto the chaos that was starting to ensue. Pierrot Lunaire (1912), with its Sprechgesang and darkly symbolic poetry, shows, with its use of passacaglia, canon and other ‘learned’ compositional devices, signs of Schoenberg seeking some sort of atonal order. Even at his most extreme, Schoenberg seemed to yearn for the eighteenth-century musical Enlightenment in its search for clarity, purity of form, and balance of construction.
The German composer James Simon also wrote on ‘Expressionism in Music’ in Musikblätter des Anbruch. He starts by explaining how ‘Impressionists compress the world into the concept of “I”, whereas Expressionists explode the concept of “I” into the outer universe.‘19 Essentially, he agrees with many of Auernheimer's points, though he views the movement more sympathetically. Simon points out that, with Verklärte Nacht (1899), Schoenberg started as an Impressionist before moving into Expressionism. The potential inference from reading Auernheimer and Simon (who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944) is that Jewish intellectuals had good reason to be wary of Expressionism. With its relationship to Wagnerian Romanticism merely up-dated and drilled through with angst, it was moving away from the clear vision of rationality; Jewish intellectuals were instinctively uneasy with the irrational, a point that even comes across implicitly in the ‘Expressionism Debate’ of 1937–8.
Schoenberg's correspondence with Kandinsky is revealing for exactly this reason. Kandinsky had started to paint his first abstract works during 1908–9 at exactly the same time that Schoenberg felt he had broken through to achieve his own musical vision. In 1911 Kandinsky wrote an unsolicited but admiring letter to Schoenberg after hearing a performance of his music in Munich:
You have achieved in your compositions what I long for in less concrete form than music: the independence to walk towards one's own destiny. Your entire life is heard in the individual sounds of your music and reflects what I wish to show in my painting. Currently within the fine arts, there is a strong move towards construction as a means of finding a new ‘harmony’. […] My comprehension and efforts can subsequently only limp one step behind. Construction is exactly what the fine arts have so hopelessly lacked and it's marvellous that it's now being sought. Only, I think about the way things should be constructed.
Then, in a sentence that echoes Schoenberg's view from his Harmonielehre that composers needed to liberate themselves from merely providing con
ventional beauty or coherency, Kandinsky adds: ‘I find that contemporary harmony shouldn't follow set geometrical pattern but rather strike out on an anti-geometrical, illogical path and this path is the equivalent of musical dissonance.‘20 Kandinsky made Schoenberg a member of Der Blaue Reiter, included some of his paintings in the group's first exhibition, and organised a performance in St Petersburg of Pelleas und Melisande, which the composer conducted.21
There followed a break in correspondence with Kandinsky returning to Russia and Schoenberg joining the Austrian army in 1914. After the war, just as Kandinsky became involved with the constructivist Bauhaus movement, Schoenberg developed his own constructivist system using the twelve-note method. Both artists had independently sought to restore order from the chaos of Expressionism. Kandinsky was keen for Schoenberg to come to Weimar, where he believed it would be possible to establish a musical branch of Bauhaus. Unfortunately, allegedly anti-Semitic remarks made by Kandinsky were reported to Schoenberg just as he was smarting from the racist indignities of Mattsee, an Alpine resort where he generally spent his summer vacation and which had begun to advertise the fact that it no longer welcomed Jewish holidaymakers. This combination of unhappy events initiated a break by Schoenberg in 1923, despite protestations of innocence by a mystified Kandinsky. There was only sporadic contact afterwards. Expressionism was thus a movement that by claiming to represent inner truth based on anarchic emotion was essentially nihilistic Romanticism. After Schoenberg, it had limited appeal to Jewish avant-garde composers.
Schreker, Expressionism and His Composition Pupils
One notable exception was Franz Schreker, whose music from the pyromaniac opera Irrelohe (1919–22) onwards began to develop beyond the sensually woven ‘Jugendstil’ textures of his earlier operas and became more abrasively dissonant. The title Irrelohe was taken from a railway station near Regensburg called Irrenlohe, which Schreker adapted for the name of his opera, roughly translated as ‘Flames of Madness’. It was a transitional work that reflected his departure from Vienna and his arrival in Berlin. As such, it contains much that is redolent of his former musical world while exploring turbulent sounds and effects encouraged by the new. Der Singende Teufel,22 composed between 1924 and 1928, is also readily classifiable as musical Expressionism, with a subject similar to Kleist's Die Heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik,23 in which music stuns hordes of pagan Huns into submission. The more experimental Christophorus, oder die Vision einer Oper, composed between 1925 and 1929, brings to mind subjects as diverse as The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Thomas Mann's as yet unwritten Dr Faustus. Christophorus is dedicated to Schoenberg and, according to Schreker's biographer Christopher Hailey, owes much to Schoenberg's influence, with a musical language that pushes through the borders of conventional tonality.24 It was rejected for publication by the usually supportive Universal Edition and remained unperformed during Schreker's lifetime.
Yet if Wellesz saw much in Berg's Lulu that reminded him of Schreker's Der ferne Klang, there is even more in Christophorus with its abrasive dissonances as orchestral colour and cinematic links between scenes that seem unthinkable without Berg's Wozzeck (though, intriguingly, that was not premiered until 1925). Schreker began composing Christophorus straight after Irrelohe, but only completed it much later, following a return to more familiar territory in Der singende Teufel.25 By the time of his last opera, Der Schmied von Gent,26 completed in 1932, Schreker had become a participant in the anti-Romantic Zeitgeist that defined much of the work of his students. Ernst Krenek's Jonny spielt auf, for example, had been given its premiere in Leipzig in 1927, then toured the world, launching an avalanche of similar Zeitopern, a genre of musical theatre that offered an ultra-contemporary setting and used an apparatus of modern acoustical artifices such as car-horns, radios, jazz bands, telephones, police sirens and so on. Many of the most successful Zeitopern were composed by Schreker's students, such as Max Brand's Maschinist Hopkins and Karol Rathaus's Fremde Erde,27 both from 1930, and Mark Lothar's Lord Spleen in 1931. In February 1932, an opera by one of his brightest pupils, Der gewaltige Hahnrei28 by Berthold Goldschmidt, admittedly more erotic-grotesque than Zeitoper, was first performed to great acclaim in Mannheim. Wilhelm Grosz, viewed by Julius Korngold as one of the most promising of potential Mahler successors29 and whose Sgarnarelle (based on Molière) was given at the Vienna Opera in 1925, moved away from ‘serious’ music altogether to compose jazzy ballads, hit songs and dance numbers, including the theme-song for the film The Santa Fe Trail, starring Ronald Reagan.
Schreker's pupils from Vienna and Berlin are startling in their diversity. He instinctively took on individualists who would go their own way rather than follow his example. He treated pupils on individual merit, including several talented women such as Lotte Schlesinger, Zdenka von Ticharich, and Grete von Zieritz. His pupils, even more than Schoenberg's, are a roll-call of music in Weimar Germany. It is tantalising to speculate how such a group would have influenced future developments in German music had many of Schreker's most capable pupils not been forced into exile by the Nazis or, in some cases, openly collaborated with them, thus hindering their reception after 1945. As a result of the inevitable parricide that is common between gifted pupil and teacher, many of his most prominent students would distance themselves from Schreker as old-fashioned. With so much posthumous disparagement of Schreker, we can only surmise what he was like as a teacher on the basis of his remarkable class: unlike Schoenberg, he left no books or manuals behind.
Following Schoenberg's arrival as Busoni's successor at the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1925, thanks in part to Schreker's recommendation, Schreker's pupils took the conscious decision not to go down the twelve-tone route. Only Paul Pisk and Rudolf Kolisch – Schoenberg's future brother-in-law – studied with both. By choosing to study with Schreker, they showed an inclination to the trends within musical modernism represented by Stravinsky and the emerging voices of composers such as Hindemith and Toch. Schoenberg, though seen as brilliant, was considered too doctrinaire for many independent, younger spirits of the age.
Apart from Schreker, who is finally starting to regain recognition, it appears the most memorable examples of musical Expressionism were by two non-Jewish composers: Alban Berg's operatic settings of Büchner's Wozzeck and Wedekind's Lulu, and Paul Hindemith's three short operas, Das Nusch-Nuschi, with a libretto by Franz Blei, Sancta Susanna and its libretto by August Stramm, and Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen30 written to a text by Expressionism's favourite wild-child, the artist Oskar Kokoschka. Jewish composers were showing a marked preference for an avant-garde that either adhered to well-defined laws, such as Schoenberg's twelve-note method, or, more frequently, the emerging Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’), which represented developments that, though still broadly tonal, were anti-Romantic.
Ernst Krenek makes an interesting observation regarding Expressionist Jewish composers and atonality in his memoirs Im Atem der Zeit. In 1934, he founded a concert series called ‘The Austrian Studio’, the purpose of which was to show that modern music was something ‘intrinsically Austrian’ and not an affair relegated to (as he put it) ‘subversive lefties and Jews’.31 In a conversation regarding the programming of a liturgical concert with Dr Josef Lechthaler, the head of music within Austria's Catholic Church, Krenek is shocked by an observation which seemed at the time to enjoy wide currency: ‘Alarmingly’, according to Krenek, ‘Lechthaler mentioned that it is no wonder the public is sceptical of new music in Austria, as it was atonal music “exclusively composed by Jews for Jews and therefore only purposeful in diverting ‘an exotic minority’”.’ Krenek, despite the overtly anti-Semitic founding principles of the Austrian Studio, is taken aback and answers that if this is the case, ‘one should try to encourage non-Jews to listen to new music rather than disparage it. It's not right to blame the composer if only Jews attend performances of his works. In addition, it would be very simple to prove that concerts of modern music were attended by at least as many non-Jews a
s Jews.‘32 With regard to the other point, Krenek admits that he can only think of a single Jewish composer ‘of the more dubious variety of atonal music: Arnold Schoenberg’. Lechthaler is surprised and tries to strengthen his argument by listing one atonal or twelve-tone composer after another, only to be informed by Krenek that they all come from generations of good Austrian Catholics.
Krenek was the son of a Czech army officer and a conservative Austrian Catholic monarchist. His implicit view that Jews could not be considered the same as ‘Austrians’ or ‘Germans’ confirms that even enlightened non-Jewish intellectuals sported casually anti-Semitic opinions at the time. Since 1933, he had been frequently and erroneously attacked as a Jew in the Nazi press. He subsequently expressed remorse for what he called his ‘disgraceful’ public protestations at these charges.33 Indeed, his first two wives, Mahler's daughter Anna and the actress Bertha Haas, were both Jewish enough to fall foul of the Nuremberg laws.