Forbidden Music

by Michael Haas

  By January 1931, there was no clear delineation of how modern music theatre was progressing. The following highlight some of the most important work chosen by the Anbruch editor Hans Heinsheimer for treatment:34 Walter Braunfels speaks about his opera based on E. T. A. Hoffmann's Prinzessin Brambilla; Berthold Goldschmidt writes about his ‘tragic-comedy’ grotesque Der gewaltige Hahnrei; Hans Krasa (who would be murdered in Auschwitz in 1944) writes about his opera Verlobung im Traum, based on an amusing short-story by Dostoyevsky.35 There are further articles by Alois Hába on his Moravian nationalist quarter-tone opera Matka (The Mother);36 reviews of Manfred Gurlitt's reworking of the tale of girls from good families falling for soldiers and becoming prostitutes, based on Lenz's 1776 play Soldaten;37 Karol Rathaus's contemporary opera Fremde Erde about the exploitation of financial refugees;38 Janáček's From the House of the Dead, also based on Dostoyevsky;39 Kurt Weill's opera for school-children Der Jasager;40 Krenek's updating of the Orestes story in Das Leben des Orest;41 Schreker writing on Der Schmied von Gent, which in January 1931 he was still calling Smee und die sieben Jahre,42 and a revealing article by Herbert Windt – who became Leni Riefenstahl's composer of choice during the Third Reich – on the nationalist political nature of his opera Andromache.43

  By 1930, the fad for Zeitoper had already peaked and was starting to give way to operas based on folktales and parables mixed with antiquity, often referred to in the press and elsewhere as the ‘Bekenntnisoper’ or ‘operas of avowal’. As Windt unintentionally makes clear in his article on Andromache, this was the perfect cultural run-up to National Socialism with its Germanic chauvinism mixed with Hellenophilia. Prior to the premiere of Schreker's own ‘Bekenntnisoper’, Der Schmied von Gent, there was Wellesz's Alkestis, first performed at Mannheim in 1924, Pfitzner's Das Herz (1931), Herbert Windt's Andromache (1932), Weinberger's Schwanda der Dudelsackpfeifer (1928), Weill's Die Bürgschaft (1932), and Paul Graener's Friedemann Bach (1932). Though a number of these works were by Jewish composers, the move away from Zeitoper towards the simple rustic parable or warmed-over Hellenism was unmistakable. Schreker, in an attempt to combine what he had always done best with an appeal to contemporary tastes, seemed to critics to have cooked up a mixture of current modernism, re-packaged as a German religious morality play. Viktor Zuckerkandl's review of the new work did not make for pleasant reading:

  Schreker: the composer of distant sounds, music-box mysteries, grave diggers in the realms of pesky magic, maddening flames, and singing devils in operatic enclosures, friend of orgies and intoxication, this sworn enemy of the commonplace has decided [in his latest opera] to re-locate to Holland: the centre of portly conventional pleasures and everyday well-being. He exchanges his opium excesses for the more commonplace delights of beer and Edam cheese. The nervous haggard looks of his usual characters are now exchanged for well-rounded beer-bellies. Is this a change in his personality or has he been caught up by the spirit of the time? Probably a bit of both. Presumably continuous exaltation is even wearing for those who create it.44

  Leaving Schreker's motivations to one side, Zuckerkandl dismisses the tonal language as mere ‘paper music’ and in a final flurry of journalistic mischief continues: ‘nothing proves that the music so completely misses the point as the fact that with [baritone] Wilhelm Rode, we have the perfectly cast central character! What!? The great Wotan and Iago as a jolly pie-face provincial with a pot-belly!? Of course not! But since the music makes no concession to these particular characteristics, the singer doesn't need to pretend he possesses them.‘45

  The Musical Consequences of Change: Serialism

  When Krenek referred to Schoenberg as the only Jewish composer of ‘the more dubious variety of atonal music’, he was simply stating what every musician at the time, including such reactionaries as Julius Korngold, already knew. Schoenberg was the supreme musical intellect and creative spirit of the age who towered well above his Austro-German contemporaries. His concept of twelve-tone composition (‘serialism’ or dodecaphonic composition) was an attempt to impose order onto the disorder that had grown out of a-tonal Expressionism. It was conceived in order to create new building blocks for Western music. Egon Wellesz, who at this time was intrigued by the sequences of modal tone-rows found in early Byzantine liturgical music, gave the following account of the development of Schoenberg's ideas:

  At this time [1917], I had an unusual encounter. A conscript wearing a filthy uniform reported to me and handed over a letter from the War Ministry. I was asked to assess whether the bearer of this letter, a certain Josef Matthias Hauer, was insane or if he was truly a musician, a claim doubted by the military doctors. Truth be told, clothed in his dirty uniform with his eccentric manner, the soldier in question actually did make a curious impression. But the moment he started to explain his theory of composing using a system of twelve notes, I quickly noted that far from being deranged, he was extraordinarily inventive and potentially an important musician. I wrote a letter informing the authorities of my opinion and managed to secure a safe place for him as an office clerk. Several days later, Hauer appeared again with several of his compositions and began to re-explain how his theory worked.46

  A childhood friend and important influence on Hauer was the Austrian Catholic philosopher Ferdinand Ebner, who not only wrote extensively about Hauer's music, but also published The Word and Spiritual Realities (Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten) in 1921, resulting in him being seen as a Catholic Kirkegaard. And in fact Kirkegaard, along with the nihilist Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger, and the Bible, were Ebner's principal influences. The Word and Spiritual Realities would become a cornerstone of anti-clerical theology. Ethics at the start of the twentieth century were obviously not a uniquely Jewish preoccupation. But Schoenberg's declaration that the composer needed to be honest in listening to his inner voice was consistent with Ebner's more general philosophy relating to the ‘I and thou’ relationship between the inner ethical voice and the individual. Ebner, rather than being a ‘Catholic Kirkegaard’, had in truth written a Catholic extension of Ich und Du47 by the Viennese Jewish philosopher Martin Buber which also explored the inner dialogue between God and the individual.

  Wellesz dwells on the relationship between Ebner and Hauer, which, before coming to an end in 1920, had supplied Hauer with the terms of reference to describe melodies composed according to strict rules as ‘nomos’ or ‘atonal Melos’, which differentiated between the purity of unaccompanied melody and noise. In describing Hauer and his eventual break with Ebner, Wellesz goes on to write:

  It was in fact quite difficult to have any sort of dialogue at all with Hauer. One was treated to dilettantish and arrogant monologues regarding his theories and their significance to mankind. Yet there was something valuable to be gathered when he ceased his preaching for a few moments and concentrated on how he built his system: The twelve-tone row was constructed from four groups [of notes], each consisting of three pitches. We know that this idea would be important to Schoenberg. When speaking of a-tonality, he explained that music that exists without consonance and dissonance can only be homophonic. When he showed me his twelve-tone compositions, he explained how important it was that the intervallic relationships between the different notes should only fluctuate gently. He then sang with great emotion his exceptionally simplistic melodies. Far more significant were his [later] piano works Nomos 1, Nomos 2, his choruses from the tragedies of Sophocles, and particularly his Hölderlin Songs.48

  Wellesz told his friend and fellow Schoenberg pupil Rudof Réti about Hauer, and it was Réti who was responsible for finally bringing Schoenberg and Hauer together. Wellesz writes:

  The meeting between Schoenberg and Hauer was a confrontation of two very different natures. Schoenberg's musical universe contained well-developed ideas on the melodic, harmonic and the contrapuntal components of composition in equal measure. At this point, Hauer was only interested in ‘melos’ constructed according to his system in which ‘the same over-tones and t
he same sounds’ were shared. […] For Schoenberg, Hauer's formulas were merely the starting point that allowed him to develop his own thoughts regarding the practical construction of tone-rows. As the era's greatest master of counterpoint, it gave him the tool with which he could finally impose order on the construction of atonal music.49

  Hauer and Schoenberg planned a jointly-written book on the subject, and Schoenberg programmed some of Hauer's piano works, performed by Réti, in one of his concerts at the Society for Private Performance. The difference in the two men's characters – and Hauer's suspicions of Schoenberg's motives – meant the book would never be written. Wellesz argued that the difference between Hauer and Schoenberg could be demonstrated by the following anecdote:

  During the final years of his life, Hauer carried around flash-cards, each with a tone printed on it. He allowed friends and acquaintances to pick out cards randomly from which he constructed a melody which he then named after the person who had chosen the notes, such as, for example, the one he named after his post-man Pospischil. […] In writing to his future brother-in-law, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch and leader of the Kolisch Quartet, Schoenberg explained that ‘what is important in composition isn't how something is composed but what is composed! I've tried to explain this to Wiesengrund [Theodor Adorno], Berg and Webern, but they won't believe me. I can't repeat it often enough: my works are twelve tone compositions, not twelve tone compositions. In this, one confuses me again with Hauer for whom the actual composition is less important.’ 50

  The Musical Chronicle of Change: Anbruch

  With the end of the war in 1918, it was clear that society had changed. As early as 1905 the playwright and essayist Hans Müller was referring to morbus Austriacus.51 By 1919, this had turned into a self-fulfilled prophecy. Universal Edition, publishers of such major figures as Mahler, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, Schreker, Berg, Webern, Wellesz, Hauer, Bartók and Kodály, along with Casella, Janáček, Szymanowski, Weill, Eisler, Krenek, Milhaud and Malipiero, decided to launch a magazine devoted to new music symbolically entitled Musikblätter des Anbruch (Music Leaves from a New Dawn). The ‘Jewishness’ of Universal Edition was described by Ernst Krenek:

  Fräulein Rothe (assistant to Director Emil Hertzka) was the only highly placed employee of UE who was not Jewish. Immediately under Director Hertzka was Dr. Kalmus, a relative of Hertzka's, if I'm not mistaken, and a good-natured oaf with lovely Old-Testament features. Peter Winter was the principal head of accounts, a fine, good-hearted person who was a genius in financial matters. […] Among the many projects that UE supported was the monthly musical publication Musikblätter des Anbruch, an admittedly lame title that only made it clear that it was an artistic movement that wished to be called Anbruch (Dawn – a typically Expressionist term for ‘beginning’), which was edited originally by Otto Schneider, a smooth roguish character who in all likelihood personified the revolutionary prototype of the coming age. I didn't much care for him.52

  Theodor Adorno, Paul Pisk, Rudolf Réti and Paul Stefan were just some of the prominent Jewish musicians and thinkers who would join its editorial staff. The magazine's first issue in January 1919 starts with an introduction by Guido Adler, followed by articles on a variety of subjects by Béla Bartók, Frederick Delius, Oskar Fried, Hugo Kauder, Rudolf Hoffmann (one of the founding members of the Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler), Egon Lustgarten, Egon Wellesz, Rudolf Réti and Franz Schreker. As with the Neue Freie Presse, this was a publication that was dominated by assimilated, secular Jews and it quickly became one of the most influential musical chronicles of the period. It lasted for 19 years and 165 issues. Even more than its rival Melos, published by Schott, Anbruch (its title from 1929) would not so much reflect Jewish assimilation as Jewish dominance in matters of new music. Seen in the context of a 70-year progression starting from Wagner's anti-Semitic pamphleteering of 1850, Anbruch appeared to represent the pinnacle of Jewish musical assimilation. The National Socialists, unsurprisingly, would see things differently and Universal Edition, along with Anbruch, would become Exhibit A in their propaganda campaign against the Jewish infiltration of German culture.

  The Musical Consequences of Change: New Objectivity

  The apocalyptic premonitions of Expressionism before the war, the horrors of the Front and the bewildering postwar reconstitution of European states resulted in a galvanising sobriety within the arts. One of the most prominent movements came to be known as Neue Sachlichkeit, or ‘New Objectivity’. In common with verismo, its realist relative from the end of the nineteenth century, New Objectivity offered an unflinching presentation of reality. As it grew out of Expressionism, or more precisely as a reaction against it, the realism of the New Objectivity was intended to provoke a sense of discomfort and foreboding. In the visual arts, the influence of the Italian Futurists lent some of the best German neusachlich paintings a dream-like quality with stark shadows and eerie lighting.

  Despite Busoni's 1907 Sketch on a New Aesthetic of Music, which predicted some of the ideas of Futurism, New Objectivity in music tended to eschew such mysterious and suggestive shades of light and grey, and pursued the black and white dispassionate ideals of mechanical precision. Under its broad umbrella of tonal, structured music composed as an anti-Romantic reaction against Expressionism, it included every conceivable form of technical experimentation. It was as defining musically of the Weimar Years as Bauhaus was within design and architecture. The most prominent exponents of its purest form were undoubtedly Hindemith – something of an enfant terrible at the time – and the more sedate Ernst Toch, though Weill and most of Schreker's composition pupils (including Krenek) were also willing participants. New Objectivity attempted to distance music from the subjectively poetic, and even in Schoenberg's circle – with its leaning towards Expressionism – there was discussion of the concept of ‘musical prose’. Alban Berg and Erwin Schulhoff – who as a pianist was a valued interpreter of Berg's Piano Sonata Op. 1 – corresponded extensively on the subject, with Berg writing that 'we have long stopped regarding bar lines as a means of enchaining melody and phrasing; just look at my early clarinet works, or the later works of Schoenberg – all could be performed without any time signatures at all.‘53

  Similar developments were already under way in the Soviet Union, but in Germany and Austria, New Objectivity included diverse permutations, such as the musical wing of ‘Die Novembergruppe, a loose organisation that took its name from the German Revolution of November 1918 and consisted of the composers Max Butting, Hanns Eisler, Philipp Jarnach, Heinz Tiessen, Wladimir Vogel, Kurt Weill and Stefan Wolpe; the journalist and musicologist H. H. Stuckenschmidt, several Schreker pupils, and the violinist Gustav Havemann. New Objectivity also encompassed everything from the Communist fight songs of Hanns Eisler to the Zeitoper. Eventually it accommodated the theatre songs of Weill and Paul Dessau; to these could be added the Dadaist dalliances of Stefan Wolpe and the jazz flirtations of Schulhoff and Wilhelm Grosz. What passed as Neo-Classicism in Germany and Austria could more appropriately be described as New Objectivity. Incidental music for the theatre was re-christened ‘applied music’ (angewandte Musik) and now included scores for cinema and radio. New Objectivity also provided an aesthetic home for some of the kookier experiments with sound machines, propellers, turbines, generators and strange new instruments, as well as offering space to the social ambitions of ‘functional music’ – Gebrauchsmusik and its constant companion, the Lehrstück (Brechtian works intended to offer political ‘instruction’), in which the barriers between performers and listeners were often torn down.

  Ernst Toch, the New Objectivist

  In the midst of all this energetic exuberance stood a rather austere figure, almost forgotten today, who alongside Hindemith was one of the prime exponents of the age: Ernst Toch. Toch was older than Hindemith and was arguably more established as a composer by the end of the war. He thus offers a clearer image of what went into the psychology that shaped New Objectivity. With Hindemith, it is more difficult
to say whether he shaped the movement through his boundless youthful creativity or if the movement shaped him. Toch, on the other hand, grew into it through a sequence of carefully considered steps. Interestingly, both Toch and Hindemith produced similar artistic responses, having approached them from very different directions.

  Though Toch maintained that he was basically self-taught, he had studied – like so many other Viennese composers – with Robert Fuchs; indeed, he was only 16 when Fuchs accepted him into his harmony class. Toch's first quartet was taken up by the prestigious Rosé Quartet when he was 18. Originally he was a student of philosophy and medicine at Vienna's University before winning a scholarship in 1909 to study composition in Frankfurt, entering its Conservatory the same year as Hindemith.

  Toch's musical relationship with Vienna was unique. He recalled that his resolve to become a composer came to him when, as a boy, he heard a newspaper vendor announce the death of ‘the composer Johannes Brahms’ in 1897. Until then, he hadn't realised that it was even possible to be a composer. His family disapproved of his musical interests (they refused even to attend the Rosé premiere of his quartet), and he remained isolated and largely unaware of, indeed impervious to, the intoxicating sound-world of the musical developments represented by Mahler, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Schreker. Years later, when listening to Mahler's symphonies, Toch admitted that all he could hear were obvious compositional errors.

  Following graduation in Frankfurt, Toch moved to Mannheim, where he taught the piano until – in a fit of patriotic fervour – he joined the Austrian army at the outbreak of war. His music, until his return after 1918, was pleasantly Brahmsian, its inoffensiveness sharpened slightly by the obvious influence of Reger, with whom he was in correspondence until Reger's death in 1916. If Julius Korngold could describe the early music of Schreker as ‘tame’, he would have referred to Toch's first works as ‘timid’.