by Michael Haas
There follows a further comparison with Wozzeck, concluding with the observation: ‘Wozzeck in its everyday use of language is more original – as indeed Alban Berg is the more spontaneous and differentiated – and in fact technically superior composer.‘59 To be damned by Julius Korngold in an unfavourable comparison with Alban Berg was no doubt insulting, especially as Wellesz had campaigned assiduously to have Wozzeck first performed in Berlin, and even more because Korngold had rarely condemned a work as thoroughly as he had Wozzeck, suggesting that people attending performances might prefer to leave their ears at home (though in fairness, Korngold is generous in his praise of Berg's undeniable brilliance).60
Clemens Krauss left the Vienna Opera in 1934, and Die Bakchantinnen was not revived in Austria. Wellesz had in any case turned a corner: Die Bakchantinnen would be his last stage work until Incognito, an opera based on William Congreve written for the Oxford Opera Club in 1950 and submitted to a competition run by the Arts Council of Great Britain. After Die Bakchantinnen, Wellesz next turned to a sequence of tone-poems based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, which he entitled Prosperos Beschwörungen (The Spells of Prospero), a project that subsequently provided Wellesz – living in British exile after the war – with a template for an exploration of that most Austro-German of musical forms, the symphony. All nine of Wellesz's symphonies were written in the last 25 years of his life, the first of them completed in 1945.
The most potent of Prospero's spells, however, saved Wellesz, Bruno Walter and Ernst Krenek from Nazi arrest and certain annihilation. Walter had programmed a series of concerts in Amsterdam in which the works of two living Austrian composers would feature: Wellesz's Prospero and Krenek's Second Piano Concerto. Krenek had composed this to be simple enough to perform himself, since he needed income following the banning of his music in Germany.61 The Jewish Austrian pianist and noted Schoenbergian, Peter Stadlen also attended the performances, which took place over the weekend of Hitler's annexation of Austria and triumphant march into Vienna. Wellesz, Walter, Krenek and Stadlen all fled to England. Gál would follow soon thereafter and together, he with Wellesz and Stadlen would remain in Britain, becoming respected writers and academics, while their reputations as composers were of only marginal interest to the British musical establishment. After the war, Gál, with the help of Rudolf Bing, became one of the founders of the Edinburgh Festival.
What both Gál and Wellesz represented was the view that there were different ways of reacting to the post-Wagnerian Romanticism identified by Alfred Einstein as the ‘debilitating condition’ that undermined German music's capacity of reinventing itself, and thus maintaining its supremacy. There were, however, several young, Austro-German Jewish composers who believed that the musical ideals of Wagner represented the better way forward, lining themselves up behind such established figures as Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner, Siegfried Wagner and Franz Schmidt. To them, post-Wagnerian Romanticism was not at all a spent force but a legitimate direction that offered plenty of scope to a younger generation of composers.
CHAPTER 9
The Resolute Romantics
A fight between the constructive power of rhythm and the gentle soothing of harmony: this is the fate of music that produces undreamt of stimuli through both strength and weakness while ardently reaching for a new sense of unity. A magical place is discovered and with it, the craving for new sensations. As these sensations become exhausted, chaos threatens while the creative urge drives us further and further towards new shapes and forms. By the time we have circuitously reached this point, we shall discover sensuality and intellect in fierce conflict.
Kampf zwischen der aufbauenden Kraft des Rhythmus und der verfeinerden, verweichlichenden Harmonik: das ist das Schicksal einer Musik, die zwischen Kraft und Schwäche ungeahnte Reize gewinnt, aber sehnsuchtsvoll nach einer neuen Geschlossenheit ausschaut. Ein Wunderland wird entdeckt. Der Schritt zur Reizsamkeit wird getan. Das Reizsame nutzt sich ab. Das Chaos droht. Aber der schöpferische Geist drängt zu neuer Gestaltung, zu neuer Form. Die Zeit, da auf weitem Umweg solches geschieht, ist eben jene, in der Sinnlichkeit und Intellektualismus sich stark befehden.
Adolf Weißmann, Die Musik in der Weltkrise, 1922
The Romantic Renewal and Houston Stewart Chamberlain
At this point, it's worth recalling the cultural upheaval resulting from the First World War. Though Germany and Austria had sued for peace in 1918, they assumed that the war, which had ground on for four years, had ended in a stalemate. Neither side had gained any significant advantage and both had suffered unimaginable casualties. Germany, Austria and their allies sustained losses of approximately 8.5 million, compared with the 5 million casualties of the Entente and its various partners. But the sabre rattling and armaments race before 1914 had been as intense among the Triple Alliance of France, Russia and Britain as it was among the Germans. The gunshot in Sarajevo was, from the Austrian perspective, an act of aggression. For the rest of the world, it was merely the starting pistol that unleashed pent-up tensions throughout Europe. By 1914, Germany as a unified state was only 43 years old; unification had come at a cost to the French, and with the accession of Wilhelm II the new state gained imperial aspirations with only limited room for geographical expansion.
These ambitions need to be put into context. Wilhelm I, who became the first German Emperor in 1871, was born in 1797, only 11 years after the death of Frederick the Great. Wilhelm went on to live to the age of 91. When he died in 1888, his son, Frederick III, only survived him by 99 days before the crown passed to Wilhelm II, who remained Emperor until the fall of the House of Hohenzollern in 1918. Wilhelm I was a Prussian with little comprehension of Bismarck's united Germany. He believed that being Emperor of Germany was a distraction from being King of Prussia, and legend has it that on the eve of his imperial coronation in Versailles, he wept with despair. Wilhelm II, however, was a child of the Empire and thus the first (and only) German Emperor whose allegiance to Prussia was secondary to his allegiance to Germany. His Germany had, since 1871, undoubtedly become more Prussian, but Prussia had also become more German. Wilhelm II was a man who looked forward to the twentieth century, while his grandfather had looked back to the eighteenth. While Wilhelm I found Bismarck a necessity who aided the mechanics of running the complex network of German states beyond Prussia while managing a compliant but irritating parliament, Wilhelm II dismissed him, sending him into long overdue retirement.
Several factors might be held responsible for starting the war: most obviously, it was the Austrian need to avenge the assassination of their future Emperor and his wife. Nevertheless, Germany found it convenient as an excuse to flex its muscles on a global scale in competition with France and Britain. It presented Austria with an opportunity of establishing its hold amongst the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and thus bettering Russia. One could even blame the British – fearful of Germany as a rival colonial power – and the French, over-eager to regain Alsace-Lorraine and to redress their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Even the Americans were not entirely blameless; though at first reluctant to participate, they too eventually joined in the European brawl if only to keep German expansion in check. In short, the world was ripe for conflict. The fears that had been projected into art and literature for decades had finally been fulfilled. Nobody knew how it would end, but everyone thought that they would be better off, almost regardless of the outcome.
Yet even before the war, it was clear that a new age was imminent. Mechanisation held the same hidden promises that technology holds today. If the war could produce an undisputed victor it was science's transmutation into industry, which had provided the advanced weaponry of modern battle. By 1918, it had supplied the tools for conquering both the monarchy and the church. Even if the old order had passed, the strong emotions that once pounded in every patriot's heart, and continued to find expression in art, literature and music, had not been totally destroyed and demanded new validation.
Empirical scienti
fic investigations did not pretend to provide all of the answers to nature's great mysteries, but the better scientists already knew what they didn't know and were confident that they could carry on finding things out without recourse to religion or philosophy, and increasingly without recourse to ethics, as witnessed by the use of U-boats on civilian passenger liners and poison gas on the battle-field. By 1923, Felix Salten, with his story of Bambi, and Leoš Janáček, with his opera The Cunning Little Vixen, presented children with very secular views of reproduction, life and death as part of the natural order. Animals are anthropomorphised into sentient, thinking humans, while their nature and the world in which they live remain both ruthless and savage. At the same time, Adolf Hitler would begin writing Mein Kampf, in which he interpreted the ‘natural order’ as the subjugation of the weak by the strong. This extrapolation of pseudo-Darwinian concepts meant that arguments that had previously denied Jews German identity because they were not in possession of the German spirit were now replaced with the view that Jews, Slavs and others were inferior biological ‘races’, subject to annihilation by the more powerful Aryans who were, by some as yet unexplained ‘scientific’ logic, the natural conquerors of all others. Thus post-Wagnerian Romantics could continue their anti-Semitism unimpeded, firm in the belief that science provided their validation of racism as effectively being the law of the jungle. Where this would lead is related by Victor Klemperer 10 years later in his diary on 10 April, 1933: ‘It's like Spain in the 15th Century, but in those days, it was only a question of religious beliefs. Today it's all about zoology.‘1
Houston Stewart Chamberlain
One of the most notorious manifestations of this wilful and opportunistic misunderstanding of Darwinism was to be found in the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the English-born son-in-law of Richard Wagner. The theories set out in his seminal work The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) are examined in a series of four lengthy articles in the Neue Freie Presse from 1905 by the Jewish philosopher and theologian Ludwig Stein, who declares Chamberlain's racial theories to be a manifestation of the Romantic movement and refers to him as ‘the troubadour of racial imperialism’.2 He compares two English Chamberlains, Houston Stewart and the unrelated Joseph, by noting that Joseph Chamberlain's enemies were specifically the Boers and anyone else who got in the way of British imperial ambitions, whereas Houston Stewart's enemies were anyone and anything resembling a mixed race: the Semitic races in general and, specifically, the Jews. Joseph Chamberlain, according to Stein, was the ‘national imperialist’, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the ‘racial imperialist’.3
The latter's views on Teutonic racial imperialism led to a close relationship between him and Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was captivated by Chamberlain's ideas. The Kaiser's approval confirmed Chamberlain as a major figure in Germany (he was actually living in Austria at the time of writing The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century) despite devastating reviews in many scientific journals. One that is quoted by Stein offers a summary of how pseudo-scientists of the day, such as Chamberlain, were presenting themselves: ‘In short, this is an extremely bad book, unclear and illogical in its development of ideas and written in an un-gratifying style, full of false modesty and genuine arrogance; full of genuine ignorance and false scholarship.‘4
On the other hand, Stein goes on to quote Karl Joël, the Basel University rector who was ‘among the leading experts of the Philosophy of Romanticism’, and wrote of Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century: ‘The book lives and inflames with passion, it incites feelings of the most objectionable hatred while eliciting enthusiasm through its own conviction. It is at once so gloriously bold, so presumptuous in offering up uncensored ideas, so refreshingly irreverent, gleeful, free and so contradictory that it has more of the characteristics of a person than a book.‘5
Stein then brings up a compilation of essays and articles by the sociologist Friedrich Otto Hertz, Modern Racial Theory (later published as Race and Culture), as a total rejection of Chamberlain's work. Hertz takes apart the contradictions and inaccuracies in Chamberlain's book. Yet, according to Stein, ‘Chamberlain's response would only be a smiled, “But dear sir, I'm merely a dilettante – as I expressly explain in the foreword of the fourth edition of my book.”’ Stein goes on: ‘In order to disprove Chamberlain, it is necessary to offer psychological explanations of the man himself. Chamberlain speaks to the tendencies of our time. Let us say this very clearly, he speaks to the deepest responses that reside in people's soul. Everyone knows that “feelings” are not things that can be disproved – at best, they can only be analysed and thus laid bare so that at least the more irrational of the components may be disproved.‘6
In fact, Chamberlain admitted in a letter to Stein that what he felt distinguished The Foundation of the Nineteenth Century ‘is its total lack of caution’.7 He goes on to state that he has not written a new theory of race, nor has he updated the widely admired theories of Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, the aristocratic father of the theory of ‘race as a determinant of culture’ and a great influence on Richard Wagner's thinking. Chamberlain continues his explanation to Stein:
Race is to the collective what personality is to the individual. […] One can in any case only define ideas, not things – race as well – it's equally impossible to define the colour blue or green. […] One need only note the establishment in 1904 of the ‘Racial Archive’ by professors Plate, Ploetz and Nordenholtz – men who are not by any stretch of the imagination fantasists. Indeed, it is an archive that has had numerous contributions made by such distinguished scientists as the zoologists Ziegler, Ratzler, Hueppe, etc. It only proves where science is trying to lead us and gives us an indication as to which path is the correct one to follow – as such, one is able to dismiss the journalist and feuilletonist who attack research on race as a legitimate concern. Such is scientific research: a search for truth, against ignorance. […] Yet one must be prepared to carry on and not be frightened of discovering the truth. As I myself am a man with the deepest respect for science, I totally reject the pure speculative hypotheses of Gobineau […] rather, my views are based on those that can be inferred by Darwin's own writings on race and its origins.8
Stein then lays out the arguments surrounding Chamberlain's ‘subjective conviction’ and, in sentences that recall Schoenberg, he writes that he is merely ‘listening to his inner voice, regardless of the consequences’. Chamberlain's arguments regarding race are ‘race is a fact. Everyone is aware of it.’ But as Stein points out, he is oblivious to the possible findings of future evaluations of a not-yet-understood science: ‘Yet his belief that believing is all that matters flies in the face of the many things we have believed in the past and have had to reject as evidence came to light that disproved that which we had known “deep in our hearts” to be true.‘9
In placing the Romantics in opposition to the Enlightenment, Stein writes that ‘irrationality is not to be countered by rationality’ and quotes another review of Chamberlain's book by the Viennese psychiatrist Otto Pötzl, who wrote: ‘Chamberlain's “Teutonic races” are a purely intuitive, artificial and personal concept. His thoughts regarding “race” are equally part of his intuition and must thus be ascribed to his personal domain. The idea behind race breeds further ideas regarding race which inevitably lead directly back to [Chamberlain's] original idea. As a result, it turns itself into a circle of definitions which removes intuition itself from being subject to definition.‘10 Ratio intuitiva (intuitive reasoning), Stein argues, is the most defining element of artistic natures and this is what he ascribes to Chamberlain – as with the philosophers René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche. ‘Such mystics see no higher judge of truth than the certainty that comes from their inner voice and their inner self.’ Stein continues: ‘[A] scholar such as Chamberlain who as a philosophical historian sees race as the key to all life on earth […] should not be implementing such fundamentally mystical concepts as “racial purity”, s
omething he describes as “an amusing mind-game” [“lustiges Gedankending”]: racial purity inhibits rather than expands such explanations. His references to ‘the sacredness of racial purity’ are not ideas that can be brought to empirical tests if they are to be thought of merely as “amusing mind-games”.‘11
Stein goes on to write that, with Chamberlain, it is the duality of scholar and artist that accounts for the many contradictions in his concepts and ideas. For Stein, it is often the scholar who is victorious over the artist, but usually it's the other way around. He writes:
‘With my mind I am a follower of Spinoza, with my heart I am a devoted Christian’ is the fundamental destiny of all Romantics. Chamberlain is the strict nominalist and actually sees this as a characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon races. According to Chamberlain, ‘the social manifestation of nominalism is individualism’. Yet these sober observations collide abruptly against Chamberlain's ideas regarding race. Ultimately, the Romantic irrationalist, instinctive philosopher, mystic and artist in Chamberlain are stronger than the logistician and scholar. His heart has conquered his head.
Chamberlain distances himself substantially from Gobineau and makes it clear he does not wish to be thought of as a Gobineau disciple. Yet we must challenge this ‘racial imperialism’ and ‘racial Romanticism’ that Chamberlain claims to be a characteristic of the Teutonic people. Undoubtedly the most Romantic concept put forward by the philosophical historian is indeed the concept of the ‘Teutonic race’. Chamberlain himself dismisses the misty-eyed views of German Romanticism of heraldry and minstrels, folk songs and minnesingers. He despises the notion of this sort of Romanticism that ‘throws shadows in all directions and thus becomes the basis of explaining all mystical experiences’. […] The masters of modern culture, according to Chamberlain, are the Nordic races. He gives them the collective name ‘the Teutons’ [Die Germanen] which he has taken from Tacitus, despite using the term in ways that Tacitus would not have recognised. He admits as much […] but with this new concept, he accords a practical identification to an ethnic grouping within current human history. We wish to address a final word on […] ‘racial Romanticism’ as laid out by [Chamberlain] regarding this new ethnic entity that he implacably places against the Jew. […] Chamberlain's protestations that he is not a Romantic must be seen in the context of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, who would also not have welcomed this particular moniker. […] The mind offers us logic, while feelings offer us the mystical. The two are in constant conflict and from the one we have science and technology measured in units, while from the other we have religion and [artistic] creativity. […] The duality of mankind consists of reason and emotion which remain in continuous alternation with each other and are variously described as Classicism or Romanticism.12