The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization

by Howard Goodall

  In 1907, four years after his setting of the poems, Mahler’s own five-year-old daughter Anna Maria died of scarlet fever, and he confessed to his friend Guido Adler that having lost his daughter he could not then have written Kindertotenlieder, the pain being too great to bear. Mahler himself was diagnosed with a terminal heart condition the year of Anna Maria’s death. When he too died, in 1911, aged fifty, he was laid to rest in her grave. (His younger daughter, Anna Justine, survived the illness, became a sculptor and fled Nazi Austria for Hampstead, London, where she died in June 1988.)

  The Kindertotenlieder cycle, and movements of Mahler’s symphonies of similarly extreme vulnerability, were to inspire virtually all the giants of twentieth-century classical music, long before he was introduced to millions through recordings (in large part by Leonard Bernstein, his unstinting champion in the 1960s). One of so many examples is Shostakovich’s thirteenth symphony, Babi Yar – the subject of which is the Nazi massacre in a Kiev ravine of 33,771 Jews over the course of forty-eight hours in September 1941 – which is stylistically unthinkable without the pervasive influence of Mahler. Other composers whose work is indebted to his include Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Sergei Prokofiev, Jean Sibelius, Leoš Janáček, Karol Szymanowski, Béla Bartok, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein and, in film music, Franz Waxman, Erich Korngold, Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, Miklós Rózsa, James Horner, Danny Elfman, James Newton Howard, Howard Shore, John Corigliano and John Williams.

  There is no hidden agenda in Mahler’s music: he felt isolated in a mean-spirited age, as many Jews did, victims in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century of widespread anti-Semitic persecution all over Europe. Mahler himself was forced out of his post at the Vienna State Opera, notwithstanding his world-class artistic success there, as a result of anti-Semitism. But despite the understandable sadness and alienation we hear in his music, there is, incredibly, hope of something better, usually associated with childhood and youth, as in his Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), composed in 1908–9.

  The dear Earth everywhere blooms in spring

  and grows green, as new,

  Everywhere and for ever

  A blue sky in the distance

  for ever… for ever… for ever.

  The concluding three or so minutes of the final movement of the symphony, Der Abschied (The Farewell), is music of astonishing transcendence, as the cadence repeatedly attempts to come to rest under the reiterated word ewig (for ever), seemingly unable to accept its final conclusion. Indeed, Mahler’s instruction at the end of the piece is for the sound to fade away, imperceptibly, to nothing, blurring the moment when the music dies and the silence begins – a respectful nod towards the not dissimilar ending of his friend Richard Strauss’s symphonic tone poem, Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration) of 1889. The resulting, long final chord of The Song of the Earth – Western music’s symbolic ‘home’ of C major, naturally – was described by the mid-twentieth-century English composer Benjamin Britten as being ‘imprinted on the atmosphere’.

  Mahler’s symphonies and songs were unappreciated by critics, who either found them too abrasive, too loud, too neurotic and too structurally complicated, or, like the Austrian Reichpost, simply objected to Mahler himself, reporting on his appointment to the State Opera in October 1897, ‘Only the fullness of time will reveal whether this Jew-boy will prove worthy of such acclaim or will find himself brushed aside when reality strikes.’ His music was, however, mostly enjoyed by audiences in his own lifetime, and perhaps most significantly it exerted a huge influence on the debate over music’s future direction. He had a direct, tutor-like impact on a wave of younger composers whose agenda was nothing less than the complete dismantling of the Western ‘tonal’ system – that is to say, the way notes are arranged into key-families with a sense of ‘home’. Indeed, Mahler’s own composing style had begun to destabilise this system, borrowing as it did from ethnic folk music of near and far – his Song of the Earth was a setting of ancient Chinese poetry in translation and its music was accordingly given a Chinese flavour – and seeking to convey dark and unsettling emotional states. Of all his impressionable Viennese pupils, none embraced this dismantling of tonality quite as enthusiastically as Arnold Schoenberg.

  Schoenberg’s idea – the adoption of a totally new ‘tonal’ system – was, like other authoritarian manifestos of the early twentieth century, strict on how everybody else should obey its rules but applied with remarkable laxity when it came to his own creative output. His goal was to sweep away the forms that had served music for a thousand years – the way melodies are constructed, the chords, the rhythms, everything – and replace them with a system based purely on a mathematical formula.

  The ‘twelve-tone’ formula that Schoenberg began exploring in the early 1900s – the one arguably anticipated by Liszt’s Faust of 1855 – treated each of the twelve notes in the Western scale as equals in order to do away with the sense of ‘home’ in any given piece of music. Not one of them was allowed to be repeated in a melodic phrase, which prevented the listener’s ear from latching on to any note as the centre of gravity. It was as radical a formula for music as it would be for a language if you ruled that no letter of the alphabet could be used more than once in a sentence.

  Fascinating and brain-teasing though this limitation might be, its main problem as applied to music was that the only people who understood or admired it were other musicians. The public, then as now, were simply baffled. Schoenberg’s theoretical rebellion, which later acquired the labels ‘serialism’ or ‘atonality’, produced decades of scholarly hot air, books, debates and seminars, and – in its purest, strictest form – not one piece of music, in a hundred years’-worth of effort, that a normal person could understand or enjoy.

  One positive function Schoenberg’s twelve-tone formula fulfilled, though, other than provide for interesting analysis and debate, was to give composers in the twentieth century a challenging structure with which to grapple. Igor Stravinsky, for example, as he hit a mid-life lull in his composing energy in the 1950s, began experimenting with serial techniques as a way of hearing musical possibilities in a fresh way, saying about it, ‘The rules and restrictions of serial writing differ little from the rigidity of the great contrapuntal schools of old. At the same time they widen and enrich harmonic scope; one starts to hear more things and differently than before. The serial technique I use impels me to greater discipline than ever before.’ That said, Stravinsky composed relatively few works with the serial rules fully applied, the short third movement of his Venetian cantata Canticum Sacrum (1955) being one.

  One thing is for sure: Schoenberg and his fellow-travellers in the redesigning of the Western note system were not courting a mainstream audience. When, during the next half-century, audiences reacted with hostility to serialist works, it seemed to confirm to the movement’s adherents that it was a cause so noble that ordinary, lesser mortals without ‘the knowledge’ would inevitably reject it. ‘Elitist’ is an overused word, tinged with resentment, but in describing serialist self-justification of the twentieth century it is spot on. Schoenberg was so sure his new dodecaphonic system would take off that he declared triumphantly, ‘I have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.’ He was no prophet.

  Had early serialism had any chance of appealing to a paying public, one composer who would surely have opted into it was Richard Strauss, Germany’s leading composer after Mahler’s death and a man with a voracious appetite for musical adventure. Strauss, though, had other tricks up his sleeve.

  He began his career, conventionally enough, in a musical style that owed much to Liszt and a little to Wagner, composing large-scale symphonic poems of which Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus spoke Zarathustra) is pretty typical. Based on the philosopher Nietzsche’s treatise of the same name, its opening, ‘Sunrise’, is now legendary thanks to Stanley Kubr
ick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The overall musical effect is cinematic: shock and awe for a fin de siècle generation seeking thrills and spills galore. At the same time, Strauss looked backwards at the dying century, in songs of heartbreaking, Mahlerish delicacy, like ‘Morgen!’ (Tomorrow!), composed as a wedding present for his wife Pauline in 1894.

  And then, just a few years after writing Also sprach Zarathustra and ‘Morgen!’, Strauss catapulted himself into musical notoriety with an opera of such savage, erotic power that it shocked bourgeois society and created a sensation. In some cities, London and Vienna among them, the opera was immediately banned. In one fell swoop, Strauss had transformed himself from the genteel Kappellmeister of the Austrian Belle Epoque into the Che Guevara of the musical rebels. The year was 1905, the place Dresden, the opera Salome.

  Strauss’s decision to find a newly rebellious musical style for the opera had been brewing over the preceding few years, a period during which his career as an opera conductor, principally in Munich and Berlin, though briefly too at Bayreuth, had been blossoming. His first public opera, Guntram, had had a disastrous reception when it opened in Munich in 1894 – from musicians, theatre management, press and public alike – prompting him to scheme artistic revenge on a city he thought ‘philistine’. The first stage of his retaliation was a satirical opera, Feuersnot (Fire-night), performed in Dresden in 1901, in which he lampooned the anti-artistic burghers of Munich, throwing into the caustic melting pot a crazed magician modelled on Wagner. The second stage was accompanied by an acknowledgement that any young composer hoping to make a splash on the opera world would need to be daring and – if possible – a little shocking. Strauss knew that concert hall audiences, for whom he had produced a series of highly successful orchestral tone poems, were easier to impress than those in opera houses, especially in Germany and Austria where the expense of mounting opera had caused it to become heavily politicised. Nonetheless, the stark modernity of his music for Salome, never mind its edgy subject matter, was undoubtedly intended to shock the conservative opera community of Munich, the town of his birth, who had haughtily dismissed his early operatic efforts.

  Based not so much on the biblical original as the scandalous 1891 play by Oscar Wilde, in which the motivation for the beheading of John the Baptist became primarily sexual, Strauss’s opera set a new standard for ear-splitting dissonance – and, as he had predicted, earned him immediate worldwide notoriety. Salome’s exotic Seven Veils dance-striptease may have alarmed and excited its first-night audience, but her final solo of passion for the severed head of John the Baptist, which she then kisses, was the Tarantino moment. You can either read Salome as a strong, independent young woman who gets what she wants by exploiting her sexuality, cleverly outwitting her stepfather the king in the process, or as a kind of demented junkie who lowers humanity’s moral standards to a new nadir.

  Strauss apparently hedges his bets, giving the first necrophiliac kiss arguably the most dissonant chord that had ever been heard. To put this chord in context, summon to your mind the high, shrieking violin discords that accompany the murderous shower scene in Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). The two notes that create the ear-piercing clash are placed at a distance of eleven steps from one other: an E and the E♭ above it. This discord is a split-apart version of another discord, the ‘minor second’, which can also be made up of an E and an E♭ but the ones directly adjacent to one another rather than the ones just short of an octave apart. These two clashes are enough on their own, as in the Herrmann shower scene, to be unpleasant, scary and painful to listen to. Salome’s death-kiss chord has a trilling minor second hovering above it, but the real meat of the dissonance lies in the lower bass cluster, made up of a clashing minor second sandwiched between two other clashes, a major second and a tritone (the ‘devil in music’ we encountered in an earlier chapter). Underneath this scrunch is an ugly, growling minor third – not particularly offensive in itself but very dark and foreboding at such a low pitch – while the high trilling ‘A’ creates a vicious clash with the A# that sits three octaves below it at the apex of the deeper cluster. It would be hard to find a more aggressively uncomfortable combination of notes.

  After asking whether the taste of blood on his lips is actually the ‘taste of love’, Salome revisits the kiss, in supreme triumph. ‘I have now kissed your mouth, Jochanaan!’ she screams, and Strauss unleashes a musical earthquake that could be construed as representing sexual consummation. To further complicate the psychological torment of this terrifying end, King Herod, who had encouraged Salome to dance for him in the first place, orders his soldiers to kill his stepdaughter there and then. For the awful violence of this slaughter, Strauss reserves his angriest, most dissonant music yet.

  Having led the rebellion against musical respectability with Salome and one other blood-and-guts opera, Elektra, Strauss then made his second unexpected switch of style: he spent the remainder of his career, thirty-five years of it, composing beautiful music of antique nostalgia, from his luxuriantly melodic, intoxicatingly enjoyable, bitter-sweet opera Der Rosenkavalier (first performed in January 1911) to his posthumously published ‘Four Last Songs’ (1948), which for many music lovers are worthy candidates for the title Most Beautiful Music Ever Written. The ‘Four Last Songs’ appeared at the end of the Second World War but could easily have been composed half a century earlier: they belong stylistically to the end of the nineteenth century, alongside Mahler’s orchestral songs. Their unspeakable beauty may have as much to do with the sense of a lost world as it does with Strauss’s final gesture of love and gratitude to his wife of over fifty years.

  The instant and worldwide acclaim that greeted the birth of Der Rosenkavalier in 1911 seemed to underline the two-hundred-year Austro-German dominance of classical music that had begun with J. S. Bach. This hegemony looked likely to continue indefinitely. But even without the catastrophe of two world wars, the Austro-German dynasty was coming to an end. Instead, a new force had emerged, and was by the early twentieth century the most exhilarating sound in Europe. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century the sleeping giant of Russia had awoken. Music was never going to be the same again.

  The signs had been there for a while. In 1890, for example, if you’d asked most educated people in the West to name a famous living composer, they would very likely have given you that of a Russian, Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky wasn’t the first heavyweight Russian composer who wrote in the mainstream international idiom, the same milieu as Beethoven, Berlioz, Verdi or Brahms. Instead, that position was filled by Mikhail Glinka, whose operas A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila had firmly established Tsarist Russia as a musical force to be reckoned with in the 1830s. Tchaikovsky, though, was the first Russian composer to achieve meaningful fame outside Russia.

  If, for Italians, the supreme expression of their love of music was the emotionally charged operatic aria, for Russians it was dance. Whereas Italian opera arias were suffused with the musical quality known as ‘rubato’ – meaning to be free and flexible with the rhythmic pulse – in Russia the invigorating, repetitious beat of dance was everywhere to be heard. At the ballet, in operas, on the concert stage, lilting, driving, whirling, tiptoeing, leaping, gliding, jumping, gyrating and twirling, Russian music can’t get enough of it. Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores are still among the most popular pieces in the classical repertoire. His enormous prestige and irrepressible gift for melody, harnessed to a penchant for orchestral excitement, was a stark reminder to the West that patronising the Russian Empire as an offshoot of the Austro-German ‘mainstream’ was dangerously wide of the mark. Between the 1870s and the 1950s, Russian music exploded into creative life in a manner that was unprecedented – and subsequently unmatched – in history.

  The fuse lighter of this Russian firework display in classical music wasn’t cosmopolitan, well-travelled, friend-of-the-Romanovs Tchaikovsky, though, but a former military cadet from Pskov who worked in the Civil
Service and who had a fatal vodka habit: Modest Mussorgsky.

  Mussorgsky, among the big-name composers, was the most original voice of the late-nineteenth century and probably the only one in any country whose ideas cannot be traced back to Liszt. There was a reason for this: he wasn’t musically trained at a conservatoire and he wasn’t a professional composer. He was self-taught and thus blissfully unaware of the rules he was breaking. It was as if he was inventing composition as he went along. His pieces lacked traditional form and structure; in Pictures at an Exhibition (1874), for example, he merely hung together a series of ten different piano reflections of the paintings of his late friend, the artist Viktor Hartmann. They were like written-down improvisations. There was without doubt a naivety in his style, which earned him more than a little ridicule at the time, Tchaikovsky’s summary being fairly representative of a generally held view. ‘Mussorgsky you very rightly call a hopeless case,’ he opined. ‘His nature is narrow-minded, devoid of any urge towards self-perfection, blindly believing… in his own genius. In addition, he has a certain base side to his nature which likes coarseness, uncouthness, roughness… He flaunts… his illiteracy, takes pride in his ignorance, mucks along anyhow, blindly believing in the infallibility of his genius. Yet he has flashes of talent which are, moreover, not devoid of originality.’

  Importantly, though, for all his rough edges, Mussorgsky showed that Russian music could obey its own rules, follow its own tastes and carve its own identity. It did not have to be Brahms-ski. Comparing Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov with another, earlier, opera also evoking Russia’s Tsarist past, A Life for the Tsar by Glinka, whose traditional classical training included spells in Italy, Austria and Germany, the difference in styles is a stark demonstration of the change of direction being undertaken as the nineteenth century drew on.

  A Life for the Tsar (1836), known in Russia as Ivan Susanin, is set in the Kremlin and has as its triumphant final chorus a celebration of the victory of Tsar Mikhail, the first of the Romanovs, against the Poles in the early seventeenth century. The assembled throng sing, ‘Glory, Glory to you, holy Rus’!’ Their jubilant chorus is certainly exciting and suitably victorious; someone has clearly stirred the thronging mob into singing very high and repeating themselves a lot, in the manner of victory crowds. If you didn’t know, though, that this was a Russian victory, as opposed to a French, Austrian or Italian one, would you be any the wiser? If you were an academic, a detailed examination of the chorus harmonies would reveal some Russian Orthodox flavours in there, for sure. The fact is, though, that there is a pan-European character to the music; it could just as plausibly have originated in Vienna, Berlin or Rome as in St Petersburg or Moscow. But when compared to the Coronation scene from Boris Godunov, also set in the Kremlin and composed just thirty-eight years later, it is hard to believe the two choruses come from the same country.