by David Schiff
“Madness in Great Ones”
In a blindfold test you might guess that this was a Thelonious Monk tune arranged by Dizzy Gillespie (or perhaps Bob Graettinger). It portrays Hamlet as the father of the jazz avant-garde, and perhaps was written to remind the jazz world that Ellington was still the king of the cats. The piece sounds so unhinged that it is surprising to see how precisely Ellington sketched it. Contrasted with “Up and Down” it illustrates Ellington's collagelike approach to composition as opposed to Strayhorn's finely woven method. “Madness” seems to follow no logic but its own north by northwest lunacy. Ellington's sketch shows a sequence of carefully composed phrases that seem to get shuffled and reshuffled, with letter names and arrows added later on to indicate the final order of events. As in “Up and Down” a single conventional jazz phrase, played twice, serves to rein in the chaos, though here the chaos, Cat Anderson's manic raving, wins out.
“Half the Fun”
Although it is the penultimate movement of the suite, “Half the Fun” forms a bookend with “Such Sweet Thunder,” a portrait of Cleopatra (minus Antony) as counterpart to Othello. The double relation is shown by rhythmic similarity, a habanera slowed down to the tempo of a beguine, and harmonic polarity, an exoticized D to balance the opening movement's modal G.
Like “Star-Crossed Lovers,” “Half the Fun” sprang from an older Strayhorn number, “Lately,” and somehow gained a collaborative credit.37 “Half the Fun” is the third avant-garde piece of the set; it predicts modal jazz in general and The Far East Suite in particular. There are no chord changes. The outer sections rest on a constant ostinato in D (with a flatted sixth: D, A, A, G); the middle section just moves the ostinato up a fourth to G. The harmony, texture, and mood recall Debussy's Iberian pieces, especially “La Puerta del Vino” from the second book of preludes. In the central section we hear another side of Johnny Hodges, not far from free jazz; and in the transition back to the main section Strayhorn presents a chain of dissonant six-note chords heard beneath an inverted D pedal. The star of the movement, though, is Sam Woodyard, who covers the canvas in evocations of ancient evenings.
“Circle of Fourths”
Ellington reached into his own book for this boppish romp, which was said to honor the four Shakespearean genres: tragedy, history, comedy, and sonnets. After “Half the Fun” it pulls us smartly out of the East and out of the Bard and back to Manhattan, back to business. It is the only movement of the suite that sounds like a head chart; it feels like a company bow. Ellington launches the piece with a four-bar, eleven-note motto and then it takes off. The piece, a showcase for Paul Gonsalves, has two structural components. The first is a twenty-four-bar harmonic progression around the circle of fourths, similar to the changes of “How High the Moon,” by Morgan Lewis. The progression is: C-F7-B7-E7-A7-D7-B7-E9-A7-D7-d7-G7. The second element is an eight-bar blues-tinged call-and-response idea built on the opening motto.
In retrospect this section on Such Sweet Thunder might have appeared in a chapter on politics rather than one on love, but in African American music, as in African American literature, the two subjects are inseparable. In the writings of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker the freedom to love demands a reclamation of manhood and womanhood. In Such Sweet Thunder Ellington and Strayhorn replaced the degraded images of Porgy and Bess with regal portraits of Othello and Cleopatra. In these figures sexuality is both public and private, both powerful and tender.
SECRET LOVE: THE LISTENER AS VOYEUR
Music is miraculous in that one can say everything in such a way that those in the know can understand it all, and yet one's own secrets, those which one will not even admit to oneself, remain undivulged.
—Arnold Schoenberg
In 1977 composer and theorist George Perle rocked the staid world of musicology with a document that was one part Rosetta stone, one part National Enquirer. He had tracked down a copy of the score of Alban Berg's Lyric Suite annotated in the composer's hand. The published score already contained some tantalizing clues, including musical quotations from the Lyric Symphony of Alexander von Zemlinsky (to whom the work was dedicated) and the famous opening of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, as well numerical oddities; both the metronome markings and the number of bars in each movement were derived from the numbers twenty-three and ten. The long-hidden annotations explained the meanings of pitches, themes, and even bar numbers and revealed that the final movement was based on a poem by Baudelaire, “De profundis clamavi”—not vaguely, but word for word, syllable for syllable, implying the need for an additional performer, a singer, following the precedent of Schoenberg's Quartet no. 2. The most important pitches of the work, H (B in German) F, A, and B (B in German) were a cryptogram for Hanna Fuchs and Alban Berg. Berg likewise associated the numbers ten and twenty-three with these two masked characters. Perle found the score in the possession of Dorothea Robettin, daughter of Herbert and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, a wealthy and cultured couple with whom Berg stayed in May 1925 when his Three Fragments from Wozzeck was first performed in Prague, conducted by Alexander Zemlinsky. Berg returned chez Fuchs in November 1925 en route to the Berlin premiere of Wozzeck, by which time he felt the need to respond to his wife's anxieties about his relations with Frau Fuchs, a.k.a. Mopinka: “(…may I die of distemper if I ever sin against faithfulness!). Faithfulness towards you, and also towards myself, Music, Schoenberg (and he makes this really hard for one) even towards Trahütten.”38
Despite Berg's reassurances, rumors of the affair circulated in Vienna, even though the annotated score remained hidden; shortly after Berg's death in 1935, his student T. W. Adorno advised his widow “not to worry about the affair with Hanna since Berg ‘didn't write the Lyric Suite because he fell in love with Hanna Fuchs but fell in love with Hanna Fuchs in order to write the Lyric Suite.'”39 Adorno was recycling an old argument about the relation of Wagner's affair with Mathilde Wesendonck to the composition of Tristan und Isolde, but he may have been right.40
I was present when Perle revealed his discovery at a musicological meeting in New York. He looked like the cat that had swallowed the cream and the room crackled with the sense of a historic moment. A few days later the final movement was performed for the first time with voice, and many listeners felt they were finally hearing the work as Berg intended. Today I'm not so sure. Perle had decoded the piece by assuming the truth-value of Berg's annotations, but a man who could lie to his wife with the ease demonstrated in Berg's letter might just as easily deceive his mistress, or posterity. Taken on its own, the annotated score might have been just an over-the-top thank-you note to a gracious hostess with whom Berg had shared perhaps no more than some kind of moment. (Or perhaps Berg, an overnight celebrity, attracted cultured groupies all over Europe.) Berg scholars, moreover, had resented Helene Berg's protective guardianship over her husband's papers and her longstanding refusal to allow for the completion of his opera Lulu. Perle's paper explained Frau Berg's diffidence all too conveniently; his mean-spirited portrait of Frau Berg in the third part of the Lyric Suite article verges on libel.
As for the composer's intentions, Perle gave the impression that the annotated copy represented the real piece (“My own belief is that the composer would not have been opposed to a vocal performance of the finale”), even though Berg never showed it to anyone except Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. Had he really wanted it performed at some future time, when it would not embarrass either Mrs. Berg or Mrs. Fuchs, he could have sent a copy to his good friend Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel, who was married to Hanna's brother and certainly would have understood any romantic situation that might have existed. On the fine recording of the vocal version of the finale by Dawn Upshaw and the Kronos Quartet, the reconstructed voice line often sounds awkward in its tessitura and in its relation to the accompaniment. Most tellingly, the text (“Not even brook and tree, nor field nor flock”) and vocal line written above the score's quotation of the opening of Tristan do not clarify or even e
xploit the allusion but just cover it over. The annotated score may be less an urtext than a billet-doux.
Perle's revelation of the secret program marked a turning point in the hermeneutics of twentieth-century music from modernist formalism to postmodernist semiotics. Perhaps as an unforeseen consequence Perle revived long-repressed habits of programmatic reading, which modernists had consigned to the middlebrow milieu of musical appreciation. Post Perle, critics and scholars have routinely described the Lyric Suite as a cinema verité depiction of the affair between AB and HF, and soon enough scholars found other secret programs in Berg's music, without benefit of the composer's own notes.41 Programmatic speculation became an even bigger business just a few years later with the publication of Testimony, said to be the work of Dmitri Shostakovich, which similarly claimed a decisive role for secret programs in an important and apparently misunderstood oeuvre. Arid formalism had turned into vulgar literalism overnight.
As an alternative to reductive styles of interpretation, and in pursuit of a Sontagian “erotics of listening” I propose that we read the Lyric Suite in relation to a work rarely mentioned in the same breath, or even the same paragraph, “Jeux de vagues,” the second movement of Debussy's La Mer. Like the Lyric Suite, La Mer coincided with tumultuous romantic events. During the three years of its composition, 1903-5, Debussy left his first wife, Rosalie (“Lilly”) Texier, whom he had married just four years earlier, and began a relationship with Emma Moyse Bardac. Debussy's biographer, Marcel Dietschy, interpreting the music in Perle's manner, though without the smoking gun, presents La Mer as both a premonition and product of the dissolution of one marriage and the creation of another. As Debussy began work on the piece in the summer of 1903, Dietschy writes, “He had no idea that exactly twelve months later the turning-point would be reached. A ground swell would wash away all the past. He was preparing himself for it involuntarily; he hoped for it without knowing it.”42
Dietschy's Portrait of Claude Debussy (originally titled La Passion de Claude Debussy, but retitled and toned down in translation) exemplifies cherchez la femme musical criticism, perhaps well suited to a composer noted for his wandering eye, but, like Perle's account of the Berg-Fuchs affair, reductive and naïve in its readings. Its account of La Mer, though, suggests some intriguing parallels with Berg's Lyric Suite. Let me present them schematically:
Composer Debussy (1862–1916) Berg (1885–1935)
Work La Mer Lyric Suite
Age at completion 43 41
Opera premiere Pelléas, 1902 Wozzeck, 1925
Musical father Wagner Schoenberg
Counterinfluences Mussorgsky, Satie Mahler, Debussy
Marriage Rosalie Texier (1899) Helene Nahowski (1911)
Affair Emma Bardac (1904) Hanna Werfel Fuchs-Robettin (1925)
Other women Marie-Blanche Vasnier Marie Scheuchl
Gabrielle Dupont Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel
Mary Garden (?) Several others (see Simms)
Pelléas Opera Analysis of Schoenberg's tone poem, 2nd movement, Kammerkonzert
La Mer and the Lyric Suite, both associated with multidimensional life crises, blurred genre distinctions. Debussy called his work “symphonic sketches” rather than a symphony, just as Berg would reject the title of string quartet for its symphonic, developmental implications. Their extrasymphonic titles comport with the extramarital events that surrounded them. The course of these events was similar despite the fact that Debussy traded one wife for another, ruptured his important circle of friends, and transformed his lifestyle from bohemian disorder to anxiously high bourgeois comfort, while Berg apparently never contemplated divorce and was better at keeping up appearances. At age forty, the two composers passed from relative obscurity to worldwide fame with the premieres of their operas. Soon after these successes they both became involved with wealthy and cultured married women— “trophies,” we might say today—more suited to their new eminence. Similar patterns can be found in the marital history of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, and, possibly, your accountant. In addition to their physical and personal charms, both Emma Bardac and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin were far more knowledgeable about music than the women they replaced (or, in Hanna's case, supplemented); the very fact that Berg prepared an annotated score for Mrs. Fuchs attests to her musical literacy. (The large literature on the Berg-Fuchs affair is stunningly uninformative about Hanna; mainly we learn that she was ten years younger than Berg and a “flirt.”) Both composers celebrated their new alliances, or their newfound celebrity, with works that combined monumental and provisional aspects in novel musical structures.
These are the intriguing factual parallels, but rather than reducing La Mer and the Lyric Suite to reportage, I suggest that we read them as complex symbolic statements about the interplay of the sensual and semiotic both in love and in music. Both works subvert older forms of erotic representation in music. As post-Wagnerian composers, Debussy and Berg knew that their musical depictions of love would have to coalesce in a climactic mimicry of orgasm, following the overwhelming model of the second and third acts of Tristan. Climactic moments, or “Höhepunkte” as Berg sometimes labeled them in his scores, were both mimetic and formal, imitating the curve of sexual activity and shaping the curve of musical form; the high point marked the sexual union of composer and listener. After Tristan the representation of sexual climax became a musical game in which composers could juggle evocative devices to take the music to the brink of good taste—or over it. Standing at the brink myself, I suggest that in pursuit of their formal and expressive secrets we hunt for the Big O in each work.
At its premiere La Mer baffled most critics, who judged it either as a defective symphony or an inaccurate weather report; I suspect it was also badly played. Debussy, who, unlike Berg, never discussed the technical or thematic aspects of his own music, gave the three movements the evocative titles “From Dawn to Midday at Sea,” “Play of the Waves,” and “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea.” Let's dub them more symbolically “Birth and Growth,” “Love,” and “Death and Rebirth.” We can hear La Mer, the only work in which Debussy engaged such fundamental existential issues on a symphonic scale, as Debussy's riposte to Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra and as a Bergsonian interpretation of Nietzsche, in which change and transformation replace the illusions of certainty. Just as the sea, for Verlaine, was more beautiful than cathedrals, the inner self, for Bergson, was “a continuous flux, a succession of states, each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it.”43 Bergson's philosophy and Debussy's life experience demanded a formal approach different than the cathedral-like certainties of the symphony. “Jeux de vagues,” the centerpiece of La Mer, restates Bergsonian metaphysics in erotic terms.
For much of its duration “Jeux de vagues” defies formal analysis; it is even hard to tell where it starts, since the opening phrase seems to continue the harmony (D = C#) of the previous movement, and the breathless flute filigree of the opening phrase never returns. Flux itself seems more thematic than any of the musical themes. The tempo changes constantly and the meter, although written mainly in , implies and simultaneously in many places. Although the movement takes the place of a symphonic scherzo, it does not exhibit the expected tripartite ABA scherzo form. It falls instead into a multisectional form shaped by two orgasmic climaxes on a B dominant ninth chord:
1. Introduction (mm. 1-8)
2. Exposition (mm. 9-88)
3. Compressed restatement (mm. 89-114)
4. Restatement interrupted and then building to first climax (mm. 115-59)
5. Quasi-recapitulation leading to second climax (mm. 160-215)
6. Coda (mm. 216-58)
This scheme is unusual in several ways. The exposition presents a succession of six different thematic ideas without repetition or much sense of tonal direction. Although two shortened restatements seem to give more shape to the music, the irruption of a new theme in the trumpet at measure 124, almost exactly halfway through the piece, alt
ers the mood radically. Introducing a new idea midway through a movement violates classical notions of form, but here it recalls Wagnerian precedents, like the appearance of the sword motive (also in the trumpet) at the end of Das Rheingold. There is a Debussyan precedent as well. At measure 131 Debussy follows the trumpet motive, call it X, with a chromatic trilled idea in the clarinet, call it Y. The source for both new motives is the erotically charged action in Pelléas act 3, scene 1, where Mélisande leans out a window and lets Pelléas lose himself in her hair. The Y motive bubbles up when she sings “Je suis affreuse ainsi” as she unpins her hair, and it returns as Pelléas asks to kiss her hand. The first part of the X motive appears a moment later when their hands meet. The recollection of these moments in “Jeux de vagues” transforms its free-floating eroticism, splitting it into male and female components (X and Y) whose counterpoint sets off a sensual tsunami.
After this first climax the quasi recapitulation begins. Instead of repeating the loose thematic succession of the exposition, however, the music becomes a spiraling waltz, urged on by restatements of the trumpet theme. It achieves its second climax at measure 212 with a superimposition of X and Y. I leave an anatomical assessment of these musical climaxes to the reader, but at least one of them represents a sexual climax. Just as the succession of events in the first half of the movement only hinted at the ecstatic buildup to come, the coda, evoking at once detumescence and afterglow, suddenly takes the music to a new sphere of harmony, melody, and timbre, with the music finally resolving to a Lydian-tinged E major.