The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  As the finale begins, the march rhythm—Left! Left! Left-right-left!—comes back with a vengeance. No composer ever devised a form quite like this one—wave after wave of development, skirling fanfares suggesting imminent joy, then the chilling return of the marching beat. The movement is organized around three “hammerblows” (or, in the revised version, two), which have the effect of triggering a kind of collapse. For the premiere, Mahler had a gigantic drum constructed—“the hide of a fully grown cow stretched on a frame a meter and a half square,” one critic wrote in sarcastic wonder—which was to have been struck with a mallet of unprecedented size. In the event, the drum produced only a muffled thump, to the amusement of the musicians. Like Strauss in Salome, Mahler is employing shock tactics on his audience, and he saves his biggest shock for the very end. The work is poised to die away to silence, with a three-note figure limping through the lower instruments. Then, out of nowhere, a fortissimo A-minor chord clangs like a metal door swung shut. Correctly performed, this gesture should make unsuspecting listeners jump out of their seats.

  After the last rehearsal, Mahler sat in his dressing room, shattered by the power of his own creation. Alma reported that he “walked up and down…sobbing, wringing his hands, unable to control himself.” Suddenly Strauss poked his head through the door to say that the mayor of Essen had died and that a memorial piece needed to be played at the beginning of the program. Strauss’s only comment on the symphony was that the final movement was “over-instrumented.”

  Bruno Walter observed that Mahler was “reduced almost to tears” by the episode. How could Strauss have misjudged the work so completely? Or was Strauss possibly right? That summer, Mahler lightened the orchestration of the Sixth’s finale considerably.

  After the events of May 1906, the friendship between the two men cooled. Mahler’s envy of Strauss metastasized, affecting his conception of music’s place in society. All along, in his letters to Alma and others, Mahler had recorded various indignities to which his colleague had subjected him, probably exaggerating for effect. “I extend to [Strauss] respectful and friendly solicitude,” Mahler wrote to his wife on one occasion, “and he doesn’t respond, he doesn’t even seem to notice, it is wasted on him. When I experience such things again and again, I feel totally confused about myself and the world!” In a letter the very next day, Mahler described Strauss as “very sweet,” which suggests not only that he had forgotten the snub of the previous day but that he had invented it.

  In an essay on the relationship between the composers, the musicologist Herta Blaukopf cites the lopsided friendship of two young men in Thomas Mann’s story “Tonio Kröger.” Mahler is like the dark-haired Tonio, who thinks too much and feels everything too intensely. Strauss is like the fair-haired Hans Hansen, who sails through life in ignorance of the world’s horror. Indeed, Strauss could never comprehend Mahler’s obsession with suffering and redemption. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be redeemed from,” he once said to the conductor Otto Klemperer.

  Mahler was still trying to answer the question that he had pondered on the train from Graz: Can a man win fame in his own time while also remaining a true artist? Doubt was growing in his mind. Increasingly, he spoke of the insignificance of contemporary musical judgment in the face of the ultimate wisdom of posterity.

  “I am to find no recognition as a composer during my lifetime,” he told a critic in 1906. “As long as I am the ‘Mahler’ wandering among you, a ‘man among men,’ I must content myself with an ‘all too human’ reception as a creative figure. Only when I have shaken off this earthly dust will there be justice done. I am what Nietzsche calls an ‘untimely’ one…The true ‘timely one’ is Richard Strauss. That is why he already enjoys immortality here on earth.” In a letter to Alma, Mahler spoke of his relationship with Strauss in terms borrowed from John the Baptist’s prophecy of the coming of Jesus Christ: “The time is coming when men will see the wheat separated from the chaff—and my time will come when his is up.” That last remark has been widely bowdlerized to “My time will come”—a statement of faith often quoted by composers who place themselves in opposition to popular culture.

  With Mahler, though, the “untimely” stance was something of a pose. He cared mightily about the reception of his works, and danced on air if they succeeded, which they usually did. No Mahler myth is more moth-eaten than the one that he was neglected in his own time. The First Symphony may have baffled its first audience, but the later symphonies almost always conquered the public, if not the critics. “In his mature years,” the scholar and conductor Leon Botstein writes, “Mahler experienced far more triumph than defeat and more enthusiasm than rejection by audiences.” Even at the premiere of the “satanic” Sixth, a critic reported that the composer “had to return to the platform to receive the congratulations and thanks of the crowded audience.”

  In the summer of 1906, Mahler sought to cement his relationship with the public by sketching his life-affirming, oratorio-like Eighth Symphony, which he called his “gift to the nation.” The first part was based on the hymn “Veni creator spiritus”; the second part was a panoramic setting of the last scene of Goethe’s Faust, Part II. The Eighth inspired earthshaking applause on the occasion of its premiere, four years later. “The indescribable here is accomplished,” hundreds of singers roar at the end; the storm of applause that followed might as well have been notated in the score.

  The glowing optimism of the Eighth belied the fact that the composer was growing sick of Vienna, of the constant opposition of anti-Semites, of infighting and backstabbing. He announced his resignation in May 1907, conducted his last opera performance in October, and made his final appearance as a conductor in Vienna in November, bidding farewell with his own Second Symphony. To his ardent fans, it was as though he had been driven out by the forces of ignorance and reaction. When he left the city, at the end of the year, two hundred admirers, Schoenberg and his pupils among them, gathered at the train station to bid him farewell, garlanding his compartment with flowers. It seemed the end of a golden age. “Vorbei!” said Gustav Klimt—“It’s over!”

  The reality was a bit less romantic. Throughout the spring of 1907, Mahler had been negotiating secretly with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and not the least of the management’s enticements was what it called “the highest fee a musician has ever received”: 75,000 kronen for three months’ work, or, in today’s money, $300,000. Mahler said yes.

  The New World

  There was no lack of music in the American republic at the beginning of the twentieth century. Every major city had an orchestra. International opera stars circulated through the opera houses of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Virtuosos, maestros, and national geniuses landed in Manhattan by the boatload. European visitors found the musical scene in the New World congenially similar to that in the Old. The orchestral repertory gravitated toward the Austro-German tradition, most musicians were immigrants, and many rehearsals took place in German. Operatic life was divided among the French, German, and Italian traditions. The Metropolitan Opera experienced a fad for Gounod, a cult of Wagner, and, finally, a wave of Puccini.

  For the rich, classical music was a status symbol, a collector’s delight. Millionaires signed up musicians in much the same way they bought up and brought home pieces of European art. Yet the appeal of composers such as Wagner and Puccini went much wider. In 1884, for example, Theodore Thomas led his virtuoso orchestra in a cross-country tour, playing to audiences of five, eight, even ten thousand people. And, as the historian Joseph Horowitz relates, Anton Seidl conducted all-Wagner concerts on Coney Island, his series advertised by means of a newfangled “electric sign” on Broadway. Enrico Caruso, who began singing in America in 1903, was probably the biggest cultural celebrity of the day; when he was arrested for groping the wife of a baseball player in the monkey house in Central Park, the story played on the front pages of newspapers across the country, and, far from ruining the tenor’s reputation, it only augm
ented his already enormous popularity. In the New York Times, advertisements for classical events were jumbled together with myriad other offerings under the rubric “Amusements.” One night the Met would put on John Philip Sousa’s band, the next night the Ring. Elgar’s oratorios rubbed shoulders with midget performers and Barnum’s Original Skeleton Dude.

  New technologies helped bring the music to those who had never heard it live. In 1906, the year of Salome in Graz, the Victor Talking Machine Company introduced its new-model Victrola phonograph, which, though priced at an astronomical two hundred dollars, proved wildly successful. Caruso ruled the medium; his sobbing rendition of “Vesti la giubba” was apparently the first record to sell a million copies. Also in 1906, the inventor Thaddeus Cahill unveiled a two-hundred-ton electronic instrument called the Telharmonium, which, by way of an ingenious if unwieldy array of alternators, broadcast arrangements of Bach, Chopin, and Grieg to audiences in Telharmonic Hall, opposite the Met.

  The hall closed after two seasons; local phone customers complained that the Telharmonium was disrupting their calls. But the future had been glimpsed. The electrification of music would forever change the world in which Mahler and Strauss came of age, bringing classical music to unprecedented mass audiences but also publicizing popular genres that would challenge composers’ long-standing cultural hegemony. Even in 1906, ragtime numbers and other syncopated dances were thriving on the new medium. Small bands made a crisp, vital sound, while symphony orchestras came across as tinny and feeble.

  What classical music in America lacked was American classical music. Composition remained in the condition of cultural subservience that Ralph Waldo Emerson had diagnosed in his essay “The American Scholar” back in 1837: “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” American writers answered Emerson’s call: by the turn of the century, libraries contained the works of Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, and the brothers James. The roster of American composers, on the other hand, included the likes of John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, George Whitefield Chadwick, and Edward MacDowell—skilled craftsmen who did credit to their European training but who failed to find a language that was either singularly American or singularly their own. Audiences saved their deepest genuflections for European figures who deigned to cross the Atlantic.

  Strauss came to America in 1904. Notwithstanding his mildly dangerous aura—the American critic James Huneker labeled him an “anarch of art”—he was greeted almost as a head of state. Theodore Roosevelt received him at the White House, and Senator Stephen B. Elkins, a powerful operator in the pro-business Republican Party, invited him onto the floor of the Senate. In return, Strauss granted America the honor of hosting the premiere of his latest work, the Symphonia domestica. The program stirred controversy: it described a day in the life of a well-to-do family, including breakfast, the baby’s bath, and connubial bliss. Despite some extended patches of note-spinning, the new work gave vigorous expression to Strauss’s belief that anything could be set to music as long as it was felt intensely. Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation, observed that music could find as much pathos in the disagreements of an ordinary household as in the agonies of the house of Agamemnon. There in one sentence was Strauss’s career from Domestica to Elektra.

  Demand for Strauss in New York grew so strong that two additional orchestral performances were arranged. They took place on the fourth floor of Wanamaker’s department store, which was one of the original American superstores, occupying two blocks along Broadway between Eighth and Tenth streets. Wanamaker’s felt that it had a duty to provide cultural uplift: its piano showroom, like the Steinway showroom uptown, regularly featured recitals by celebrated artists. “They do things sumptuously at the Wanamaker store,” the Times wrote of the first Strauss concert. “There was, of course, an eager desire on the part of many people to hear the great German composer conduct his own compositions, and though there were fully five thousand people accommodated at the concerts last evening, there were many applicants who had to be refused, and every inch of space was occupied, many people standing.” In the European press, however, Strauss was promptly pilloried as a moneygrubbing vulgarian who so desperately wanted to add to his coffers that he performed in supermarkets.

  The Symphonia domestica entertained Manhattanites; Salome scandalized them. When the Metropolitan Opera presented the latter work in January 1907, there was a kerfuffle in the Golden Horseshoe, as the elite ring of boxes was known. Boxes 27 and 29 emptied out before the scene of the kissing of the head. J. P. Morgan’s daughter allegedly asked her father to shut down the production; Salome did not return to the Met until 1934. A physician vented his disgust in a letter to the New York Times:

  I am a man of middle life, who has devoted upward of twenty years to the practice of a profession that necessitates, in the treatment of nervous and mental diseases, a daily intimacy with degenerates…I say after deliberation, and a familiarity with the emotional productions of Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss, that Salome is a detailed and explicit exposition of the most horrible, disgusting, revolting and unmentionable features of degeneracy (using the word now in its customary social, sexual significance) that I have ever heard, read of, or imagined…That which it depicts is naught else than the motive of the indescribable acts of Jack the Ripper.

  The greater part of the audience couldn’t turn away. One critic reported that the spectacle filled him with “indefinable dread.”

  Giacomo Puccini arrived for his first American visit just a few days before the Salome affair. When his ship was trapped for a day in a fog bank off Sandy Hook, bulletins of his progress went out to opera-loving readers of the New York Times. Puccini’s operas had lately become runaway hits in the city; during his five-week stay, all four of his mature works to date—Manon Lescaut, La Bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly—played at the Metropolitan Opera, and La Bohème ran concurrently at Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House.

  Puccini was keen to write something for his American fans, and in the customary shipside press conference he floated the idea of an opera set in the Wild West. “I have read Bret Harte’s novels,” he said, “and I think there is great scope in your Western life for operatic treatment.” He also looked into African-American music, or “coon songs,” as the Times called them. Black musicians were summoned to the home of Dr. and Mrs. William Tillinghast Bull, so that the maestro could hear them.

  Puccini returned to Italy with the plan of making an opera out of The Girl of the Golden West, by the playwright-showman David Belasco, who had also written the play on which Butterfly was based. The score branched out in a couple of new directions. On the one hand, Puccini demonstrated what he had absorbed from several encounters with Salome, as well as from a study of Debussy. Act I begins with blaring whole-tone chords, which must have alarmed the hordes who had fallen for La Bohème. Act II culminates in a “tritone complex” of the kind that had often appeared at climactic moments of Salome and Elektra—chords of E-flat minor and A minor in minatory alternation. At the same time, The Girl of the Golden West gamely tries to do justice to its classic American setting; intermittent strains of the cakewalk echo whatever it was that Puccini heard at Dr. and Mrs. Bull’s, while a Native American Zuni song furnishes material for (oddly) an aria by a black minstrel. The most remarkable thing about the work is that a fearless, independent woman occupies the center of it; in an age when women in opera almost invariably came off as diseased and deranged, Puccini’s Minnie is a bringer of peace, a beacon in a darkening world.

  Mahler arrived in New York on December 21, 1907, taking up residence at the Hotel Majestic on Central Park West. His performances at the Met went splendidly, but trouble was brewing behind the scenes. Heinrich Conried, who had hired Mahler, was forced out, partly because of the Salome debacle, and the board expressed a desire to “work away from the German atmosphere and the Jew.” Giulio Gatti-Casazza, of La Scala, became the new manager, bringin
g with him the firebrand conductor Arturo Toscanini. But another opportunity arose. The society figure Mary Sheldon offered to set Mahler up with a star orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic was reconstituted to meet his needs. Mahler believed that this arrangement would allow him to present his own works and the classics under ideal conditions. “Since [New Yorkers] are completely unprejudiced,” he wrote home, “I hope I shall here find fertile ground for my works and thus a spiritual home, something that, for all the sensationalism, I should never be able to achieve in Europe.”

  Things did not turn out quite so rosily, but Mahler and America got along well. The conductor was no longer so addicted to perfection, nor did he hold himself aloof from society as he had done in Vienna. On a good night, he would take all seventy of his musicians out to dinner. He went to dinner parties, attended a séance, even poked his head into an opium den in Chinatown. When traveling to a concert, he refused the assistance of a chauffeur, preferring to use the newly constructed subway system. A Philharmonic musician once saw the great man alone in a subway car, staring vacantly like any other commuter.

  A New York friend, Maurice Baumfeld, recalled that Mahler loved to gaze out his high window at the city and the sky. “Wherever I am,” the composer said, “the longing for this blue sky, this sun, this pulsating activity goes with me.” In 1909, at the beginning of his second New York season, he wrote to Bruno Walter: “I see everything in such a new light—am in such a state of flux, sometimes I should hardly be surprised suddenly to find myself in a new body. (Like Faust in the last scene.) I am thirstier for life than ever before…”