The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Privately, Sibelius was tormented by the promulgation of race laws in Nazi Germany. In 1943 he vented in his diary, “How can you, Jean Sibelius, possibly take these ‘Aryan paragraphs’ seriously? That is a great advantage for an artist. You are a cultural aristocrat and can make a stand against stupid prejudice.” But he made no stand. As the culture god of the Finnish state he had long since ceased to see a difference between music and history, and with the world in flames his music seemed destined for ruin. At the same time, obscure agonies consumed him. The diary again: “The tragedy begins. My burdensome thoughts paralyze me. The cause? Alone, alone. I never allow the great distress to pass my lips. Aino must be spared.” The final page of the diary, from 1944, contains a shopping list for champagne, cognac, and gin.

  Sibelius lived to the age of ninety-one. Like his contemporary Strauss, he made wry jokes about his inability to die. “All the doctors who wanted to forbid me to smoke and to drink are dead,” he once said. In a more serious mood, he observed, “It is very painful to be eighty. The public love artists who fall by the wayside in this life. A true artist must be down and out or die of hunger. In youth he should at least die of consumption.” One September morning in 1957, he went for his usual walk in the fields and forest around Ainola, scanning the skies for cranes flying south for the winter. They were part of his ritual of autumn; back when he was writing the Fifth Symphony, he had noted in his diary, “Every day I have seen the cranes. Flying south in full cry with their music. Have been yet again their most assiduous pupil. Their cries echo throughout my being.” When, on the third-to-last day of his life, the cranes duly appeared, he told his wife, “Here they come, the birds of my youth!” One of them broke from the flock, circled the house, cried out, and flew away.

  There is a curiously moving photograph of Igor Stravinsky kneeling over Sibelius’s grave, which takes the form of a horizontal metal slab on the grounds at Ainola. The visit took place in 1961, four years after Sibelius’s death. The master of modern music had practical reasons for making the pilgrimage: the Finnish government had promised him the Wihuri Sibelius Prize, which came in the generous amount of twenty-five thousand dollars. But the gesture had a certain gallantry. In the past, Stravinsky had belittled Sibelius, and on the occasion of the old man’s death he had slammed down the phone when a reporter called for comment. In his last years, though, Stravinsky warmed to a few Sibelius scores, and made an arrangement for octet of the Canzonetta for strings.

  The notion that there might be something “modern” about Sibelius was risible to self-styled progressives of the immediate postwar era. The Schoenbergian pedagogue René Leibowitz summed up the feelings of many new-music connoisseurs when he published a pamphlet with the title Sibelius: The Worst Composer in the World. Surveys of twentieth-century music labeled the composer a peripheral figure in the central drama of the march toward atonality and other intellectual landmarks. At least two texts—Joan Peyser’s The New Music and Glenn Watkins’s Soundings—failed to mention him at all. Yet performances of Sibelius’s music continued unabated; conductors and audiences had it right all along.

  In the last decades of the century, the politics of style changed in Sibelius’s favor. The composer began to be understood in terms of what Milan Kundera called, in another meditation on the culture of small nations, “antimodern modernism”—a personal style that stands outside the status quo of perpetual progress. Suddenly, composers and scholars were paying heed to Sibelius’s effects of thematic deliquescence, his ever-evolving forms, his unearthly timbres. New-music luminaries such as Brian Ferneyhough, Wolfgang Rihm, Tristan Murail, Gérard Grisey, Per Nørgård, Peter Maxwell Davies, John Adams, and Thomas Adès all cited him as a model. A generation of upstart Finns—Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, and Esa-Pekka Salonen—found new respect for the national hero after having rejected him in their punkish youth. Lindberg made his name with a gripping piece called Kraft (1983–85), whose orchestra is augmented by scrap-metal percussion and a conductor blowing a whistle. At any given point, it sounds nothing like Sibelius—Lindberg cites the influence of noise-rock bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten—but the accumulation of roiling processes from microscopic material feels like a computer-age reprise of Tapiola.

  In 1984, the great American avant-garde composer Morton Feldman gave a lecture at the relentlessly up-to-date Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, Germany. “The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives,” Feldman said on that occasion. “The people who you think are conservative might really be radical.” And he began to hum the Sibelius Fifth.

  6

  CITY OF NETS

  Berlin in the Twenties

  One day in 1932, during the last months of Germany’s first attempt at democracy, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann’s son, walked into a room and saw the corpse of the young actor Ricki Hallgarten, his friend and sometime lover. Hallgarten had shot himself through the heart, splattering blood on the wall. Klaus wrote, “The blood stains looked like the scattered fragments of a mysterious pattern—a last message, a warning, the writing on the wall.” That phrase, from the book of Daniel, became the leitmotif of Klaus Mann’s recollections of Germany in the 1920s, and, lest anyone miss the allusion, he went on to quote the biblical text itself: “MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN…God hath numbered thy kingdom…Thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting…Thy kingdom is divided.”

  The Weimar Republic, as embodied in the culture of Berlin, invites melodrama. Every violent act or image seems to foreshadow the catastrophe to come. But it is too easy to write the story of German culture from 1918 to 1933 as the prelude to the next chapter. Berlin was a city of possibilities, of myriad outcomes, glowing with promise as well as threat. It played host to Communists, Nazis, Social Democrats, nationalists, New Objectivists, Expressionists, Dadaists, and straggling Romantics. Its spirit spoke in the meeting of opposites. In the wake of the humiliation of defeat, Berlin shook off its imperial past and reinvented itself as the prototype of media-saturated urban cultures to come—the first all-night city, the city without shame.

  The young composers of Berlin—among them Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, Hanns Eisler, and Stefan Wolpe—happily joined in the frenzy. Like their counterparts in Paris and New York, they picked up the rhythms of jazz, the noise of industry, the fashionable clutter of twenties life. They not only gained entry to popular culture but at times took control of it: Weill’s Threepenny Opera charmed Germany as Show Boat charmed America. Weill and company seemed on the verge of solving the ultimate mystery—how to break the divide between classical music and modern society. “Music is no longer a matter of the few,” Weill proclaimed in 1928. “The musicians of today have made this sentence their own. Their music, therefore, is simpler, clearer, and more transparent…Once musicians obtained everything they had imagined in their most daring dreams, they started again from scratch.”

  Historians of Weimar debate whether German democracy was preordained to fail, or whether Hitler’s rise to power was a freak event. Music historians face a similar problem. Was Weimar a kind of fever dream, its arts programs destined to fall victim to the vagaries of commercial culture? Or might Weimar have given artists a permanent safe haven? As so often, the pessimists seem to have the force of history behind them. Schoenberg, who lived in Berlin from 1926 on, warned his colleagues against a futile chase after popularity, and in this period he devised a new way of working—a “method of composing with twelve notes”—that would protect the serious composer from vulgarity.

  Back in Vienna, Alban Berg went his own way; his second opera, the opulent and terrifying Lulu, reconciled his teacher’s latest ideas with Weimar rhythms and Romantic chords. Wozzeck conquered Berlin in 1925; in an alternate universe, Lulu might have had the same reception. But Berg did not live to finish it, and by the time of his death, in 1935, Klaus Mann’s “writing on the wall” had become reality.

  Ministry of Enlightenment

  When Kaiser Wilh
elm II abdicated his throne on November 9, 1918, Germany fell into a political disorder from which it never fully recovered. Leaders of the Social Democratic Party proclaimed a republic from the windows of the Reichstag. Karl Liebknecht hailed a Communist revolution while standing on the steps of the Royal Palace.

  Kurt Weill, an eighteen-year-old student at the Hochschule für Musik, was in the streets that day; he heard Liebknecht’s speech and watched the skirmishes around the Reichstag. “I’ve had indescribable experiences the last few days,” he wrote to his parents. What he saw on the ground led him to make a perceptive comment, which historians of the Weimar period have confirmed: the moderate elements lacked power and influence, so the extremes of the left and the right were setting the tone and the agenda. This was an ominous note on which to inaugurate a republic.

  Still, the school stayed open and musical life went on. Cafés were full and the trams were running. Even as the revolution began, the Ufa film studio held a champagne reception for Ernst Lubitsch’s film of Carmen. The previous night Richard Strauss had conducted Salome at the Court Opera, which promptly shook off its royal title and became the State Opera.

  The brief life of the Weimar Republic is usually divided into three periods: chaos, stabilization, and the devolution toward Nazism. Chaos lasted a full four years, bringing with it various coups and counterrevolutions and an astonishing total of four hundred political murders. (One victim was Gustav Landauer, commissar for people’s enlightenment of the short-lived Soviet Republic of Bavaria, whose wife, Hedwig Lachmann, translated Salome into German.) Most damaging to the country’s psychological security was the hyperinflation of 1923, at the height of which the mark was valued at several trillion to the dollar. “Nothing was so mad or so atrocious that it could have caused any awe in people anymore,” Thomas Mann wrote of the inflation. “[Germans] learned to look on life as a wild adventure, the outcome of which depended not on their own effort but on sinister, mysterious forces.”

  The “stabilization” period, which lasted from 1924 to 1929, unfolded under the guiding hand of the master politician Gustav Stresemann, who, first as chancellor and then as foreign minister, restored economic order and led Germany back into the world community. Stresemann’s death in 1929 removed from the scene the most powerful personality who might have stopped Hitler.

  Directing the “stabilization” of music was a man named Leo Kestenberg, who in December 1918 assumed the post of musical adviser to the Prussian Ministry of Science, Culture, and Education. He had studied piano with Ferruccio Busoni before becoming active in the Social Democratic Party. In the spirit of that well-meaning organization, he aimed to clear away the cobwebs of elitist culture and promote the creation of “art for the people.” One of his flagship institutions was the Kroll Opera, which presented antitraditional stagings to a working-class audience. Half the seats were made available to the Volksbühne, the socialist theater, at prices appropriate to the salary of a manual worker. The conductor was Otto Klemperer, a Mahler protegé, who at this early stage of his long career specialized in subversive productions of classic repertory. Kestenberg also gave Berlin’s new-music scene a shot of adrenaline by appointing two leading progressives to teach at the conservatories: Busoni at the Prussian Academy of Arts and Franz Schreker at the Hochschule für Musik. When Busoni died, Schoenberg moved from Vienna to take his place. Schreker and Schoenberg brought with them bristling cohorts of students, who quickly took over the limelight.

  Inconvenient realities soon intruded on Kestenberg’s arts utopia. As the critic John Rockwell has shown in his study of Weimar musical politics, Kestenberg never really figured out who the People were or what they wanted to hear: the working classes whom the Kroll Opera hoped to serve were often confounded by the company’s revisionist take on the classics. At the same time, Kestenberg lacked the political skill to placate the right wing, which deplored all avant-garde doings. While Weimar’s bohemians and leftists had their time in the sun, the reactionary, xenophobic strain in German culture was never far below the surface. One night in 1928, Joseph Goebbels walked around the Tauentzienstrasse cabaret district and returned home to write: “This is not the true Berlin…The other Berlin is lurking, ready to pounce.”

  Music for Use

  During the Great War, Paul Hindemith banged the bass drum in a military band, racing back and forth a mile or so behind the front lines, playing marches and dances for soldiers who were recovering from their spell in the trenches. He also performed in an all-soldier string quartet, at the behest of a cultured commanding officer, Count von Kielmannsegg, who adored Debussy. The group happened to be playing the Debussy Quartet when news of the composer’s death came over the radio. The count himself died in action a few months later. Such surreal juxtapositions of music and war left their mark on Hindemith’s imagination, and he, more than anyone, set the pace for postwar German music.

  A no-nonsense man with a bulbous face and a machine-gun manner of speech, Hindemith had nothing aristocratic or bourgeois in his background. He was the son of a small-town manual laborer, and attended the Hoch Conservatorium in Frankfurt with the help of a full scholarship. In the first months of the peace, he declared his independence from German Romanticism by completing a series of six sonatas for stringed instruments, crisply constructed pieces in which the influence of Debussy and Ravel was pervasive; few German composers of the preceding fifty years had written music of such uncomplicated grace. The young composer also showed a deep feeling for pre-Romantic traditions, for the stately forms of the Renaissance and the Baroque, although he modernized them relentlessly.

  “Beauty of sound is beside the point,” Hindemith instructed the player in his Second Sonata for Solo Viola. He was considered the musical personification of what Gustav Hartlaub called the New Objectivity—a form of expression “neither Impressionistically vague nor Expressionistically abstract, neither sensuously superficial nor constructivistically introverted.” The archetypal Hindemith piece takes the form of a fast, furious, off-kilter march, with fanfares in multiple tonalities and bass lines bent off course. The music is intense, but it does not take itself particularly seriously, or seriously at all. The “Ragtime” movement of Hindemith’s Suite 1922 for piano is inscribed with the placard-like notice “Mode d’emploi—Directions for Use!!” in which the performer is told to “look on the piano as an interesting kind of percussion instrument and act accordingly.” The Kammermusik No. 1, also from 1922, opens with an homage to Stravinsky’s Petrushka and ends with a squealing siren out of a Dada cabaret. All this resembles the up-to-date, streetwise music that Milhaud was writing in Paris, except that Hindemith’s constructions had a rougher, rowdier edge.

  There was something bracingly un-German about this new German talent. Strauss, even in his merriest prankster mood, could never have perpetrated something like The Flying Dutchman Overture as Sight-Read by a Bad Spa Orchestra by the Village Well at Seven in the Morning, in which a string quartet plays Wagner’s overture horribly out of tune. Hindemith was anything but visionary in his preoccupations; he was practical, efficient, down-to-earth. Another catchword that became attached to him was Gebrauchsmusik, or music for use. If, say, a bassoonist and a double-bass player were looking for something to play, then Hindemith would dash off a Duet for Bassoon and Double Bass and not worry what posterity might make of it. He worked fast and to order; on one occasion he wrote two sonata movements in the buffet car of a train and performed them on arrival. As violist of the Amar Quartet, he energetically promoted his colleagues’ music as well as his own. He helped to organize festivals and “new-music weeks” in Donaueschingen, Salzburg, Baden-Baden, and eventually Berlin, where, in 1927, he became a teacher at the Hochschule für Musik.

  The idea of “music for use” quickly took root in the Weimar musical scene. The Munich-born Carl Orff, who would find everlasting fame as the composer of Carmina burana, cultivated it assiduously. If Hindemith, like Stravinsky, found rejuvenation in the curt forms and sharp timbres
of the Baroque, Orff went much further back in time, to the music theater of ancient Greece. The austere aesthetic of Stravinsky’s Les Noces and Histoire du soldat metamorphosed into a timeless ritual language, tuneful, percussive, and hypnotically repetitive. In his early years Orff tended to the political left, setting poems by Bertolt Brecht. But his most singular achievement was a massive cycle of pieces for children, the School Work project, which, by way of infectious musical invention, instructed youngsters in the basics of mode, harmony, form, and rhythm. Kestenberg took notice, and by the early thirties he was proposing to give Orff control of the entire German music education system. The Nazi takeover in 1933 ended that prospect.

  “Music for use” and educational music went hand in hand with what Peter Gay has called Weimar’s “hunger for wholeness”: its obsessive pursuit of arts-and-crafts projects, physical culture, back-to-nature expeditions, youth movements, sing-alongs, and so on. After the war, Theodor Adorno professed to see proto-Fascist tendencies in Weimar’s communitarian music making, playing off the fact that both Hindemith and Orff had become entangled, to a greater or lesser degree, in Nazi culture. Yet the denunciation rests on specious logic. There is nothing intrinsically fascistic about the longing to connect music to a community; it can just as easily serve as a vehicle for the propagation of democratic thought. Untold millions of children would learn the basics of musical language by tapping out notes on the mallet percussion instruments that Orff had constructed to his purposes. The man himself may have been politically duplicitous, but his passion for teaching was profound, and it probably touched more lives than any music described in this book.