The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Now Opera

  A publicity photo issued by the music publisher Universal Edition in 1927 shows the twenty-seven-year-old Austrian composer Ernst Krenek in a vaguely druggy double exposure, an endless cigarette holder dangling from his mouth. With his sharp suit and unlined face, he looks like a baby gangster gone legit. Another photomontage from that year puts the young artist together with two other celebrities of the moment: the boxer Max Schmeling and the aviator Charles Lindbergh.

  For a little while in the late twenties, Krenek acquired certifiable, almost Gershwin-like celebrity; his opera Jonny spielt auf, or Jonny Strikes Up, was enshrined as one of those pop-culture artifacts that every Central European had to know. Fame came Krenek’s way because he dared to bring jazz—or what passed for jazz—onto the hallowed opera stage. Like George Antheil in Paris and New York, he was an ambitious young man seeking to make a splash, although there was a serious side to his enterprise as well; like so many young Austrians and Germans, he yearned to break out of the hothouse of Romantic and Expressionist art, to join the milling throngs in the new democratic street.

  Jonny exemplified a new subgenre that came to be called Zeitoper, or Now Opera. Composers working in this mode set works in factories, or on board ocean liners, or, in one case, on “Fiftieth Avenue” in Manhattan. Typical was the plot of Max Brand’s Maschinist Hopkins, memorably described by Nicolas Slonimsky in his reference work Music Since 1900: “A cuckolding libertine pushes the husband of his mistress to his death in the cogs of a monstrous machine and strangles her when he finds out that she has become a promiscuous prostitute, whereupon the foreman, Maschinist Hopkins, dismisses him from his job ostensibly for inefficiency.” Now Operas almost always contained a scene in which one or another of the characters throws off his or her inhibitions to dance a Charleston, a Fox-Trott, a shimmy, or a tango. Composers thereby liberated themselves.

  Several Zeitoper composers, Krenek and Brand among them, studied with the once celebrated and now unfairly neglected Austrian opera composer Franz Schreker, who, back in 1912, had unveiled a remarkable work titled Der ferne Klang, or The Distant Sound. The story of that opera is essentially the story of this book: the cultural predicament of the composer in the twentieth century. An ambitious young musical dramatist named Fritz decides to abandon his middling career and his adoring fiancée in order to find a new style—a “mysterious distant sound,” a “high, sublime goal.” He produces a work that people call “something really new,” “spine-chilling.” It causes a Schoenbergian scandal, replete with stamping and whistling. Meanwhile, Grete, Fritz’s fiancée, sinks low in the world, ending up as a prostitute. In the opera’s final scene they meet again, and Fritz, dying of an unspecified illness, tragically realizes that the sound he has been seeking has been around him all this time, in the multifarious textures of modern life, and in Grete’s voice.

  The magic of Schreker’s opera is that from the first bars we have been hearing the music that Fritz cannot grasp—buoyantly lyrical vocal writing, more Italian than German in style; a golden blur of orchestral sound, more Debussy than Wagner in timbre; a cosmopolitan sensualism, incorporating, in the “grand bordello” sequence of Act II, Gypsy bands, barcaroles, and choral sernades.

  Jonny tries to replicate Schreker’s achievement, but with more modern means. The title character is a Negro jazz violinist on a European tour, a sort of Austrian cartoon of Will Marion Cook. He crows in triumph: “Across the sea comes New World brilliance / Inheriting old Europe with dance.” The cast also features a composer named Max, who, at the beginning of the opera, is seen sitting at the side of a grim glacier, which he addresses as “Du schöner Berg” (“you beautiful mountain”). Like Fritz in Der ferne Klang, Max cannot forgo the pursuit of a distant sound, presumably of the Schoenbergian variety. The subtext becomes amusingly obvious when Max says of the glacier, “Everyone loves it once they have got to know it,” as if quoting from propaganda literature of the Second Viennese School. The glacier eventually instructs Max, through the medium of an invisible choir of women’s voices, to “return to life.” In a climactic railway-station scene Max catches up with his beloved Anita as she rides off into the unknown. Jonny jumps up on top of the station clock and the chorus reprises his song of triumph. According to Krenek’s original notes, the opera was to have ended with the image of a 78-rpm recording spinning on a phonograph, the composer’s name inscribed upon it.

  The entire plot was autobiographical. Before discovering a taste for jazz and other popular materials, Krenek had gone through his own wild-eyed semi-atonal phase, with Schoenberg and Bartók his guides. In writing Jonny, he was trying to live out Max’s epiphany, exposing his own glacier world to the warmth of Jonny’s violin. Furthermore, the character of Anita was based on Anna Mahler, Gustav and Alma’s daughter, to whom Krenek was briefly and tempestuously married. Not long after the relationship ended, the composer went to see Sam Wooding’s jazz revue Chocolate Kiddies, which was the rage of Europe in the mid-twenties, and he seized on Wooding’s polite jazz arrangements as a lifeline that would lead him out of the abysses of Central European despair. Interestingly, the revue contained at least one early Duke Ellington song, “Jig Walk,” and that tune bears a slight resemblance to Jonny’s big number. Alas, Krenek’s engagement with African-American music went about as deep as the blackface painted on the singer playing Jonny.

  Zeitoper drew sharp criticisms from both ends of Weimar’s hyper-extended political spectrum. The Nazis attacked it as degenerate art. The Communist composer Hanns Eisler, meanwhile, wrote of Jonny in Die Rote Fahne: “Despite the infusions of chic, this is exactly the same mushy, petit bourgeois stuff that other contemporary opera composers produce.” Eisler was equally unkind to Hindemith’s “music for use,” dismissing it as a “relative stabilization of music” (a wry echo of German economic lingo). All modern music lived a Scheindasein, an illusory existence bereft of meaning or community. In 1928 Eisler wrote: “The big music festivals have become downright stock exchanges, where the value of the works is assessed and contracts for the coming season are settled. Yet all this noise is carried out in the vacuum of a bell glass, so to speak, so that not a sound can be heard outside. An empty officiousness celebrates orgies of inbreeding, while there is a complete lack of interest or participation of a public of any kind.”

  What Germany needed, Eisler said, was music that told deeper truths about human society. Open the window when you compose, he instructed his colleagues. “Remember that the noise of the street is not mere noise, but is made by man…Discover the people, the real people, discover day-to-day life for your art, and then perhaps you will be rediscovered.” By that time, the revolution had begun; The Threepenny Opera was playing to packed crowds at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.

  Gestic Music

  Kurt Weill’s schoolmates probably never imagined him as the cynosure of a decadent city. The son of a Jewish cantor in the town of Dessau, about seventy miles from Berlin, Weill grew up a shy, serious boy, devoted to music. Like Krenek, he admired Schoenberg in his youth, and yearned to study with the Master himself in Vienna, but the family’s limited finances prevented him from going. Instead, in the last weeks of 1918, Weill journeyed to revolutionary Berlin, where he ended up enrolling in Busoni’s master class at the Prussian Academy of Arts.

  His first reactions to Weimar culture were skeptical. After a visit to the 1923 Frankfurt Chamber Music Festival, he reported to Busoni that “Hindemith has already danced too far into the land of the fox-trot.” Yet his ears were opening to a broader gamut of sounds: Mahler’s catchall symphonies, Stravinsky’s pop-tinged Histoire du soldat. The latter work appeared on the Frankfurt programs, and Weill was moved to admit—his snobbery was on the wane—that its “pandering to the taste of the street is bearable because it suits the material.”

  As Krenek followed Schreker’s path out into the wider world, Weill followed Busoni, a magus-like musician who hovered over the early twentieth century like a spider in his
web. A Tuscan of Corsican descent, a resident variously of Trieste, Vienna, Leipzig, Helsinki, Moscow, New York, Zurich, and Berlin, Busoni was a cosmopolitan in a nationalist age, a pragmatist in an era of aesthetic absolutism. In 1909, Busoni reprimanded Schoenberg for rejecting the old while embracing the new; as Busoni saw it, you could do both at once, and in the Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music he called simultaneously for a reinvention of the “tonal system” and for a return to Mozartean, classical grace. Like so many Romantics and modernists before him, Busoni idolized the figure of Faust, but he delighted more in the science of magic than in the theory of heaven and hell. Doctor Faust, his unfinished operatic masterpiece, circumnavigated the globe of musical possibility, incorporating diatonic, modal, whole-tone, and chromatic scales, Renaissance polyphony, eighteenth-century formulas, operetta airs, and flurries of dissonance.

  Perhaps the most effective lesson that Busoni imparted to Weill was a single sentence: “Do not be afraid of banality.” For a young German who had been raised to think that “banality” included almost everything Italian and French, this advice had an enlightening effect. Busoni showed how the great operas of Mozart and Verdi interwove naive tunes and sophisticated designs. He talked about the Schlagwort, the “hit word” or catchword, which can sum up in one instant an intricate theatrical situation—for example, the scalding cry of “Maledizione!” (“The curse!”) in Verdi’s Rigoletto. In a 1928 essay, “On the Gestic Character of Music,” Weill elaborated the related idea of Gestus, or musical gesture. The literary critic Daniel Albright defines Gestus as the dramatic turning point “in which pantomime, speech, and music cooperate toward a pure flash of meaning.” Bertolt Brecht, Weill’s principal literary collaborator, would give the concept of Gestus a political cast, describing it as a revolutionary transfer of energy from author to audience. For Weill, though, it always had a more practical meaning, one to which politics might or might not be attached.

  Weill’s first efforts at music theater were one-act operas: The Protagonist, a neat little shocker in which an Elizabethan actor, unable to distinguish between art and life, murders his own sister onstage; Royal Palace, in which a socialite throws herself into a lake rather than pursue a spiritually empty Jazz Age existence; and The Tsar Has Himself Photographed, in which a female anarchist posing as a society photographer plots the assassination of the tsar. Each of these works contains a pivotal moment—“gestic” in the musical if not political sense—when a popular, everyday sound grabs the listener’s attention. In The Protagonist it is an oompahing wind-and-brass octet, which intrudes on the dissonant ruminations of the orchestra. In Royal Palace it is the blast of an auto horn and the jangling of a honky-tonk piano, which illustrate an innovative film interlude in the center of the piece. And in The Tsar it is the effortlessly slinky “Tango Angèle” that plays as the tsar and his would-be assassine dance and fall in love. Weill asked that this last piece be executed not by the orchestra but by an onstage Victrola, and, to this end, a 78-rpm record was included with the score. Something interesting happened after the premiere, which took place in February 1928: Weill’s publisher, Universal Edition, began selling the Tango in stores, and it became a hit.

  The transformation of Weill’s style was quickened by two crucial meetings, one with Lotte Lenya and one with Bertolt Brecht. Weill become romantically and professionally involved with Lenya starting in 1924, and was never the same afterward. If Weill had a “cool, withdrawn” nature, as Busoni observed, Lenya was in every sense a woman of the world. The product of a poor background and an abusive father, she found employment variously as a dancer, a singer, an actress, a stage extra, an acrobat, and, briefly, a prostitute—a profession that ensnared countless German and Austrian women during the years of chaos and inflation. Weill met her through the playwright Georg Kaiser, who wrote the texts for The Protagonist and The Tsar. His music began to resemble Lenya’s voice—that famously unpolished, cutting, wearily expressive instrument. “She can’t read music,” Weill wrote in 1929, “but when she sings, people listen as if it were Caruso.”

  Brecht barged into Weill’s life in early 1927. Scholars are still trying to capture the dynamic of their collaboration, which Brecht obfuscated for many years by telling arrogant, self-serving lies; the playwright used to say that he had written all the best tunes of The Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny and that Weill, a “composer of atonal psychological operas,” had merely transcribed them. Subsequent investigations have shown that it was Brecht who relied quite often on the work of others—touching up translations of foreign plays and calling them his own, borrowing indiscriminately from the literature of several centuries, playing down or covering up the contributions of co-writers such as Elisabeth Hauptmann, his sometime lover. All the same, Brecht had an utterly distinctive style—his sentences say what they have to say and then snap shut—and with a modicum of editing he could stamp his voice on anyone’s writing. On Weill, Brecht had as electric an effect as Lenya did: he further toughened the composer’s image, pushing him in the direction of hard-left politics and giving him words with teeth and bite.

  Weill asserted his musical personality not just in the large structures that contained his “hits” but in the interstices of the songs themselves. Consider the “Alabama-Song,” from Mahagonny Songspiel, the first collaboration between Weill and the firm of Brecht. The title, an Americanization of the old German genre of the popular Singspiel, signals the creators’ intentions to appropriate modern pop, and the lyrics, by Hauptmann, are couched in a delightfully eccentric version of the English language: “Oh show us the way to the next whisky bar / Oh don’t ask why, oh don’t ask why.” A steady rhythm chugs under the almost entirely monosyllabic text, but subtle irregularities complicate the song’s progress. The vocal line keeps plunking down a minor third, and then drops a minor third again, like a drunk whose legs buckle under him as he staggers forward. Extraneous notes creep into what seems to be a C-minor key, and by the seventh bar (“Oh don’t ask why”) the harmony has tilted across the tritone into the area of F-sharp before veering back again. The chorus—“Oh! Moon of Alabama”—comes as a relief, its arching tune shaking off the churlishness of the verse. But one of the inner voices descends by half steps, like the chromatic bass of a Renaissance lament, and a bare fifth drones dully and menacingly in the bass. Berlinish world-weariness is woven into the fabric of the score.

  Mahagonny Songspiel had its first performance at Hindemith’s Baden-Baden Festival in 1927, where it was an instant smash. At the party after the performance, Lenya felt a huge hand on her shoulder and turned to see the looming figure of Otto Klemperer, who grinned and sang a line from the “Benares Song”: “Is here no telephone?” Everyone in the bar joined in. Thrilled at the impact that this spontaneous little work had made on the new-music elite, Weill and Brecht decided to create an evening-length opera based on the Mahagonny material; this would become Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

  Before that project came to fruition, however, composer and playwright took a detour into the criminal underworld of eighteenth-century London. And in the process they escaped the paradox that had encircled the jazzy, poppy ventures of Paris composers, as well as Leo Kestenberg’s state-funded modernist theater; they produced “art for the people” that the people heard and liked.

  The Threepenny Opera

  Brecht loved outlaws, thugs, men of no principles. In his adolescence, he idolized the turn-of-the-century Austrian playwright Frank Wedekind, who shocked Vienna with his scabrous, criminal appearance—“ugly, brutal, dangerous, with close-cropped red hair,” in Brecht’s words. Brecht had his hair shorn in the same style and, like Wedekind, took to strumming on a guitar during poetry recitations.

  How Brecht’s infatuation with antisocial hooligans can be reconciled with the strict Marxist doctrine that the writer adopted after 1926 is something that scholars have long struggled to comprehend. In a 1930 article, Walter Benjamin proposed that Brecht’s thugs should be understood as promis
ing material for revolutionary transformation, and used a Faustian metaphor to describe the hoped-for process: “Just as Wagner [Doctor Faust’s assistant] produced a homunculus in a test tube from a magic brew, Brecht hopes to produce the revolutionary in a test tube from a mixture of poverty and nastiness.” But Brecht seemed to relish the nastiness more than the promise of socialist redemption to follow.

  Macheath, a.k.a. Mackie, the antihero of The Threepenny Opera, is the nastiest of Brecht’s homunculi. He is based on the character of Captain Macheath in John Gay’s eighteenth-century ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera, which served as the main source for Brecht and Hauptmann’s libretto. In the original, Macheath is a master criminal with a dashing style who stands in metaphorically for the corrupt politicians of Gay’s time. Benjamin, in a later essay on The Threepenny Opera and its sources, observed how “intimately the countermorality of beggars and rogues is intertwined with the cant of the official morality.” Brecht and Weill’s Macheath is at once more charming and more menacing than Gay’s, mainly because of the musical number that introduces him: “Die Moritat vom Mackie Messer,” otherwise known as “Mack the Knife.” This most famous of Weimar songs takes the form of a “murder ballad,” a catalog of killings. Macheath is revealed not merely as a high-living highwayman but as an apparent psychopath who kills as much for pleasure as for financial gain. Schmul Meier has disappeared, along with many rich men; Jenny Towler is found with a knife in her breast; seven children die in a great fire in Soho; a young girl is raped.

  Weimar culture exhibited an unhealthy fixation on the figure of the serial or sexual killer. The German press gave comprehensive coverage to such homicidal lunatics as Georg Karl Grossmann, the “Bluebeard of the Silesian Railway”; Karl Denke, the “Monster of Münsterberg”; Fritz Haarmann, the boy killer of Hannover; and Peter Kürten, the “Vampire of Düsseldorf.” The artists George Grosz and Otto Dix depicted the bloody corpses of prostitutes in pitiless fashion; Grosz went so far as to have himself photographed acting out the crimes of Jack the Ripper (also a character in Wedekind’s prewar play Pandora’s Box). Peter Lorre portrayed a child killer in Fritz Lang’s film M. Macheath has something in common with all these bloodthirsty types. At the same time, he fits the profile of the detective-story archcriminal, a figure like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty and Lang’s Dr. Mabuse—and the Weimar fascination with masterminds is also unsettling in retrospect, given how Hitler would blame everything on the hidden machinations of the Jews. In one way or another, Macheath seems to be the agent of all that is insoluble and unspeakable behind the scenes of the Western city.