by Alex Ross
Weill encased Brecht’s hymn to Macheath in insidiously hummable music. A simple tune circles around and around, coming to rest repeatedly on an added-sixth chord—a C-major triad plus the note A—which was a favorite device of Debussy. That “sweetened” harmony would become a standard device in jazz, but there is something desperate and bedraggled about Weill’s use of it here. In the first verse, the main chord is wheezed out on a solo harmonium; thumping bass notes give the melody heavy feet; and, throughout, the almost obsessive stress on the note A tends to darken rather than lighten the mood, nudging the music toward the minor mode. “Mack the Knife” is a song chained to one chord. It’s a pop tune with no exit.
Everything about The Threepenny Opera is ambiguous; in the words of the scholar Stephen Hinton, it practices a “style of willful and relentless equivocation on absolutely every level.” The ambiguity reaches down to the fundamental level of musical identity: like Jerome Kern’s Show Boat, which opened the previous year, and like Gershwin’s pre-Porgy musicals, Threepenny sits on the border between classical and popular genres, combining “hit” numbers with modernistic textures and socially critical themes. Weill’s most ingenious move was to score his breakthrough theater piece not for a symphony orchestra but for a sleek, mutable band of seven musicians, who were asked to play no fewer than twenty-three different instruments. (The drummer, for example, plays second trumpet for a couple of numbers, and the banjo player at one point picks up the cello.) And, by asking his performers to take on so many roles, Weill guarantees that the playing will have, in place of soulless professional expertise, a scrappy, seat-of-the-pants energy.
The singers were liberated, too. Just as John W. Bubbles and other performers were allowed to improvise their way through parts of Porgy and Bess, Lenya and the rest of the Threepenny cast had the opportunity to freight Weill’s deceptively simple vocal lines with varying degrees of knowingness, sarcasm, ennui, and despair. That freedom of expression became a performing tradition that continues to evolve today.
In the 1950s, “Mack the Knife” began a second life as an American pop standard, and new variations were rung on the tune. When Louis Armstrong sang it, he warmed up Brecht’s hard-bitten lyrics with the husky humanity of his voice, and jokingly added Lenya’s name to the list of Mackie’s victims: “Sukey Tawdry, Jenny Diver / Lotte Lenya, sweet Lucy Brown.” Frank Sinatra turned the song into a display of Rat Pack braggadocio: “When I tell you all about Mack the Knife, babe / It’s an offer you can never refuse.” Weill’s song thus became a showbiz tour de force, although its sting remained. Armstrong and Sinatra, both children of the streets, understood what the text was about: Armstrong said that Mack the Knife reminded him of characters he had encountered in New Orleans, while Sinatra knowingly grafted on a line from Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films, which exposed American politicians as gangsters of a higher order.
Weill’s influence did not end there. In 1962 Lenya appeared in the revue Brecht on Brecht at the Theater de Lys in New York’s Greenwich Village. A young Minnesota-born singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan came to see the show and found himself mesmerized by Lenya’s singing of “Pirate Jenny,” in which a prostitute fantasizes revenge on the men who exploit her. “The audience was the ‘gentlemen’ in the song,” Dylan wrote in his autobiography, Chronicles. “It was their beds she was making up…It wasn’t a protest or topical song and there was no love of people in it.” What especially intrigued Dylan was the cryptic repetition of the chorus—“And a ship with eight sails and fifty cannon…” The line reminded him of the foghorns on Lake Superior, next to his childhood home in Duluth: “Even though you couldn’t see the ships through the fog, you knew they were there by the heavy outbursts of thunder that blasted like Beethoven’s Fifth—two low notes, the first one long and deep like a bassoon.”
In the spirit of Brecht and Weill, Dylan proceeded to carve his own Gestus-like phrases into the minds of late-twentieth-century listeners: “The answer is blowin’ in the wind,” “A hard rain’s a-gonna fall,” “The times they are a-changin’.” The last was a direct quotation from one of Brecht’s lyrics for Hanns Eisler. The spirit of Berlin played on.
Twelve-Tone Music
In October 1928, while The Threepenny Opera was still enjoying its first run, Arnold Schoenberg, resident in Berlin since 1926, began work on a libretto for an opera titled Moses und Aron. Like Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Moses would display new religious conviction in a morally uncentered time. In the face of anti-Semitism, Schoenberg was rediscovering his Jewish roots, and, in telling of Moses’s struggle to bring the Word of God to his recalcitrant people, he aligned himself with the prophetic tradition. By the time Hitler came to power, Schoenberg had completed the second act, which features the dance around the golden calf—that orgy of idol worship in which the people indulge themselves while Moses goes up the mountain to receive the Tables of the Law. The scene has many sardonic echoes of twenties styles—some stamping Stravinskyan cross-rhythms here, some bustling Hindemithian counterpoint there, a few woeful Weill-like tunes. Schoenberg had been inveighing against Weimar culture in his prose writings, and there is a congruence between those jeremiads and Moses’s thunderings in Act III of the libretto: “You have betrayed God to the gods, the idea to images, this chosen folk to others, the extraordinary to the commonplace.”
Schoenberg had unveiled his own new law in 1923, in the form of the “method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another.” Pupils and friends were summoned to his house in Mödling, outside Vienna, to hear news of the breakthrough. Schoenberg had hit on the notion of twelve-tone music after enduring an extended period of creative confusion. The “extreme emotionality” of atonal composition, in his own words, had exhausted him, and he needed a less fraught, more orderly way of working. From 1912 to 1915 he had labored on a choral symphony, which was to have depicted modern man’s struggle to find a realistic form of faith. One section was titled “The bourgeois God does not suffice.” The symphony never made it past the sketching stage, but some of its ideas passed into another project, the oratorio Jacob’s Ladder. This, too, was never finished, but an impressive beginning was made. At the outset, Archangel Gabriel gives direction to the hapless denizens of modernity: “Whether right or left, forward or backward, uphill or downhill—one must go on, without asking what lies ahead or behind.” This titanic utterance is backed up by an equally titanic prelude in which a six-note ostinato grinds beneath a ladderlike ascending sequence of six other notes, making up a total of twelve.
Twelve is the number of steps it takes to go from middle C on a piano to the next C above or below. Twelve consecutive notes make up what is called the chromatic scale, so named because it suggests all the colors of a spectrum. Over the course of the nineteenth century, composers made increasingly free use of the complete set of chromatic notes, depending on it to create a turbulent, even devilish atmosphere. Liszt’s Faust Symphony begins with a nonrepeating series of twelve, an emblem of Faust’s ceaseless striving after knowledge. Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra employs a twelve-tone theme to mock the workings of the scientific mind. Salome and Elektra have several such episodes of chromatic saturation. Likewise, the first atonal works by Schoenberg and his students tend to run through the set of twelve in a few bars. Twelve-tone writing simply made official the tendency to “run the gamut.”
A particular arrangement of twelve notes is called a series or row. The idea is not to consider the row a theme in itself but to employ it as a kind of fund of notes, or, more precisely, of relationships among notes, or intervals. Schoenberg added some concepts from the old art of counterpoint to maximize the possibilities of thematic play. The composer can run the row in retrograde (go backward from the last note). Or he can use an inversion (turn it upside down). For example, if the original begins by moving up three half steps and down two, the retrograde row will end with that same pattern in reverse, while the inverted row begins by going down three half steps
and up two. The retrograde inversion goes back to front and upside down. The composer can also transpose the row by moving it up or down the scale. All told, the chromatic scale contains a huge number of permutations—to be exact, 479,001,600, the factorial of 12.
The great discovery made Schoenberg happy. Through the early and mid-twenties he composed with a fluency that he had not experienced since 1909. A set of Five Pieces and a Suite for piano, a Serenade, a Wind Quintet, a Septet-Suite, and a set of Variations for Orchestra appeared in quick succession. Nearly all of Schoenberg’s early twelve-tone works are couched in established forms, usually from the Baroque and Classical periods. Formal rules are observed, dance rhythms replicated, ideas clearly spelled out and rigorously developed. Schoenberg has almost entirely abandoned the mystical mind-set of his early atonal period, when he wished to dissolve form and leap into the unknown.
Along the way, a peculiar thing happens: the tonal building blocks that Schoenberg formerly disavowed begin popping up on occasion. One may even find that rootless cosmopolitan, the diminished seventh: the Variations starts with one. The Swiss composer Frank Martin later noted that the twelve-tone idea never forbids the use of tonal materials; in fact, one must manipulate the system to avoid producing them. Schoenberg did not always make the correction: the groundbreaking twelve-note sequence in Jacob’s Ladder culminates in a C-sharp-major triad in the horns, followed by a hint of G—harmonies that follow logically from the intervals contained in the opening corkscrew figure.
Many of Schoenberg’s pupils loyally adopted the new method. Anton Webern, it turned out, had been tinkering with his own form of twelve-tone writing for some time; as far back as 1911, while working on his Bagatelles for String Quartet, he had made a chart of the twelve chromatic notes and crossed them off one by one as he composed. “When all twelve notes have gone by,” he would tell himself, “the piece is over.” In a manuscript dated 1922, some months before the ceremonial unveiling of dodecaphony in Mödling, Webern copied out rows in retrograde and inversion. Schoenberg later complained that his former student had “used twelve tones in some of his compositions—without telling me.”
Webern’s twelve-tone music is of a piece with his atonal music, with its spare construction and haiku strokes. In 1927 he completed his first extended instrumental piece in the new medium, the word “extended” being understood in a relative sense; the String Trio, the product of nine months’ labor, lasts nine minutes. Its second and final movement contains an old-fashioned repeat sign, in a seeming nod toward neoclassical practice; yet the gestures are so evanescent that the listener may have a hard time noticing when the repeat commences. A ten-minute Symphony followed in 1928, and, in 1930, the Quartet for violin, clarinet, tenor saxophone, and piano (this is the work for which Webern demanded “sex appeal,” to Berg’s amusement). The composer kept whittling down his materials, employing twelve-tone rows that were really elaborations of smaller, three-note segments. Works of later years, notably the Piano Variations of 1936, have the abstract beauty of ice crystals or snowflakes, their structures made up of symmetrical patterns. Joseph Auner points out that there was an element of nature-mysticism to Webern’s method. On a hiking trip in 1930 the composer wrote ecstatically of the experience of being lost in a snowstorm, of walking into a whiteness that was like a “completely undifferentiated screen.” His music offered a similar experience for the ears.
In the mad year of hyperinflation, Schoenberg offered a kind of stabilization—the conversion of a chaotic musical marketplace to a planned economy. There was a nationalistic thrust, too, to Schoenberg’s return to order; at a time when Russian, French, and American composers were seizing headlines with their Jazz Age antics, Schoenberg was reasserting the primacy of Austro-German composition, its ancient arts of counterpoint and thematic development. Supposedly, he once declared that he had ensured the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years. In the end, however, twelve-tone writing turned out to be an impeccably cosmopolitan method, almost a lingua franca in the post–World War II period. Already, in the late twenties and early thirties, scattered young composers were feeling the pull of Schoenberg’s intervallic games: Nikos Skalkottas in Greece, Luigi Dallapiccola in Italy, Roberto Gerhard in Spain, Fartein Valen in Norway, and young Milton Babbitt of Jackson, Mississippi.
Despite the occasional scandal—a Berlin Philharmonic audience registered its unhappiness when Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted the Variations for Orchestra in 1928—the late twenties were the happiest years of Schoenberg’s life. He felt vindicated by the esteem that the appointment at the Prussian Academy of Arts bestowed. “Recognition does one good,” he wrote to Leo Kestenberg. There was unprecedented stability in his personal life; in 1923, the unfaithful Mathilde had died after a long illness, and less than a year later Schoenberg married Gertrud Kolisch, the daughter of a Viennese doctor and the sister of the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, whose Kolisch Quartet would do much to advance Schoenberg’s cause.
Yet the cultural antics of the Weimar era irritated the composer no end. “Art is from the outset naturally not for the people,” he wrote in 1928. “But one wants to force it to be. Everyone is supposed to have their say. For the new bliss consists of the right to speak: free speech! Oh God!” He derided his more faddish colleagues variously as window dressers, restaurateurs, and purveyors of greaseproof paper and neckties. The satirical song cycle Three Satires, from 1925–26, took potshots at Stravinsky:
But who’s this beating the drum?
Why, it’s little Modernsky!
He’s had his hair cut in an old-fashioned queue,
And it looks quite nice!
Like real false hair!
Like a wig!
Just like (or so little Modernsky likes to think)
Just like Papa Bach!
In an essayistic introduction to the Satires, Schoenberg widened his attack to include folkloristic composers, who “want to apply to the naturally primitive ideas of folk music a technique that only suits a complicated way of thinking” (this would presumably be Bartók), and certain “middle road” composers who mingle dissonance and tonality (Krenek, possibly Berg). In another essay from 1926, Schoenberg wrote, “Many modern composers believe they are writing tonally if they occasionally introduce a major or minor triad, or a cadence-like turn of phrase, into a series of harmonies that lack, and must lack, any terms of reference.” He added cryptically: “They betray their God, but remain on good terms with those who call themselves His attorneys.” Here is a pre-echo of the Moses libretto: “You have betrayed God to the gods…”
Curiously, even as Schoenberg vented against the popular styles of the day, he not so subtly assimilated them in his music. The Serenade, for example, originally had movements titled “Jo-Jo-Foxtrot,” “Film Dva,” and “Tenn Ski.” There is a sort of jazz episode, or at least a burst of syncopation, in the eighth of the orchestral Variations. The comic opera From Today Until Tomorrow, undertaken in the wake of The Threepenny Opera, portrays an agitated married couple in a modern setting, replete with ringing telephone, ringing doorbell, three saxophones, and a guitar. The couple is trying to decide whether to become “up-to-date” by entering into an open marriage. The wife racily contemplates taking an array of lovers, “one after the other or two at the same time, but just not a system!” In the end, husband and wife resolve their differences, spurn modernity, and reaffirm traditional roles. So sure was Schoenberg of the opera’s success that he had it published at his own expense, figuring that he could reap all the profits when it became a runaway hit. For all its spiky charms, it did not.
In a way, Schoenberg’s resentment of Weimar’s young composers was a personal affair. As the Satires said, it was a question of betrayal. Those who had formerly embraced atonality as the one true path were being tempted in more outwardly fashionable directions. Krenek ventured to criticize a certain unnamed brand of contemporary music as “the self-gratification of an individual who sits in his studio and invents rules accord
ing to which he then writes down his notes.” Schoenberg took offense at this masturbatory metaphor and snapped in an unpublished commentary that Krenek “wishes for only whores as listeners.” Eventually, Krenek came back to the fold: at the beginning of the thirties, he abandoned the jazz airs of Jonny spielt auf and took up twelve-tone writing, discovering a gritty new voice in his historical opera Charles V.
Hanns Eisler, too, disavowed his teacher’s methods. By 1926, he could no longer reconcile modernist complexity with his leftist politics, as he said in a characteristically blunt letter to Schoenberg: “Modern music bores me, it does not interest me, I hate much of it and even despise it. I will in fact have nothing to do with the ‘modern.’ If possible I try to avoid hearing it and reading it.” Schoenberg accused Eisler of committing “treason”—not so much because he wished to go his own way as because he insisted all along that he remained loyal to Schoenberg’s cause.