by Alex Ross
The most infuriating apostasy was that of Kurt Weill. In this case, there could be no question of personal disloyalty, since the two men barely knew each other. Perhaps it was the similarities in their backgrounds—both were descended from synagogue cantors—that prompted Schoenberg to look on Weill as something of a prodigal son, or, closer to the allegory of Moses und Aron, as a wayward younger brother.
The Schoenberg-Weill dispute began in October 1927, when Weill wrote an article drawing a pointed contrast between those composers “who, filled with disdain for the public, work toward the solution of aesthetic problems as if behind closed doors” and those who “open up a connection with any kind of public.” The following year Weill called on composers to end all elitist pursuits and start “from scratch.” Schoenberg got hold of the second article and annotated it furiously. Where Weill wrote, “You want to hear music you can understand without special explanations,” Schoenberg put an “X” next to the word “understand.” And where Weill imagined a theater in which “operatic figures become once again living human beings who speak a language understandable by all,” Schoenberg put a wavy line under “understandable.” His conclusion was harsh: “In the end, those communally oriented artists will have addressed their idiocies only to each other.” He began to take pride in the fact that his music attracted so few listeners. When, in 1930, he was asked to describe his public, he said, “I do not believe I have one.”
The textual evidence suggests that Schoenberg’s critique of Weill carried over into Moses und Aron. In the final scene of Act II of the opera the prophet argues with his brother Aron—Schoenberg having changed Aaron to Aron in order to avoid an unlucky thirteen-letter title, or so the legend goes—over whether and how God should be represented. Aron says his mission is to “make [Moses] understandable to the people in their own accustomed way.” He uses the same word—“verständlich”—that Schoenberg had underlined skeptically in Weill’s essay. And as Aron sings of his urge to reach out to all the people the music keeps slipping into quasi-tonal patterns. Schoenberg probably did not know Weill’s music well enough to imitate it, but this may be The Threepenny Opera as he heard it in his head. Moses, reciting nonmelodious Sprechstimme over strict atonal harmonies, declares his loyalty to the “unrepresentable,” the “inexpressible.”
Weimar polemics aside, Moses stands as Schoenberg’s most awesome achievement. It is a profound meditation on faith and doubt, the difficulty of the language commensurate with the difficulty of the subject; no doubt the God of the Old Testament would speak through atonal hexachords. At the same time, Schoenberg’s parodies in the “Dance Around the Golden Calf” give the work a stylistic diversity that helps to sustain the ordinary operagoer’s interest. (The scene is a little like the moralizing politician’s trick of waving pornography while he condemns it.) Yet Schoenberg does not exempt himself from judgment. Moses, his alter ego, ends Act II in abject despair, crying out, “O Word, you Word that I lack!” Admittedly, this aura of frailty dissipates in Act III (never set to music), where the prophet regains his confidence and wreaks vengeance on all who misunderstood him. Aron falls dead. The people cannot be saved, there is no promised land. Moses is destined to roam the desert in the company of his soldier-acolytes. “In the desert,” he tells them, “you shall be invincible.”
Battle Music
In the summer of 1929, Gustav Stresemann, the foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, attended a performance by the La Scala opera company of Milan. The event was part of an extraordinary festival of music, dance, and theater involving all the leading German musicians (Strauss, Furtwängler, Klemperer, and so on) as well as Arturo Toscanini’s Italian company and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. It turned out to be Berlin’s last hour of cultural glory before the decline and fall. Many who bought tickets for that La Scala gala were worried to see Stresemann in poor health; they knew that he was almost single-handedly providing a semblance of a steady center in German politics. When he died that October, German intellectuals had a sinking feeling. “It’s the beginning of the end,” the author Bruno Frank said to Klaus Mann. That same month the American stock-market crash brought on a worldwide depression, putting a quick end to “relative stabilization” and thus to the merrymaking spirit of what Germans still call the “Golden Twenties.”
German music entered a new period of sobriety. Many young composers abandoned notions of entertaining a mass public and instead began writing music of aggressively political character, in anticipation of a coming battle with the right.
Far-left musical agitation had been stirring since the first days of the republic. One early locus of activity was the Novembergruppe, a cross-disciplinary artistic organization that took its name from Liebknecht’s aborted revolution of November 1918. At first, musical leftists hoped to use avant-garde methods to overthrow bourgeois values. Stefan Wolpe, one of very few Berlin-in-the-twenties luminaries who were actually from the city, became the prime musical mover of the Novembergruppe movement; on one occasion he organized a kind of happening at which eight phonographs played recordings of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at different speeds. Even fellow Novembergruppists were aghast at Wolpe’s First Piano Sonata, which had its premiere at a 1927 evening of “Stationary Music.” Among the most extreme works of the time, it mixed whiplash mechanical gestures with serpentine, gamelan-like patterns on the white keys of the piano. Later, Wolpe would write an absurdist Zeitoper titled Zeus und Elida, in which the god of the Greeks tries to rape Europa in the middle of a jazz-filled Potsdamer Platz. A narrator tells the audience to think of Zeus as Hitler. Had the opera been performed, it would have been one of very few musical works of the period to attack Hitler by name.
Wolpe’s brand of avant-garde agitation failed to satisfy Hanns Eisler, who thought that composers should communicate as directly as possible with the working classes and other potential revolutionary elements. By 1928, Eisler had developed a genre that he called Kampflieder (songs of struggle), which was intended strictly for proletarian audiences and their intellectual allies. Fiercely trudging marches, usually in a minatory minor mode, and modernized Bachian chorales served to focus the emotion of the crowd. Eisler’s right-hand man was the actor-singer Ernst Busch, whose riveting voice, a blunt instrument of righteous anger, seemed to compel some decisive, brutish act on the part of the listener. Busch’s postwar recordings of Kampflieder preserve the desperate passions of the Weimar era; in Eisler’s song “Der heimliche Aufmarsch,” or “Secret Mobilization,” originally written in 1930, the singer barks out the line “The attack against the Soviet Union is a stab in the heart of the revolution” with a palpable tone of wounded pride.
Schoenberg claimed that the populists of Weimar were talking mostly to each other. Eisler, though, found a real mass following. The German Worker-Singers Union, with which he was closely associated, had 400,000 members. He and Busch would venture into halls and bars in Berlin’s working-class districts, whipping up fervor with the force of their performances; the composer drew shouts of approval whenever he banged the piano keys with a balled-up fist. Unlike other parties on the political spectrum, German Communists did not stand idle as the Nazi Party gathered strength. The problem was that they, too, were in thrall to a totalitarian ideology; Germany faced a choice between tyrannies. Eisler soon began to involve himself not only in German politics but in the Soviet cultural bureaucracy, taking a role in a Comintern (Communist International) organization called the International Music Bureau. Eisler could have been under no illusions about the nature of the emergent Stalinist regime, which tolerated no dissent or diversity of opinion. Pitilessness was in the air; sentimental humanist values would have to be sacrificed at the altar of action. In a way, German Communists were most effective against the Nazis because they shared the will to violence.
On such issues the alliance between Brecht and Weill foundered. The two were still uneasily conjoined in the summer of 1929, during that last spell of freedom. They appeared once again at the Baden-
Baden Festival, where the Mahagonny Songspiel had struck a nerve two years before. This time they presented a didactic cantata describing Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic. In the face of a looming deadline, Weill persuaded Hindemith to write several of the numbers. Hindemith was also the sole composer of Brecht’s other music-theater project of the summer, The Baden-Baden Learning Play About Acquiescence. This instantly notorious piece explored, by way of interrelated stories, the question of “whether man helps man.” In one scene a clown named Herr Schmidt complains that his limbs hurt, whereupon two other clowns tear them off his body one by one. While blood gushes from the stumps, a “Clown March” plays in the orchestra. A summary placard is held up, reading, “Better to make music than to hear it.” Hindemith found the material revolting, and reacted by moving to the aesthetic and political right during the remaining years of the Weimar Republic.
“Acquiescence”—the German word Einverständnis also implies “thinking as one”—became Brecht’s favorite leitmotif. Stephen Hinton paraphrases it as an individual’s “willingness to act in the interests of the community, even to the point of sacrificing his own life.” That idea dominated the “school opera” The Yes-Sayer, for which Weill wrote the music in early 1930. The text was adapted by Hauptmann and Brecht from the Japanese play Taniko (in an English-language version). Four young people go on a hazardous mountain journey, and when the youngest of them falls sick the others face the possibility of having to turn back. The boy agrees that the mission must go on and that he should be thrown over the side of the mountain. “With closed eyes, none guiltier than another,” the others toss the boy off the cliff.
Brecht secularizes this Buddhistic parable of self-sacrifice, thereby converting it into agitprop. The politics may be antithetical to Hitler’s, but there is the same mythologizing of the community, the same disregard for the sanctity of life. Weill may have had a more conflicted attitude—his music audibly mourns for the boy, a brief allusion to the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica sending him off with a tinge of Romantic grandeur—but the hard-heartedness at the core of the scenario overpowers any countervailing humanistic messages. The opera both begins and ends with the thought “Above all it is important to learn acquiescence.” The Yes-Sayer was performed hundreds of times in schools in Berlin and elsewhere, and it inadvertently prepared German children for a time when they would have to do the unthinkable for the sake of the Führer.
With both Weill and Hindemith proving insufficiently ruthless, Brecht finally turned to Eisler, his perfect political match. At the end of 1930 Brecht and Eisler collaborated on a supremely vicious theater piece titled Die Massnahme, or The Measures Taken, which had its premiere on the same night as Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. The scenario of The Measures Taken recalls that of The Yes-Sayer, but the pretense of literary allegory is dropped in favor of something like an instruction manual for international espionage—and it may have been directly inspired by secret assignments that Eisler’s brother, the mysterious Gerhart Eisler, apparently carried out for Soviet intelligence in China.
The plot is this: covert Communist operatives in China have in their midst a Young Comrade who compromises their mission by reaching out to the oppressed. After a string of mistakes, he is told that he must die, and he not only acquiesces in his own death but plans it. “What shall we do with your body?” the Agitators ask. “You must cast me into the lime-pit,” the Young Comrade replies. “In the interests of Communism in agreement with the progress of the proletarian masses of all lands.” Eisler responds with music of blistering directness, again using Bachian chorales to ennoble the bloodlust inherent in the material. The journalist Ludwig Bauer could have been thinking of The Measures Taken when he lamented that political fanaticism on both the right and the left was devaluing the life of the individual. “The I is disappearing,” Bauer wrote. “Individuals count only as part of the whole.”
By 1931, Brecht and Weill were hardly speaking. The divergence of their worldviews incited bitter arguments; Brecht famously shouted that he would throw this “phony Richard Strauss” down the stairs. Still, one more Brecht-Weill masterpiece had made its way into the world. Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was the culmination of everything that Weill sought in his most recent phase, and it was more his opera than Brecht’s—a many-layered entertainment, critical of social norms but unburdened by dogma. The songs of the original Mahagonny Songspiel become part of a three-act drama about the founding, heyday, and decline of a semi-American “paradise city,” otherwise known as the “city of nets.”
At the beginning of the opera, the Widow Begbick and her cronies are on the run from the law, guilty of swindling and procuration. When their truck breaks down in the middle of the desert, they decide to found a city—Brecht’s uncanny prophecy of Las Vegas. A solemn drumbeat beneath Begbick’s proud manifesto, again reminiscent of the funeral music of Beethoven’s Eroica, signals that Mahagonny is destined for a bad end. As the “Alabama-Song” plays, the sharks move in—the prostitute Jenny and her steely-eyed cohorts. Vice prospers, fortunes are made, rules laid down. Jim Mahoney, a lumberjack, realizes that “there is something lacking.” After a hurricane nearly destroys the city, he proclaims a new rule, which is that all should do as they please. A bacchanal follows, very Berlinish in its herky-jerky, every-which-way rhythm—Weill’s version of the “Dance Around the Golden Calf.” The philosophy of self-gratification has the eventual effect of ruining Jim, who is put on trial for failing to pay his bills. He is sentenced to death, over music of bone-chilling relentlessness, and Mahagonny likewise goes to its doom. The slow marching song that ends the opera is nothing short of apocalyptic, with the Beethovenian rhythm thundering on the drums and a death motif descending like Mahler’s hammer blows of fate. The libretto was widely understood as a protest against rampant capitalism, although it reads just as well as a critique of the fake utopia of the Soviet Union.
The performance history of Mahagonny dovetails with the disintegration of the Weimar Republic. The opera should have had its premiere at the Kroll, but Klemperer, losing political support, declined to perform it. (The “people’s opera” closed its doors the following year; its last new production was, appropriately, Janáček’s From the House of the Dead.) Instead, Mahagonny made its debut on March 9, 1930, in Leipzig, where right-wing agitators greeted it with a riot. Three weeks later, the last Social Democratic government dissolved, and that summer Heinrich Brüning began governing by emergency decree, delivering a fatal blow to the democratic process. Performances of Mahagonny in Essen, Oldenburg, and Dortmund were canceled. The elections of September showed the Nazis in ascendance, and the Brownshirts made their presence felt when the opera came to Frankfurt the following month. The first performance went off smoothly, but the second dissolved into bedlam. A hundred and fifty Nazis swarmed into the hall, shouting, “Deutschland erwache!” Stink bombs were thrown, fireworks set off. In a subsequent brawl, a Communist acquiesced to death by a beer stein to the skull.
Lulu
“The great retaliation has begun, the revenge of a man’s world which has the audacity to punish its own guilt.” Karl Kraus, the unforgiving satirist of Vienna, idol of Schoenberg and Berg and a hundred other modernist youths, said these words at a lecture back in May 1905. He was describing the world of Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, in which a bewitching young singer named Lulu descends from the heights of society to the depths of prostitution, meeting her death at the hands of Jack the Ripper. She is, to some extent, a grotesque caricature of the lethal female, fit for the misogynistic pages of Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character. Yet, as Kraus points out, Wedekind reserved his utmost contempt for the haute bourgeoisie, which hypocritically encourages its men to seek sexual satisfaction from prostitutes while condemning those same women as bearers of disease and degradation. If the woman is a monster, men are responsible. Lulu “became the destroyer of all,” Kraus says, “because she was destroyed by all.”
Although Berg lived his entire life in Vienna, Berlin was the scene of his greatest success—the premiere of Wozzeck, on December 14, 1925. Before that night, Berg had been an obscure member of the Schoenberg circle; afterward, he joined the ranks of the most illustrious composers of the day. Ovation upon ovation greeted him when he walked onstage at the Staatsoper on Unter den Linden. If Theodor Adorno is to be believed, Berg was upset by the response. “I was with him until late into the night,” Adorno recalled, “literally consoling him over his success. That a work conceived like Wozzeck’s apparitions in the field, a work satisfying Berg’s own standards, could please a first-night audience, was incomprehensible to him and struck him as an argument against the opera.” Schoenberg, on his side, was jealous. “Schoenberg envied Berg his successes,” Adorno observed, “while Berg envied Schoenberg his failures.”