by Alex Ross
Berg dutifully took up twelve-note composition, although his use of it was quirky, to say the least. In a letter to Adorno he brazenly announced that what interested him most about Schoenberg’s method was its capacity to generate new kinds of tonality. For example, the row for the first movement of the Lyric Suite—the work that spellbound Gershwin—splits into white-key notes (from the scale of C major) and black-key notes (from F-sharp major). This arrangement almost guarantees a resurgence of turn-of-the-century harmony in the vein of Strauss and Mahler. Because of the rapid rotation of pitches, no chord can stay in place for long: thus, late-Romantic harmony becomes a flickering mirage.
In a way, twelve-tone composition gave Berg the best of both worlds. It imposed discipline on an unruly spirit, and, at the same time, it allowed for the smuggling in of forbidden pleasures. The game reached its zenith in the Violin Concerto, which Berg wrote in the summer of 1935, as a memorial for Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius’s daughter, Manon. The main tone row allows not only the usual tonal allusions but a living fragment of the music of the past—the first notes of Bach’s chorale “Es ist genug.” The work ends in unambiguous B-flat major, with the violin soaring toward a stratospheric G and the harp strumming sympathetically. It sounds like nothing so much as the first chords of Debussy’s Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun.”
Berg’s works of the twenties are double layered in another sense: they allude to the latest twists in the composer’s always complex emotional life. The Lyric Suite makes coded references to Berg’s hopeless affair with a woman named Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, who is represented in the work by the notes B and F (H and F in German notation). Those notes and their related triads can be found all over Berg’s later works. A psychoanalyst might say that such romantic skulduggery was the unsuccessful self-sabotage of a fundamentally innocent, isolated nature. Berg was unfaithful to his wife in the same sense that he was unfaithful to Schoenberg: he followed the letter but sinned in spirit. Helene Berg knew of the situation. After her husband’s death she wrote to Alma, “Alban invented an excuse to keep his poetic passion within those boundaries which he himself desired. He himself constructed obstacles and thereby created the romanticism which he required.” These words apply equally well to Berg’s manipulation of the twelve-note method.
“Hereinspaziert! Step right up, lively ladies and distinguished gentlemen, into the menagerie.” Lulu opens with an allegorical Prologue, in which an animal trainer tries to entice passersby into his circus act. The most captivating creature in the menagerie turns out to be Lulu, whom the trainer is carrying on his back. His bid for the audience’s attention is typical 1920s stagecraft: think of Cocteau’s Speaker in Oedipus Rex (“Spectateurs!”), or the alienating announcers in Brecht, or the grimacing hosts of the Berlin cabarets.
As the curtain rises on the first act proper, Lulu is having her portrait done by a painter, who pledges his undying devotion. Her husband, a hapless doctor, walks in on the two of them, shouting, “You dogs!” He falls dead of a heart attack. By the second scene, Lulu is married to the painter, who, upon learning of various irregularities in his wife’s sexual history, elects to slash his own throat. By the end of Act I, the man in Lulu’s life is Dr. Schön, an editor, who has known her long enough to know that he should have stayed away. In Act II, Scene I, Schön makes an unexpected visit to his home in the middle of the day and finds his new wife in the company of his son Alwa, an emotionally scattered operetta composer. (As in Der ferne Klang and Jonny spielt auf, there is an autobiographical dimension to the composer character: when Alwa remarks that one could write an interesting opera about Lulu, the orchestra plays the first chords of Wozzeck.) Also in the room are an acrobat, a schoolboy, and a lesbian countess, all besotted with the woman of the hour. Schön gives her a revolver and instructs her to commit suicide. When she refuses, he prepares to do the job himself. More or less in self-defense, Lulu kills him.
We jump forward a year (here Earth Spirit gives way to Pandora’s Box). Alwa, the acrobat, and the countess have conspired to effect Lulu’s escape from prison, where she was sent for the killing of Schön. When she reappears, she gives herself to Alwa, and as they press their bodies together, she asks the immortal question “Isn’t this the couch on which your father bled to death?” Lulu still has her wits about her, but her social trajectory is heading downward. She starts off Act III in high style, consorting with her menagerie in the gaming room of a Paris salon. The illusion of glamour collapses when the acrobat and a disreputable marquis both threaten to denounce her to the police. Amid a stock-market panic, she escapes again, but, being a Wedekind character, she has no choice but to go to London to become an East End prostitute. Berg here introduces an inspired stroke of dramaturgy: the singers who portrayed Lulu’s “victims” in the first two acts return as her “customers.” The doctor becomes a mute professor. The painter becomes an African prince, who bludgeons Alwa to death. And Dr. Schön becomes Jack the Ripper. When Lulu retires with her final client, there is an awful shriek. Jack emerges, stabs the countess, and leaves. The countess sings that she will be with Lulu into eternity.
As in Wozzeck, the various acts and scenes are built around classical forms. The third act also takes in operetta, vaudeville, and jazz; ever the good student, Berg studied a how-to manual called Das Jazzbuch to get his orchestration right. There are possible echoes of Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which Berg saw in Vienna in 1932. At the same time, Lulu is, like Wozzeck, circular in design, churning through a tight configuration of tone rows, leitmotifs, and harmonic relationships. In a way, it is a gigantic palindrome, the midpoint of which is the interlude that ties together Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Borrowing a trick from Weill’s Royal Palace, Berg calls for the showing of a short silent film, illustrating Lulu’s trial, escapades in prison, and escape. Right in the middle of the interlude, the music literally begins running in reverse.
From then on, the opera is saturated in déjà vu. Motifs, passages, even entire sections are repeated from earlier parts of the opera. Adding to the uncanny atmosphere is the fact that most of the motifs relate to a single twelve-note row. As in the Lyric Suite, the master row carries tonal implications, dividing into white-key and black-key areas that correspond to C major and F-sharp major. Indeed, sketchbooks reveal that Berg looked at his rows as funds for keys, noting the triads that could be extracted from each.
Wozzeck plays like a film by Sergei Eisenstein or Orson Welles, its musical images running together in a virtuoso montage. Lulu, by contrast, brings to mind a coolly observed social satire by Jean Renoir or Stanley Kubrick, the sort of film in which the camera dissects the complexities of human relations in gliding movements. Opera’s camera can pass in and out of souls, and when it looks into the hearts of the people of Lulu the effect is almost overwhelming. The most powerful epiphany comes in the music that expresses the impossible love of Dr. Schön and Lulu. Schön is the one man in Lulu’s life for whom she has any sort of reciprocal feeling; the floodgates of emotion open when she speaks the words “If I belong to one man in this world, then I belong to you.” The grandiose leaps of Dr. Schön’s series, strongly implying D-flat major, define the initial shape of the theme. But from the third bar on, Schön’s and Lulu’s series unfold simultaneously—Lulu’s in a rapid stream, Schön’s at a more deliberate pace. The result is a supersaturated harmony that feels like a fifty-bar Mahler theme compressed into minimum space.
Whenever the theme of Lulu and Dr. Schön reappears, it dramatizes a new stage in the plunge of the characters’ fortunes. It is bellowed out at the end of Act I, as Schön, having witnessed the painter’s end, realizes that he is next in line: “Now comes the execution!” By then, the theme’s dreaming grandeur is gone; Schön’s characteristic upward leap is undermined by the sudden immobility of the harmony beneath him. The theme is heard again after Schön’s death, when Lulu repeats that he was the only man she ever loved. Beneath the sentimental phrase is a disquieting subtext: Lu
lu has not only killed Schön but subsumed him. Berg provides a musical metaphor for this process of depersonalization: in Schön’s last moments the lovers’ two rows are again heard in tandem, now arranged so that we can clearly hear how the notes of the one come from repeating cycles of the other. As Schön gasps, “Oh God, oh God,” Lulu’s row plays one more time, alone. The man no longer has a self.
Schön’s chilly demise is nothing next to the soul-freezing mood that descends when Jack the Ripper enters. The most disturbing thing about the scene is that, in keeping with the repetitive structure of the opera, the Schön-Lulu theme plays in the orchestra as Lulu and Jack bicker over the evening’s price. What does it mean, to have such unabashedly romantic music unfurling as the soundtrack to an act of prostitution that leads to murder? Perhaps Berg is suggesting, in a faintly positive vein, that sympathy and ardor live on even amid total degradation. Or perhaps he is perpetuating the Lustmord chic of the Weimar era, the obsessive focus on sexual killings and other revolting acts. That magnificent theme out of Mahler and Strauss is unmasked as the love song of Jack the Ripper. To quote Otto Weininger, whom Berg read so intensely, love is murder.
When Lulu is killed, the orchestra plays a monstrous chord of twelve tones. It is built up out of fourths and fifths, not unlike the chords that underpin the Doctor’s aria in Wozzeck (“Oh my theory! Oh my fame!”). There, twelve-note harmony symbolized social cruelty; here, Jack the Ripper may represent, per Kraus’s lecture of 1905, the collected malevolence of the male species. The death chord is a prolonged assault on the senses, overkill in every way. In contrast, though, to Wedekind, who could be accused of reveling in the role of Jack the Ripper, Berg’s music has the effect of putting us in Lulu’s place: the chord falls with terrible swiftness, stabbing at our ears. This is in keeping with the composer’s nature. Many witnesses noted his exceptional ability to register the pain of other people. “I always had the impression,” Schoenberg said after Berg’s death, “that he had experienced beforehand what people close to him were going through, as though he had already suffered with them when they were suffering, so that when they came to tell him of it it did not catch him unawares but rather on the contrary reopened old wounds. Wounds that he had already inflicted on himself by his powerful sympathy.”
Countess Geschwitz has the last word: “Lulu! My angel! Show yourself one more time! I am near you! I am always near! Into eternity!” In delivering this eulogy, she picks up a lyrical fragment from the debris of the dissonant detonation. As the curtain comes down, the implacable twelve-tone machinery takes over: three trombones play three fateful chords, taken respectively from Dr. Schön’s, Alwa’s, and the countess’s rows. The last chord is an ambiguous entity, a chord of nowhere. It is the same chord that sounds in Wozzeck as Marie’s life ebbs away. Berg called it his chord of waiting, of expectation. Every time it is played, it rotates in the air, searching for the music that will complete it.
In the climactic scene of Doctor Faustus, Adrian Leverkühn stands in front of a group of friends, who are expecting him to demonstrate his final work, The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus. Speaking in medieval dialect, he proceeds to confess his pact with the devil. Only a few people remain in the room when he finally begins to play. Serenus Zeitblom, the composer’s long-suffering Boswell, reports: “We saw tears trickle down his cheeks and fall on the keys, which, though wet, were now struck in a strongly dissonant chord. At the same time he opened his mouth as if to sing, but from between his lips there emerged only a wail that still rings in my ears.” It is like Lulu’s death shriek, now issuing from the artist’s throat.
Thomas Mann often thought of Berg while he worked on his musical novel. He attended the 1937 premiere of Lulu in Zurich—where the first two acts were performed together with the orchestral music of the final scene—and he probably had the opera’s ending in mind when he wrote of Leverkühn’s descent into madness. Also, Mann apparently based his account of the final bars of The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus on Adorno’s description of the Lyric Suite. “One instrument after another falls silent,” Adorno had written. “The viola alone remains, but it is not even allowed to expire, to die. It must play for ever; except that we can no longer hear it.” Mann converted those sentences into one of the most affecting passages in twentieth-century literature, in which the icy-minded composer seems finally to grasp a sliver of hope: “One instrumental group after the other steps back, and what remains as the work fades away is the high G of a cello, the final word, the final sound, floating off, slowly vanishing in a pianissimo fermata. Then nothing more. Silence and night. But the tone, which is no more, for which, as it hangs there vibrating in the silence, only the soul still listens, and which was the dying note of sorrow—is no longer that, its meaning changes, it stands as a light in the night.”
Part II
1933–1945
Along the legendary embankment
The real—not the calendar—
Twentieth Century draws near.
—ANNA AKHMATOVA, POEM WITHOUT A HERO
7
THE ART OF FEAR
Music in Stalin’s Russia
On January 26, 1936, Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik), went to the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow for a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The Soviet dictator often attended opera and ballet at the Bolshoi, where he made a show of being inconspicuous; he preferred to take a seat in the back row of Box A, just before the curtain rose, and positioned himself behind a small curtain, which concealed him from the audience without obstructing his view of the stage. Phalanxes of security and a general heightening of tension would signal to experienced observers that Stalin was in the hall. On this night, Shostakovich, the twenty-nine-year-old star of Soviet composition, had been officially instructed to attend. He sat facing Box A. Visible in front were Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Andrei Zhdanov, all of them members or candidate members of the Politburo. According to one account, they were laughing, talking among themselves, and otherwise enjoying their proximity to the man behind the curtain.
Stalin had lately taken an interest in Soviet opera. On January 17 he had seen Ivan Dzerzhinsky’s The Quiet Don, and liked it enough to summon the composer to his box for an interview, commenting that Soviet opera should “make use of all the latest devices of musical techniques, but its idiom should be close to the masses, clear and accessible.” Lady Macbeth, the tale of a vaguely Lulu-like Russian housewife who leaves a string of bodies in her wake, did not meet these somewhat ambiguous specifications. Stalin left the hall either before or during the final act, taking with him Comrades Molotov, Mikoyan, and Zhdanov. Shostakovich confided to his friend Ivan Sollertinsky that he, too, had been hoping to receive an invitation to Box A. Despite vigorous applause from the audience, the composer left feeling “sick at heart,” and he remained so as he boarded a train for the northern city of Arkhangel’sk, where he was scheduled to perform.
Two days later, one of the great nightmares of twentieth-century cultural history began riding down on the nervous young composer. Pravda, the official Communist Party newspaper, printed an editorial with the headline “Muddle Instead of Music,” in which Lady Macbeth was condemned as an artistically obscure and morally obscene work. “From the first moment of the opera,” the anonymous author wrote, “the listener is flabbergasted by the deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds.” Shostakovich was said to be playing a game that “may end very badly.” The last phrase was chilling. Stalin’s Terror was imminent, and Soviet citizens were about to discover, if they did not know already, what a bad end might mean. Some would be pilloried and executed as enemies of the people, some would be arrested and killed in secret, some would be sent to the gulags, some would simply disappear. Shostakovich never shook off the pall of fear that those six hundred words in Pravda cast on him.
A few weeks before “Muddle Instead of Music” was published, a familiar face
appeared again in Moscow. Sergei Prokofiev, who had been living outside Russia since 1918, arrived with his wife, Lina, to celebrate New Year’s Eve. According to Harlow Robinson’s biography, Prokofiev attended a party at the Moscow Art Theatre and remained there until five in the morning. Since 1927, the former enfant terrible of Russian music had returned many times to his native land; now he decided to live in Moscow full-time. He was well aware that Soviet artists were subject to censorship, but he chose to think that such restrictions would not apply to him. He was, at this time, forty-four years old, at the height of his powers and in good health. He, too, would endure a long string of humiliations, and was not granted the satisfaction of outliving Stalin. In a twist that would seem too heavy-handed in a novel, Prokofiev died on March 5, 1953, about fifty minutes before Stalin breathed his last.
The period from the mid-thirties onward marked the onset of the most warped and tragic phase in twentieth-century music: the total politicizing of the art by totalitarian means. On the eve of the Second World War, dictators had manipulated popular resentment and media spectacle to take control of half of Europe. Hitler in Germany and Austria, Mussolini in Italy, Horthy in Hungary, and Franco in Spain. In the Soviet Union, Stalin refined Lenin’s revolutionary dictatorship into an omnipotent machine, relying on a cult of personality, rigid control of the media, and an army of secret police. In America, Franklin D. Roosevelt was granted extraordinary executive powers to counter the ravages of the Depression, leading conservatives to fear an erosion of constitutional process, particularly when federal arts programs were harnessed to political purposes. In Germany, Hitler forged the most unholy alliance of art and politics that the world had ever seen.