The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  The extroverted, jazz-tinged music of the Weimar era, as embodied in The Threepenny Opera, had been condemned by the Nazis on political and racial grounds. It might have qualified as “safe” for the new Germany. By this time, though, Weill was entrenched as a composer on Broadway and uninterested in returning to Germany; his premature death in 1950 made the matter moot. Other young leftist composers who had thrived in twenties Berlin—the likes of Hanns Eisler and Stefan Wolpe—were evidently ruled out because of their Communist associations. The entire Weill-ish school of song-driven composition, whether because of its leftist leanings or because of its daring synthesis of classical and popular styles, figured little in the calculations of Music Control. Carl Orff, on the other hand, prospered, even though Carmina burana had been a hit with Goebbels. Orff misleadingly presented himself as an associate of the anti-Nazi resistance, and OMGUS gave him a clean ideological bill of health. It helped that Newell Jenkins, the local theater and music officer, had studied with Orff before the war.

  The Americans placed highest confidence in musical progressives who lacked either Nazi or Communist affiliations. Karl Amadeus Hartmann, the Munich composer who dedicated his symphonic poem Miserae to the victims of Dachau in 1935, was extolled by Music Control as “a man of the utmost integrity [who] possesses a musical outlook which is astonishingly sound and fresh for a man who has survived the nazi [sic] occupation.” Not long after the end of the war, Hartmann organized a series of Musica Viva concerts in Munich, with emphasis on “verboten” modernists. The OMGUS file dealing with Musica Viva is marked “Reorientation Project No. 1.” The material is held in a stiff gray folder that had evidently been appropriated from a Nazi filing cabinet; under the American scrawl is a watermark reading “NSDAP.”

  Alas, Munich music lovers did not flock to Hartmann’s series. John Evarts wrote, “They are extremely shy of any sort of art created in an idiom of a period later than, say, 1900.” One event drew fewer than thirty people. Carlos Moseley decided to use OMGUS money to purchase 350 tickets, which he then distributed to young musicians and composers. Thus, the American occupation was not only providing funds for the concerts but also filling the seats—an exceptionally generous form of patronage.

  The city of Darmstadt, most of which had been leveled in an incendiary bombing raid in September 1944, hosted another American-supported modern-music experiment. The music critic Wolfgang Steinecke proposed to set up a summertime institute so that young composers might familiarize themselves with music that the Nazis had banned. Steinecke persuaded the local city government to let him use the Kranichstein Hunting Castle, a picturesque pile outside of town. The American authorities warmly backed the venture, which was dubbed the International Summer Courses for New Music; the scholar Amy Beal estimates that OMGUS contributed about 20 percent of the budget. GIs even transported a Steinway grand up to the castle on the back of a jeep.

  Instrumental to the growth of this soon-to-be-formidable institution was Everett Helm, the music officer for the Hesse region and a composer himself. Helm proudly noted that at Darmstadt “contemporary music only is taught and performed—and then only the more advanced variety. R. Strauss and J. Sibelius do not come into consideration.” Hindemith was designated a “natural starting point,” but Schoenberg quickly emerged as the shining beacon for young German composers.

  Schoenberg had a prominent place in Darmstadt’s programs from the beginning. The 1949 season coincided with his seventy-fifth birthday, and the organizers very much wanted the composer to attend. John Evarts, who had met Schoenberg in Berlin before the Nazi takeover, played a crucial role in the negotiations. To his apparently skeptical colleagues in New York Evarts wrote: “It would be both historically and personally an important final gesture for the U.S. to help make the trip possible before the old man makes his final exit.” Red tape interfered with the plan. Coming to Germany as a visiting expert would have meant flying on an American military aircraft and passing a military examination. “In my former army service I was not very fortunate with military doctors,” Schoenberg wrote to Evarts. In the end, he did not feel well enough to go.

  All the same, Schoenberg’s spirit loomed over Darmstadt in the summer of 1949; there were performances of the Five Pieces for Orchestra, the Variations for Orchestra, the Violin Concerto, the Fourth String Quartet, and the String Trio. Remarkably, the Trio appeared in an OMGUS-sponsored series devoted to American chamber works, alongside quartets by Charles Ives and Wallingford Riegger. Two summers later, just before Schoenberg’s death, Darmstadt presented the “Dance Around the Golden Calf” from Moses und Aron, the first performance anywhere of music from the opera.

  Some official observers were uneasy about the direction that Darmstadt was taking. Colonel Ralph A. Burns, the chief of the Cultural Affairs Branch of the Education and Cultural Relations Division of OMGUS, noted in a June 1949 memo that the summer school had “acquired a reputation for one-sidedness.” The previous summer, the Polish-born, Paris-based composer and theorist René Leibowitz, the author of Sibelius: The Worst Composer in the World, had arrived to preach the gospel of twelve-tone music, and he caused great excitement among younger German composers. Leibowitz returned in 1949 in the company of the equally radical, though less doctrinaire, Olivier Messiaen. The French contingent had an unsettling effect, as Burns reported in his follow-up “Review of Activities for the Month of July 1949.” After extolling the virtues of the Yale Glee Club, which had staged a successful German tour, he wrote the following:

  The Darmstadt Holiday Courses for New Music came to a close on 10 July with opinion as to their effectiveness sharply divided. The majority of students and faculty felt that the idea of the school—to foster new music through performances, lectures and courses—is splendid, but that the execution of the idea was faulty. During the concluding four days, five concerts were given under the title “Music of the Younger Generation.” It was generally conceded that much of this music was worthless and had better been left unplayed. The over-emphasis on twelve-tone music was regretted. One critic (Neue Zeitung) described the concerts as “The Triumph of Dilettantism.” A regrettable feature of the session was the tension created between the French group and the rest of the school. Led by their teacher Leibowitz, the French students remained aloof from the others and acted in a snobbish way. At one concert, their conduct led to open hostility. Leibowitz (an Austrian by birth [sic]) represents and admits as valid only the most radical kind of music and is openly disdainful of any other. His attitude is aped by his students. It was generally felt that next year’s Holiday Course for New Music must follow a different, more catholic pattern.

  Here was a sign of things to come. The aggressive tactics of Schoenberg’s young French acolytes forecast the musical divides of coming years, when Pierre Boulez, the most “openly disdainful” of composers, would declare that any composer who had not come to terms with Schoenberg’s method was “useless.” Boulez himself did not attend that summer, but he had studied with Leibowitz and had already created a stink at a Stravinsky concert in Paris.

  David Monod, in his history of music during the American occupation, writes that OMGUS inadvertently helped to bring about a “segregation of the modern and the popular.” Darmstadt and similar organizations were wholly subsidized by the state, the city, and the Americans. They had no obligation to a paying public. Meanwhile, “classical music,” in the pejorative sense of performances of well-known opera and symphonic repertory, carried on as it had during the Nazi period, with many of the same star conductors—Furtwängler, Karajan, Knappertsbusch—in charge, despite the various ceremonies of denazification to which they had been subjected. So there was, on the one hand, a classical establishment that eluded denazification, and, on the other, an avant-garde establishment that opposed itself so determinedly to the aesthetics of the Nazi period that it came close to disavowing the idea of the public concert. The middlebrow ideal of a popular modernism withered away, caught between extremes of revolution and re
action.

  The worst mistake of the American occupation, from the musical point of view, was the accidental slaughter of Anton Webern, in Mittersill, Austria, on the night of September 15, 1945. As the American military were preparing to arrest a relative of Webern’s, a black marketeer who was suspected of ties to the Nazi underground, a military cook named Raymond Bell collided with Webern in the dark, panicked, and shot him dead.

  In the years that followed, the composer’s reputation took an unexpected turn. Webern had long languished as the most obscure and arcane of the Second Viennese School composers, the one who made Berg sound like an over-the-top Romantic. After death, Webern acquired a saintly, visionary aura, the super-refined surfaces and intricate design of his works foreshadowing avant-garde constructions to come. Ernst Krenek, who had studied with Webern in Vienna, called him “the prophet of a new musical cosmos, torn from this world by a dastardly fate.” When Webern’s Piano Variations were performed at Darmstadt in 1948, young composers listened in a quasi-religious trance. That Webern had been possibly the most avid Hitlerite among major Austro-German composers was not widely known, or went unmentioned.

  Richard Strauss remained in Garmisch. The “Off Limits” sign on his lawn protected his property but not his reputation. Klaus Mann, Thomas’s son, serving as a correspondent for the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, called on Strauss in mid-May 1945, identifying himself as “Mr. Brown.” He had not forgotten that Strauss had signed a denunciation of his father in 1933. In a letter home Klaus wrote that Strauss “happens to be about the most rotten character one can possibly imagine—ingnorant [sic], complacent, greedy, vain, abysmally egotistic, completely lacking in the most fundamental human impulses of shame and decency.” The Stars and Stripes article was scarcely less venomous, adorned with such headlines as “Strauss Still Unabashed About Ties with Nazis,” “His Heart Beat in Nazi Time,” and “An Old Opportunist Who Heiled Hitler.” Some of the dialogue attributed to Strauss sounds implausible. Klaus claimed, for example, that Strauss showed no awareness of the destruction of German cities and opera houses; other sources indicate that the composer talked of little else. Incensed, Strauss wrote a letter of complaint to Klaus’s father, but he never sent it, perhaps figuring that it would only add fuel to the fire.

  Other visitors were friendlier, charmed by the old man’s memories of America. When Private Russell Campitelli mentioned that he came from Poughkeepsie, Strauss nodded, and said, “Oh, yes, that is on the Hudson River.”

  Several soldiers happened to be skilled musicians. One day an intelligence operative named John de Lancie showed up at Strauss’s door, not to conduct an interrogation but to express his admiration for the composer’s woodwind writing; before the war he had played oboe in the Pittsburgh Symphony. De Lancie boldly asked Strauss if he had ever thought of writing a concerto for oboe. “No,” the composer answered. Several months later de Lancie was astonished to read in a newspaper that Strauss had indeed written an oboe concerto, at an American soldier’s request. It was music of unexpected lightness, recalling the fleet-figured, Mendelssohnian scores that the composer had written in his youth, before he fell under Wagner’s spell. Strauss’s encounters with the Americans seemed to lift his spirits. In many later photographs he wears a dour expression, but in a snapshot taken by de Lancie his eyes are bright and his face is relaxed.

  The long, strange career of Strauss faded out with the Four Last Songs of 1948. “Im Abendrot,” or “At Sunset,” out-Mahlers Mahler in the art of looking death in the face. The text paints the picture of an elderly couple walking into the twilight—“Through joy and need we have walked hand in hand”—and the E-flat-major music unfolds as one luminous arc above them. Friedrich Nietzsche might have been describing this greatest of Strauss songs when he wrote: “Masters of the very first order can be recognized by the following characteristic: in all matters great and small they know with perfect assurance how to find the end, whether it be the end of a melody or of a thought, whether it be the fifth act of a tragedy or the end of a political action. The very best of the second-in-rank grow restive toward the end. They do not plunge into the sea with a proud and measured tranquility, as do, for example, the mountains near Portofino—where the Gulf of Genoa sings its melody to the end.”

  Strauss died on September 8, 1949. Three weeks later, OMGUS was dissolved, and the American interregnum in German musical history was over.

  11

  BRAVE NEW WORLD

  The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties

  “Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics,” wrote the French poet Charles Péguy in 1910. Morton Feldman, the maverick modernist who loved Sibelius, applied this epigram to twentieth-century music, describing how grandiose ideas are made ordinary with the passage of time and become fodder for a power struggle among ideologues and pedants. “Unfortunately for most people who pursue art, ideas become their opium,” Feldman said. “There is no security to be one’s self.”

  The century began with the mystique of revolution, with the mind-bending harmonies and earthshaking rhythms of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The process of politicization was already under way in the twenties, as composers competed to stay ahead of changing trends and accused one another of complicity in regressive tendencies. In the thirties and forties, the entire Romantic tradition was effectively annexed by the totalitarian state. But nothing could compare to what happened when the Second World War ended and the Cold War began. Music exploded into a pandemonium of revolutions, counterrevolutions, theories, polemics, alliances, and party splits. The language of modern music was reinvented on an almost yearly basis: twelve-tone composition gave way to “total serialism,” which gave way to chance music, which gave way to a music of free-floating timbres, which gave way to neo-Dada happenings and collages, and so on. All the informational clutter of late-capitalist society, from purest noise to purest silence, from combinatorial set theory to bebop jazz, came rushing in, as if no barrier remained between art and reality. Strange bedfellows were the order of the day. Following in the footsteps of OMGUS, the CIA occasionally funded festivals that included hypercomplex avant-garde works. Cold War politicians such as John F. Kennedy promised a golden age of freethinking art, and twelve-tone composers at American universities were the indirect beneficiaries.

  The Second World War was the war that never really ended. The Allied superpowers stayed on a military footing, and the introduction of atomic warfare and the discovery of the death camps in the summer of 1945 brought about a worldwide darkening of mood. The rhetoric of the early Cold War period crept into the musical discussion as into everything else. Composers exploited possibilities, annexed territory, neutralized the opposition, advanced, retreated, changed sides. When Stravinsky shocked his colleagues by giving up neoclassicism in favor of twelve-tone composition, Leonard Bernstein said that “it was like the defection of a general to the enemy camp, taking all his faithful regiments with him.”

  The dominant aesthetic, in European and American music alike, was one of dissonance, density, difficulty, complexity. The American composer Elliott Carter explained why he gave up Copland-style populism and Stravinsky-style neoclassicism: “Before the end of the Second World War, it became clear to me, partly as a result of rereading Freud and others and thinking about psychoanalysis, that we were living in a world where this physical and intellectual violence would always be a problem and that the whole conception of human nature underlying the neoclassic esthetic amounted to a sweeping under the rug of things that, it seemed to me, we had to deal with in a less oblique and resigned way.”

  The most formidable proponent of sweeping nothing under the rug was Theodor Adorno—Berg’s old student, Sibelius’s nemesis, Thomas Mann’s musical adviser in the writing of Doctor Faustus. After the war Adorno acquired an intimidating reputation as a post-Marxist philosopher and deep-thinking musical analyst. He was an effective practitioner of the politics of style, using every device at his disposal to demean musi
c that he considered retrogressive. One objective of his 1949 book Philosophy of New Music was to destroy the neoclassicism of Stravinsky: the very act of preserving tonality in the modern era, Adorno proposed, betrayed symptoms of the Fascist personality. He condemned Hindemith on similar grounds, arguing that the “New Objectivity” and “music for use” were tantamount to Nazi kitsch. In his book Minima Moralia Adorno mocked American composers of the populist persuasion, claiming that Copland’s Lincoln Portrait could be found on the gramophone of every Stalinist intellectual.

  The only possible path for Adorno was the one that Schoenberg had marked out at the beginning of the century. In fact, music would now carry its holy torch into abysses where even Schoenberg had not dared to go. All familiar sounds, all relics of convention, had to be expunged. The crucial passage in Philosophy of New Music was this:

  [New music] has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world. All its happiness comes in the perception of misery, all its beauty comes in the rejection of beauty’s illusion. Neither the individual nor the collective wants any part of it. It dies away unheard, without echo. When music is heard, it is shot through with time, like a shining crystal; unheard music drops through empty time like a useless bullet. New music spontaneously takes aim at that final condition which mechanical music lives out hour by hour—the condition of absolute oblivion. It is the true message in a bottle.