The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  The personal motto D S C H, which sounded pseudo-triumphantly in the finale of the Tenth Symphony, is woven into almost every page of the Eighth Quartet. It appears alongside quotations from previous Shostakovich works, including the Tenth Symphony, Lady Macbeth, and the youthful First Symphony, not to mention Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, Siegfried’s Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung, and the revolutionary song “Tormented by Grievous Bondage.” Was Shostakovich speaking ironically when he described the quartet as an exercise in “self-glorification”? The designation might apply to the ending of the Tenth, but it seems inappropriate for the Eighth Quartet, which trails off into a black, static chorale of lamentation. The final pages of the score resemble, in a curious way, the mad scene of Peter Grimes, in which the fisherman is reduced to singing his own name: “Grimes! Grimes! Grimes!” It is the ultimate moment of self-alienation.

  The desolate psychological terrain of Shostakovich’s late-period music overlaps everywhere with that of Britten’s. Shostakovich busied himself with one of Britten’s favorite forms, the song cycle. The Seven Poems of Alexander Blok, the Six Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva, and the Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti—the last probably inspired by Britten’s Michelangelo songs—show a newly economical approach to word setting, while the texts themselves resonate with the composer’s life in the half-confessional style that Britten perfected with Les Illuminations and Serenade: villainous tartars, killings, and famine (Blok); the tsar as a murderer of poets (Tsvetayeva); Rome overrun by greed and bloodlust (Michelangelo).

  Shostakovich’s boldest political statement of the Khrushchev Thaw came in the Thirteenth Symphony, based on anti-Stalinist poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The first movement, “Babi Yar,” is ostensibly a lament for Jewish suffering under the Nazis, but it also remembers life under Stalin. Yevtushenko devotes one section to a depiction of Anne Frank cowering with her family in the attic: “Someone’s coming!” “They’re breaking down the door!” “No, it’s the ice breaking.” Shostakovich responds with a series of dissonant, hammering chords, which, in their peculiar hollowed-out voicing, suggest not only a murderous hand hammering at a door but also the terrified reactions of those waiting behind it.

  Britten, meanwhile, resumed writing chamber and orchestral music, which he had largely ignored since his American period. Between 1964 and 1971 he composed three great suites for cello, which echo the taut language of Shostakovich’s quartets while also honoring Bach. The beginning of the Second Suite quotes the opening cello theme of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony almost note for note. The dedicatee was, of course, Rostropovich, for whom Britten also wrote, in 1962 and 1963, the Cello Symphony, the only major orchestral work of the latter part of his career. Here, too, Shostakovich’s influence is perceptible, if not pervasive. The final movement is another passacaglia, this one roughly optimistic rather than tragic in tone. As Lyudmila Kovnatskaya points out, both Britten and Shostakovich used the recurring bass lines of the passacaglia to suggest the inescapable tensions of modern existence—“a chain of metamorphoses taking place within the confines of a closed circle of fate…a spiritual compass bridging the gap between the commonplace and the eternal.”

  In 1969 Shostakovich capped the friendship by placing Britten’s name on the title page of his Fourteenth Symphony, a song cycle on poems by Lorca, Apollinaire, Rilke, and Wilhelm Küchelbecker. The dedication is sealed by a quotation: in the last bars of the first movement, half of the double basses slide up a major seventh and then go back down, exactly as the same instruments do at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the Fourteenth goes some way toward revoking Britten’s half-hopeful worldview. As in Serenade and Nocturne, the poems are organized around a common theme; here, the theme is death. In some prefatory remarks before the dress rehearsal, Shostakovich cited various works, Britten’s War Requiem included, that aim to describe the “peculiar glow” or “supreme calm” of the experience of death. His own intention, he said, was to portray death without sentiment. “Death is in store for all of us,” he told his audience, “and I, for one, do not see anything good about the end of our lives.” The final measures of the symphony sound like nothing so much as a death rattle.

  A strange event at the first performance underlined the symphony’s uncanny character. During the fifth movement, Pavel Apostolov, a cultural functionary who had once denounced Shostakovich’s “gloomy, introverted psychological outlook,” left the hall in haste, his seat banging shut behind him. It was assumed that he was making his displeasure known. In fact, he was having a heart attack, and had to be carried off in a stretcher. “I didn’t want that to happen,” Shostakovich drily commented. Apostolov was dead within a month. The composer’s colleagues noted that the fifth movement of the symphony contained the line “Now has struck the hour of death.”

  Yet this outwardly bleak work offers a kind of hope of life after death, in the form of an immortal solidarity between artists who transcend the stupidity of their time. At the heart of the symphony is a setting of Küchelbecker’s poem “O Delvig, Delvig!”:

  O Delvig, Delvig! What is the reward

  For noble deeds and poetry?

  What solace for talent

  Amid villains and fools?…

  Free, joyous, and proud,

  Our bond will not die!

  Through joy and sorrow it will endure,

  The union of those beloved by the eternal muses!

  It does not take much guesswork to figure out who Delvig might be. When the Fourteenth was performed at Aldeburgh in 1970, Donald Mitchell speculated the movement portrayed the Britten-Shostakovich friendship, and Britten seemed to concur. Shostakovich’s intentions are unknown, but the music affords some clues. The principal melody is set forth by a solo cello, with another cello moving in parallel sixths; it strongly resembles the double-stopped main theme of Britten’s First Cello Suite.

  For years, Britten and Pears had been hoping that their Russian friend would visit them at the Red House in Aldeburgh. Shostakovich finally made the trip in 1972, even though he was in constant pain from a complex of illnesses—heart trouble, lung cancer, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. At the Red House, he went alone into the library, where Britten had laid out the material of a work in progress. It was a rare act of self-exposure from a composer who kept his creative process sacrosanct. Britten waited outside—Rosamund Strode recalled that he looked “very tense”—while Shostakovich pored over the music. Two hours later, he emerged, wearing a cryptic smile. In his mind, he had heard Britten’s final opera.

  Death in Venice

  In late May 1911, a few days after Gustav Mahler died in Vienna, Thomas Mann arrived in Venice with his family. He had an assignment to write a brief essay about Richard Wagner, who had died in the city three decades before. Staying at the same beach hotel was a Polish boy named Władysław Moes, whom his friends called Adzio. Mann found his eyes drifting away from his writing paper and toward the boy, and a mental obsession took hold of him. He used the experience as the basis for Death in Venice, in which, true to life, a celebrated German author named Gustav von Aschenbach falls in love with a boy named Tadzio while vacationing in Venice.

  Unlike his alter ego, however, Aschenbach carries his obsession to a comically self-debasing degree, chasing Tadzio around the city and painting his own face to look younger. Venice is in the grip of a cholera epidemic, and Aschenbach consciously risks his health in order to remain near the boy. He dies on the beach, in sight of his beloved.

  At first encounter, Mann’s novella would seem to be a solemn, somewhat overwrought story about an artist’s struggle with the competing demands of the mind and the body, of Apollonian and Dionysian principles. Aschenbach’s physical attributes were modeled on the mighty figure of Mahler, whose obituaries Mann had just read, and this association gives the fictional author a high-culture veneer. But there is something faintly ridiculous about his oeuvre of disciplined masterpieces, stocked with projects tha
t Mann himself had contemplated and then set aside—a book about Frederick the Great, a novel titled Maya, an essay on “intellect and art.” Aschenbach’s blend of intellectual grandiosity and boy worship recalls Stefan George, with his circle of neomedieval adolescents, and also the nineteenth-century poet August von Platen, who extolled youth in formally perfect sonnets. In the end, Death in Venice makes devastating fun of an irretrievably high-minded artist who is overcome by the sexual energies that he has carefully repressed. Mann himself escaped that trap simply by writing the story, releasing his desire in harmless form.

  It was not so easy for Britten to smile at Aschenbach’s predicament, for his own situation was perilously similar. Venice had been the scene of Britten’s embarrassing infatuation with David Hemmings, during the rehearsals for The Turn of the Screw. As work on Death in Venice progressed, life continued to mirror art in troubling ways. Britten ended up postponing a crucial heart operation in order to finish the opera; according to Donald Mitchell, “He talked quite calmly and dispassionately to us about the possibility of not having the operation, even though it had been made perfectly clear to him that following that path could have had only one outcome—the expectation of a very short future life.” Pears was heard to say, “Ben is writing an evil opera, and it’s killing him.” The line might have come from Mann’s story.

  At the beginning of the opera, Aschenbach finds himself trapped inside a purely intellectual sphere—“My mind beats on, my mind beats on, and no words come”—and his twelve-syllable opening line is fixed symbolically on a twelve-note row. By the end of Act I, he has brought himself to the point where he can say “I love you” to Tadzio, although the boy is not close enough to hear him. But his profession of love is still pent-up and strangulated; although the setting of “I love you” ends on an E-major chord, it is threadbare tonality, with the E and the B deep in the bass and the G-sharp nothing more than an eighth note in the tenor part. (This is the same key through which Blake’s “invisible worm” flies in the Serenade.) From here on, Aschenbach’s personality undergoes an audible dissolution; obsessive repetitions and self-quotations echo the final madness of Grimes. Yet when Aschenbach finally comes to terms with his condition and fate—“O Aschenbach…Famous as a master…Selfdiscipline…your strength…All folly, all pretense…”—the orchestra makes a final stab at Mahlerian splendor.

  Tadzio’s music comes from a different world. It is based on the Balinese gamelan, which Britten had first encountered as far back as his American days, via the composer Colin McPhee, and which he had experienced firsthand during a visit to Bali in 1956. One gamelan scale that he notated on that trip overlaps perfectly with Tadzio’s theme in Death in Venice. Gamelan-like sounds had cropped up all over Britten’s music from the late fifties onward: in the ballet score The Prince of the Pagodas, in the church parable Curlew River, in the music for Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, significantly, in the “pacifist aria” of Owen Wingrave, in the course of which a young man rebels against his conservative military family. Britten’s celebrations of the exotic have both a political dimension—the composer is reasserting his anti-establishment stance—and also an erotic one. He would have known from McPhee, a pioneer in gamelan-based composition, that Western visitors to Bali could purchase the favors of local boys for a modest price. Tadzio is no Anglican innocent; he is stereotyped as an Eastern Other, available and aware. Very likely, Aschenbach is the virgin in this scene.

  Mann’s story makes it clear that Aschenbach’s “relationship” with Tadzio is a fever dream from beginning to end. Dying on the beach, the distinguished author hallucinates a moment of connection—“it was as if the pale and lovely soul-summoner out there were smiling to him, beckoning to him”—and then slumps over dead. The final sentence—“And later that day the world was respectfully shocked to receive the news of his death”—shows Mann’s cold-eyed detachment from his alter ego.

  In the opera, Tadzio beckons for real, and Aschenbach’s air of fulfillment is allowed to stretch into the final bars. There is again a touch of Mahler in the surging of the strings. Tadzio’s theme acquires new weight and wisdom. Yet it retains its non-Western aspect, ebbing and flowing like an Indian raga. The music of intellect fades, and what remains, a high violin and a glockenspiel, is the music of the Other. We are entering into Tadzio’s consciousness, seeing the world through his eyes. With Aschenbach dead, he is no longer the object of desire but the voice of desire. He is like Szymanowski’s King Roger, who rises from the “abyss of loneliness, of power” to bathe his body in the sun.

  Like Aschenbach, Shostakovich and Britten died in middle age. On a last trip to America in 1973, Shostakovich spent a day with doctors from the National Institutes of Health, who could offer no solution to his myriad health problems. The composer took the news calmly, almost with a shrug, according to his American translator, Alexander Dunkel. He stopped in at a performance by Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic and attended a postconcert banquet, which produced an awkward moment: the “arch-apostle of modernism,” as Shostakovich called Boulez, bent down to kiss the hand of a composer about whom he had never had anything good to say. “I was so taken aback,” Shostakovich reported to Glikman, “I didn’t manage to snatch it away in time.”

  A more sincere gesture of respect greeted Shostakovich when he went to the Metropolitan Opera to hear Aida. During the final intermission, trumpet players in the orchestra saluted him by playing the opening phrase of the final movement of the Fifth Symphony. Now Shostakovich was the great man in the box, the focus of awe.

  Somehow, Shostakovich went on writing music, even though he had trouble moving his right hand. Strains of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata mysteriously infiltrate his final work, the Viola Sonata, written in June and early July 1975. He died on August 9, at the age of sixty-eight. At the premiere of the sonata Fyodor Druzhinin responded to the audience’s ovation by holding the score over his head, as Mravinsky had done at the premiere of the Fifth.

  Britten died in December of the following year, at the age of sixty-three, of complications brought on by bacterial endocarditis, the same condition that had killed Mahler. Michael Tippett wrote a remarkably generous obituary: “I want to say, here and now, that Britten has been for me the most purely musical person that I have ever met and I have ever known.” Just as remarkable was the gesture made by Queen Elizabeth II, the head of the Church of England. When the news of Britten’s decease reached her, she sent a telegram of condolence to Peter Pears.

  13

  ZION PARK

  Messiaen, Ligeti, and the Avant-Garde of the Sixties

  “I have found that it is not to be,” Adrian Leverkühn declares, in his bloodcurdling meditation on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. “The good and the noble, what they call the human, despite the fact that it is good and noble. What men have fought for, have stormed citadels for, and, in their moment of fulfillment, have jubilantly proclaimed—it is not to be. It will be taken back. I will take it back.”

  Thomas Mann’s Faustian composer is alluding to a musical code that is written into Beethoven’s last string quartet. In the introduction to the finale, the viola and cello play a sighing minor-key phrase to which are attached the words “Must it be?” The violins reply, swinging into the major: “It must be!” The little exchange was conceived as a joke, but it has a serious subtext; it expresses in miniature the spirit of cosmic affirmation that blares forth so triumphantly in Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” Leverkühn has no interest in embracing the millions. In the twentieth century, he might argue, affirmation has become banal. Only by striking the dark note can he achieve true seriousness and originality.

  Leverkühn’s aesthetic of denial and negation captures in somewhat exaggerated form one of the dominant strains of twentieth-century music. The fictional composer bears traces of Schoenberg and Webern, who professed to have killed tonality, and perhaps of Varèse, who fancied himself a “diabolic Parsifal.” Leverkühn also foreshadows Boule
z, with his aesthetic of “still more violent”; Cage, who said that he was “going toward violence rather than tenderness, hell rather than heaven”; the ironic, self-flagellating, death-obsessed Shostakovich; and even Britten, who made an arabesque of the words “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” (When Mann heard Britten’s Serenade, he wrote, “Adrian Leverkühn might well have been very happy to have done some of these things.”) More than a few canonical twentieth-century works—Salome, Erwartung, the Rite, Wozzeck, Lulu, Lady Macbeth, Peter Grimes—ride fateful currents toward scenes of violent or mysterious death. They are what Olivier Messiaen called “black masterpieces.”

  After the war, composers took up what might be called catastrophe style with a vengeance, history having justified their instinctive attraction to the dreadful and the dire. Krzysztof Penderecki one-upped his colleagues by producing, within one decade, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and Dies Irae (Auschwitz Oratorio). Not coincidentally, the fictional Leverkühn became something of a folk hero among postwar composers, most of whom read Mann’s book at one time or another. Henri Pousseur’s conceptual opera Votre Faust (1960–68) told of a Leverkühnish composer named Henri, who, in one scene, conducts an analysis of Webern’s Second Cantata.