by Alex Ross
In the central scene of Doctor Faustus, Leverkühn conducts a hallucinatory dialogue with the devil, who keeps changing guises and at one point assumes the form of “an intellectualist, who writes of art, of music, for vulgar newspapers, a theorist and critic, who is himself a composer, in so far as thinking allows”—Mann’s wry portrait of Theodor Adorno. The critic-devil hands down judgments on the state of contemporary music, eliminating all possibilities except the Schoenbergian path, the one that follows “an implacable imperative of density.” Leverkühn counters, “One could know all that and yet acknowledge freedom again beyond any criticism. One could raise the game to a yet higher power by playing with forms from which, as one knows, life has vanished.” The devil dismisses such an approach as “aristocratic nihilism.” Yet Leverkühn goes on to realize this possibility in his Violin Concerto. It is a self-aware, ironic work, its tenderness bordering on mockery. Leverkühn’s oratorio Apocalipsis cum figuris, likewise, is enlivened by “parodies of the diverse musical styles in which hell’s insipid excess indulges: burlesqued French impressionism, bourgeois drawing-room music, Tchaikovsky, music hall songs, the syncopations and rhythmic somersaults of jazz—it all whirls round like a brightly glittering tilting match, yet always sustained by the main orchestra, speaking its serious, dark, difficult language.”
Music about music had always been part of twentieth-century discourse, going back to the neo-Baroque stylings of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. But in the sixties games of parody and play caught on everywhere. Composers talked of “pluralistic sound composition,” “polystylism,” and “metacollage” (as the tirelessly neologistic Stockhausen called it). Works incorporated fragments of Beethoven and Mahler, imitated Renaissance masses and Baroque concertos, absorbed jazz, pop songs, and rock ’n’ roll. Eastern European composers championed pluralism as a compromise position between tradition and the avant-garde: Penderecki, for one, introduced medieval organum and old church chorales into his St. Luke Passion (1963–65). Stockhausen weighed in with Hymnen (1966–67), a two-hour electronic-instrumental fantasy on the world’s national anthems. Perhaps the ultimate collage work was the score that Kagel wrote for his own mind-bending film Ludwig van (1969), in which bits and pieces of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and other works are transcribed for a ragtag band whose players seem to have incomplete mastery of their instruments.
Devices of collage, quotation, and pastiche efficiently performed the service of twitting the bourgeois audience, to the extent that such an entity still existed. Familiar classical strains run up against an abrupt noise, signaling a return to contemporary reality. But sometimes this music concealed a clandestine longing for the former tonal world. The modern European composer could commandeer tonal music without committing the sin of writing tonal music as such. This was the canny compromise that Berio presented in two of his most immediately appealing works: Folk Songs (1964), an imaginative arrangement-deconstruction of traditional tunes from France, Italy, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and America; and Sinfonia (1968–69), which reclaimed the late-Romantic symphony by annexing the music of Gustav Mahler. Throughout the third movement of Sinfonia, the Scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony is heard playing in the background, its progress interrupted by quotations from more than a hundred other composers from Bach to Boulez, each one dovetailed ingeniously with Mahler’s score. Over that grand collage, amplified voices enunciate fragments of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, and a speaker delivers a satirical text of the composer’s devising. At one point the narrator announces in soothing tones that there is “nothing more restful than chamber music,” implicitly mocking ordinary listeners’ preference for cozy bits of Mozart and Brahms.
In sixties Britain, two radical youths, Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, used quotation and pastiche to thumb their noses at the conservatism of the English musical scene. Both came from northern working-class backgrounds and never identified with the sensibility of “Land of Hope and Glory.” They met at the Royal Manchester College of Music, where experimentation reigned, and they resolved to catch up with the latest European developments. On moving to London in the late sixties, they organized a group called the Pierrot Players, which was modeled on the versatile ensemble for which Schoenberg wrote Pierrot lunaire.
The spirit of Swinging London mated with the European avant-garde. In Davies’s Revelation and Fall (1965–66), the solo soprano shrieks poetry of Georg Trakl into a megaphone while the ensemble satirizes the operettas of Lehár. In the same composer’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), the madness of King George III is enacted as avant-garde street theater, the lead vocalist reciting the text in a gibbering delirium while sentimental Handelian, Victorian, and Edwardian musical strains are chewed to pieces by the players. In Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy, likewise, mangled Baroque numbers limp through a dimly lit, indistinct, eerily groaning instrumental landscape. A wide gulf separated this stony music from the work of Britten, who had by this time become an establishment icon, somewhat against his will. Britten hosted the premiere of Punch and Judy at the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival, but, after a certain interval, he and Pears retired from the directors’ box in search of drinks.
The collage works of Kagel, Berio, Davies, and Birtwistle have an exuberant, insolent tone. Those of the German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann are, by contrast, tortured and tragic. Educated in a monastery school, Zimmermann came of age just before the Second World War and served in the cavalry both in France and on the Russian front. Circa 1945 he was still writing in a style that owed much to Hindemith, middle-period Stravinsky, even Anton Bruckner. At first, the hardened ex-soldier was reluctant to let go of German-nationalist attitudes that had been drilled into him; in his diary he denounced the Nuremberg trials and other anti-Nazi proceedings as “witch hunts.” At the same time, he despaired of Germany’s future: “O Germany, what has become of you? How your people have come to naught, have even destroyed themselves…Are not fear and anxiety, insecurity and terror standing on the horizon of our future like dark storm clouds in front of a setting sun? ‘Abide with us; for it is toward evening.’” The diary bears an astonishing resemblance to passages in Doctor Faustus, which Mann was writing in Los Angeles at this time. Mann’s narrator assumes the same biblical tone: “Watch with me…Forsake me not.”
Zimmermann arrived at Darmstadt in 1948. Although he admired Schoenberg, he initially looked askance at twelve-tone writing as propagated by René Leibowitz, fearing that the technique would lead to an overintellectualized, technically overdetermined mode of composition. Still, the lure of progress proved irresistible. The composer’s manuscripts, held at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, show him steadily scrubbing out “backward” elements in his scores and installing devices more amenable to the temper of the times. In the second version of his unpublished Concerto for Orchestra, harp is replaced by piano, the texture is thickened with rapid-moving figuration, exotic percussion comes to the fore, octave doublings are eliminated, and heavy ostinato figures disappear.
Still, Zimmermann remained a recognizably German composer, exuding a Gothic-Romantic aura that was foreign to his compatriots Stockhausen and Henze. The opening bars of his opera Die Soldaten (1958–64) are a cataclysmic revision of Brahms’s First Symphony, with the timpani pounding a single note against screaming cluster chords. When masterpieces of the German canon are directly quoted in his works, they flow seamlessly out of the “serious, dark, difficult” language beneath them.
In 1969 Zimmermann finished what would become his final major work, Requiem for a Young Poet. It calls for huge and varied forces, including orchestra, organ, three choruses, three solo voices, a jazz combo, and electronic elements. There are quotations from Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece (“Democracy will triumph!”), Mao (“A revolution is no banquet, not like writing an essay or painting pictures or embroidering”), and Joyce’s Ulysses; the sounds of tanks, jets, artillery; recordings of Wagner’s Tristan and Messiaen’s Ascension; p
oems of Mayakovsky (“My song rends the times with force”); and the voice of Hitler (“I lead you back into that homeland, which you have not forgotten and which has not forgotten you!”). In the climax of the piece, loudspeakers blare a collage of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” the voices of Goebbels and Stalin, and radio transmissions by Allied bomber pilots. Soprano and bass sing from the Revelation of Saint John while the chorus chants, “Dona nobis pacem.” The moral of all this seems to be that classical and popular music have bled together into cultural white noise obscuring imminent technological disaster. It all sounds very much like Leverkühn’s “tilting match” of irreconcilable sounds, and in the middle is the Ninth, the work that Leverkühn had “taken back.”
Zimmermann’s despair over music’s future was also despair over his own. On August 10, 1970, he committed suicide.
Ligeti
The predicament of the avant-garde composer seemed complete. To continue in pursuit of the “modern” was to go over the brink into absurdity; to retreat into the past was to admit defeat. In a talk delivered in 1993, György Ligeti put it this way:
When you are accepted in a club, without willing or without noticing you take over certain habits of what is in and what is out. Tonality was definitely out. To write melodies, even nontonal melodies, was absolutely taboo. Periodic rhythm, pulsation, was taboo, not possible. Music has to be a priori…It worked when it was new, but it became stale. Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.
Ligeti escaped by not saying no. He opened himself to all music past and present, absorbing everything from the Renaissance masses of Johannes Ockeghem to the saxophone solos of Eric Dolphy, from the virtuoso piano writing of Liszt to the rhythmic polyphony of African Pygmy tribes. At the same time, he succeeded in imprinting his prickly, melancholy, ever-restless personality on whatever he caught in the web.
Many composers of the early avant-garde period witnessed horrific things in their youth. What Ligeti saw with his own eyes is practically unimaginable. He was born in 1923, in Transylvania, to a family of Hungarian Jews. Three years before he was born, Transylvania became part of Romania, and Ligeti went to study at the conservatory in Cluj, which had been called Kolozsvár. In 1940, the fascist government in Hungary regained control of Transylvania, and Cluj became Kolozsvár again. Ligeti was mobilized into a forced-labor gang in 1944, wearing the yellow armband required by anti-Semitic regulations, and carried heavy explosives on the eastern front. The Nazis took over the country later that year, and deportations to the death camps began. Calculating the likelihood of his being either killed in action, shot by the SS, or sent to the camps, Ligeti deserted from the front line. He immediately fell into the hands of Soviet troops, but once again managed to slip away. After a long walk home, he found that the Russians were now in control and that strangers were living in his parents’ house. When the war ended, he learned of his family’s fate: his father had been killed in Bergen-Belsen, his brother in Mauthausen, and his aunt and uncle in Auschwitz. His mother somehow survived.
The nightmare did not end in 1945. Ligeti went to study at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, and he watched as the Soviets and their stooges took control of Hungary; the same thugs who had committed atrocities on behalf of the fascist Arrow Cross Party went to work for Mátyás Rákosi’s Communists.
For the most part, Ligeti managed to avoid the odious task of creating Party propaganda. Instead, he buried himself in folk-music research, probably aware that Bartók had collected songs in the vicinity of a Transylvanian town where the Ligeti family had lived for a time. In secret, Ligeti dabbled in twelve-tone writing, though his understanding of the method was gleaned haphazardly from the pages of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which he read in 1952. The first movement of Musica ricercata, written from 1951 to 1953, consists of nothing more than the tuning note A arranged in various octaves, until a D enters at the end. The second movement uses three pitches, the third movement four, and so on. All twelve tones circulate in the final movement, but along the way the composer enjoys a rich diversity of material, including a sweet-sad folkish melody that he would revive decades later in his career-summarizing Violin Concerto. He later described some stabbing single notes in the second movement as “a knife in Stalin’s heart.”
In 1956, a reformist government in Budapest attempted to break away from Soviet control, and troops quickly moved in to put down the uprising. Ligeti, unable to face yet another wave of repression, escaped to the West, hiding under mailbags in a postal train and then dashing over the Austrian border by the light of military flares. He sought refuge in Vienna, where he formed alliances with leaders of the Western European avant-garde. Back in Hungary, he had cherished their works as symbols of creative freedom—on one bloody night in 1956 he stayed glued to a radio broadcast of Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge—and from 1957 onward he showed up at Darmstadt in the company of his heroes. But his intimate knowledge of the totalitarian personality made him wary of any musical ideology that was too sure of its rectitude. “I don’t like gurus,” he said once in an interview, in a discussion of Stockhausen. Years later he gave a testy interview in which he compared the warring camps of Darmstadt to the power struggles within the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. “True, there were no people being liquidated,” he said, “but there was certainly character assassination.”
Ligeti naturally inclined toward the absurdist end of the avant-garde spectrum—the music about music of Kagel and Schnebel, the conceptualism of Cage. In his 1960 work Apparitions, bassoonists play their instruments without reeds, brass players smack their mouthpieces with their hands, and a percussionist is asked to smash a bottle into a crate lined with metal plates (“Be sure to wear protective goggles,” the score advises). In 1961 Ligeti performed a Cagean conceptual piece titled The Future of Music, in which he stood in front of an unsuspecting audience and wrote instructions on a blackboard: “Crescendo,” “più forte,” “Silence.” The resulting hubbub was the composition. And in 1962 Ligeti unveiled the Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes, which, true to the title, had one hundred windup metronomes ticking away in concert. Like many Ligeti jokes, this one had a serious undertow. The initial hilarity of the scene—a concert stage filled with inanimate antique machines—gives way to unexpected complexity: as the faster metronomes wind down and stop, spiderwebs of rhythm emerge from the cloud of ticks. As the last survivors wave their little arms in the air, they look lonely, forlorn, almost human.
Impatient with the clichés of musical pointillism, with what he called the pattern of “event - pause - event,” Ligeti resolved to restore spaciousness and long-breathed lines to instrumental writing. He took inspiration from Xenakis’s Metastaseis, Stockhausen’s Carré, and other examples of late-fifties “texture music.” Ligeti’s version of the style is called micropolyphony; large structures are assembled from multiple layers of microcosmic contrapuntal activity. That sound first surfaces in the last part of Apparitions and crystallizes in the famous Atmosphères of 1961. The opening chord of the latter work has fifty-nine notes spread over five and a half octaves: the effect is mysterious rather than assaultive, a seductive threshold to an alien world. Later, half-familiar entities, quasi-or crypto-tonal chords, are glimpsed in the sonic haze. The dominant process in Ligeti’s music is one of emergence—shapes come out of the shadows, dark cedes to light. Raised an atheist, Ligeti never accepted a religious doctrine. Nonetheless, in the mid-sixties, he wrote two religiously inflected works of revelatory impact: Requiem, for two soloists, double chorus, and orchestra, and Lux aeterna, for sixteen solo voices. They are like no sacred pieces before them. Requiem is a twenty-five-minute battering of the senses—a black mass in which singers whisper, mutter, speak, shout, and shriek the Requiem text. In the “Kyrie,” the
overlapping of individual voices in micropolyphonic style creates the effect of a subhuman howling, of souls melting into a hellish mob. In the closing “Lacrimosa,” the cluster harmonies lose their diabolical aspect and give intimations of the music of the spheres: the note G-flat fans out through a widening series of intervals to a primordially humming open fifth on D and A. Coincidentally or not, a similar transformation is said to happen in Adrian Leverkühn’s Apocalipsis cum figuris, where a choral passage moves “through all the shades of graduated whispering, antiphonal speech, and quasi-chant on up to the most polyphonic song—accompanied by songs that begin as simple noise, as magical, fanatical African drums and booming gongs, only to attain the highest music.”
The plateau of “highest music” is maintained in Lux aeterna and its companion orchestral piece, Lontano. Both works have the character of occult objects, or of dream landscapes in which sound becomes a tangible surface. In the opening section of Lontano, micropolyphonic lines creep upward into the very highest ranges of the orchestra, then stop at the edge of an abyss: a blistering high C gives way to an almost inaudibly low D-flat in the tuba and contrabassoon. In the middle section the harmony gravitates toward the key of G minor, and the orchestra plays a ghostly chorale, vaguely recalling the opening lament of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. There is a second desperate surge into the treble, followed by a second vertiginous collapse, but now the listener is led onward into a secret tonal paradise of near-resolutions and almost-cadences. Blissful Messiaen-like harmony seems within reach, but the brass push it away with a mournful, honking chord. Triads are scattered through the score in the final pages, but they are clouded and covered so that you can barely hear them. What happens at the end can almost be heard as an “Amen” cadence.