The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
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Sterner spirits will undoubtedly continue to insist on fundamental differences in musical vocabulary, attaching themselves to the venerable orchestral and operatic traditions of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras or the now equally venerable practices of twentieth-century modernism. Already in the first years of the new century composers have produced works of monumental character that invite comparison to the symphonies of Mahler and the operas of Strauss. Thomas Adès’s The Tempest, first heard at Covent Garden in 2004, shows that a composer can still write a grand opera of ornate design and airy power in an atomizing digital age. The following year saw the premiere of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, an opera about the testing of the first atomic bomb. Holding his lyricism in reserve, Adams marshals a ghoulish army of twentieth-century styles to summon the awe and dread of the atomic morning. Georg Friedrich Haas’s sixty-five-minute ensemble piece in vain may mark a new departure in Austro-German music, joining spectral harmony to a vast Brucknerian structure.
If twenty-first-century composition appears to have a split personality—sometimes intent on embracing everything, sometimes longing to be lost to the world—its ambivalence is nothing new. The debate over the merits of engagement and withdrawal has gone on for centuries. In the fourteenth century, Ars Nova composers engendered controversy by inserting secular tunes into the Mass Ordinary. Around 1600, Monteverdi’s forcefully melodic style sounded crude and libertine to adherents of rule-bound Renaissance polyphony. In nineteenth-century Vienna, the extroverted brilliance of Rossini’s comic operas was judged against the inward enigmas of Beethoven’s late quartets. Composition only gains power from failing to decide the eternal dispute. In a decentered culture, it has a chance to play a kind of godfather role, able to assimilate anything new because it has assimilated everything in the past.
Composers may never match their popular counterparts in instant impact, but, in the freedom of their solitude, they can communicate experiences of singular intensity. Unfolding large forms, engaging with complex forces, traversing the spectrum from noise to silence, they show the way to what Claude Debussy once called the “imaginary country, that’s to say one that can’t be found on the map.”
NOTES
Abbreviations Used
ACLC: Aaron Copland Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.
ACR: Aaron Copland: A Reader: Selected Writings, 1923–1972, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Routledge, 2004).
ACVP: Aaron Copland and Vivien Perlis, Copland: 1900 Through 1942 (St. Martin’s, 1984).
AHRP: Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945, ed. Max Domarus (Schmidt, 1962–65).
AMM: Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, ed. Donald Mitchell, trans. Basil Creighton (Viking, 1969).
ASC: Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna.
ASL: Arnold Schoenberg: Letters, ed. Erwin Stein, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (University of California Press, 1987).
ASSI: Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (University of California Press, 1984).
BDC: Berlin Document Center, microfilm copies at National Archives II.
BGFI: Bryan Gilliam, “‘Friede im Innern’: Strauss’s Public and Private Worlds in the Mid 1930s,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 57:3 (Fall 2004), pp. 565–98.
BGRS: Bryan Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge UP, 1999).
DMBB1, 2, 3: Letters from a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, 1913–1976, vols. 1 and 2 (Faber, 1991), vol. 3 (University of California Press, 2004), ed. Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed, and Mervyn Cooke.
ETS1, 2, 3: Erik Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, Volume I: 1865–1905 (University of California Press, 1976); Volume II: 1904–1914 (University of California Press, 1986); Volume III: 1914–1957 (Faber, 1997), all trans. Robert Layton.
EWS: Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, 2nd ed. (Princeton UP, 2006).
FMP: Records of the Federal Music Project, RG 69, National Archives II.
GGLC: George Gershwin Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.
GMRS: Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss: Correspondence, 1888–1911, ed. Herta Blaukopf, trans. Edmund Jephcott (University of Chicago Press, 1984).
HHS: Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Arnold Schoenberg: His Life, World, and Work, trans. Humphrey Searle (Schirmer Books, 1978).
HMAW: Hans Moldenhauer and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Work (Knopf, 1979).
HPAC: Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (Holt, 1999).
IGSF: Isaak Glikman, Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitri Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman, 1914–1975, trans. Anthony Phillips (Cornell UP, 2001).
JASR: Joseph Auner, A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (Yale UP, 2003).
JCS: John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Wesleyan UP, 1973).
JGT: Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich (K. G. Saur, 1987–).
LFS: Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford UP, 2000).
LGM1, 2, 3: Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler, Volume 1 (Doubleday, 1973); Volume 2: Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford UP, 1995); Volume 3: Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion (1904–1907) (Oxford UP, 1999).
MFS: Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures, 1964–1987, ed. Chris Villars (Hyphen, 2006).
NG: New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie (Macmillan, 2001).
NSM: Nicolas Slonimsky, Music Since 1900, 5th ed. (Schirmer Books, 1994).
NSPHM: Nigel Simeone and Peter Hill, Messiaen (Yale UP, 2005).
OMGUS: Records of the Office of Military Government, United States, RG 260, National Archives II.
RCSC: Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship (Vanderbilt UP, 1994).
RSC: Franz Trenner, Richard Strauss: Chronik zu Leben und Werk, ed. Florian Trenner (Verlag Dr. Richard Strauss, 2003).
RSRR: Richard Strauss and Romain Rolland: Correspondence, Together with Fragments from the Diary of Romain Rolland and Other Essays, ed. Rollo Myers (Calder and Boyars, 1968).
RTS1, 2: Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through “Mavra,” 2 vols. (University of California Press, 1996).
SRW: Steve Reich, Writings on Music, 1965–2000, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford UP, 2002).
SSC1, 2, 3: Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, ed. Robert Craft, 3 vols. (Knopf, 1982–85).
SWS1, 2: Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882–1934 (Knopf, 1999), and Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934–1971 (Knopf, 2006).
TMDF: Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. John E. Woods (Vintage, 1999).
Epigraph
“It seems to me”: TMDF, p. 11.
Preface
“Mr. Gershwin”: Edward Jablonski, Gershwin (Da Capo, 1998), p. 167.
“Wherever we are”: JCS, p. 3.
1: The Golden Age
“I am ready”: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, ed. Cyrus Hamlin, trans. Walter Arndt (Norton, 2001), pp. 19–20.
“terribly cacophonous”: Puccini: 276 lettere inedite, ed. Giuseppe Pintorno (Nuove Edizioni, 1974), p. 130.
six of his pupils: They were Alban Berg, Heinrich Jalowetz, Karl Horwitz, Erwin Stein, Viktor Krüger, and Zdzislaw Jachimecki. See “Fremden-Liste,” Grazer Tagespost, May 18, 1906; and HHS, p. 67.
“feverish impatience”: Hermann Watznauer’s unpublished biography of Berg, Vom Barockpalais ins Zwölftongebäude, as published in Erich Alban Berg, Der unverbesserliche Romantiker: Alban Berg, 1885–1935 (Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1985), p. 62.
“young people”: Richard Strauss, Der Strom der Töne trug mich fort: Die Welt um Richard Strauss in Briefen, ed. Franz Grasberger (Hans Schneider, 1967), p. 169.
Hitler: Ibid., p. 392. Whether or not Hitler attended is addressed in Chapter 9.
news from Croatia…
Faust: Grazer Tagespost, May 16, 1906.
Alma recounted: AMM, p. 97. RSC, p. 277, indicates that the day trip happened on the sixteenth. For the photograph, see Gilbert Kaplan, ed., The Mahler Album (Kaplan Foundation, 1995), nos. 77 and 78.
“Der Mahler! ”: Stephen Hefling, Mahler, “Das Lied von der Erde” (Cambridge UP, 2000), p. 90.
“a pure kind of German”: Gemma Bellincioni, Io e il palcoscenico: Trenta e un anno di vita artistica (R. Quinteri, 1920), p. 133.
“All untrue”: GMRS, p. 140.
“Strauss and I tunnel”: AMM, p. 98.
Mahlerverein: BGRS, p. 75. For “Cacophony,” see Musical Times, July 1, 1906, p. 486.
piano shop: AMM, pp. 88–89.
“You would not believe”: GMRS, p. 92.
“great excitement”: Ernst Decsey, Musik war sein Leben: Lebenserinnerungen (Hans Deutsch, 1962), pp. 171–72.
“tone-color world”: Ernst Decsey, “Salome: Zur Einführung,” Grazer Tagespost, May 16,1906.
nervous electricity: Decsey, “Nachtrag,” Grazer Tagespost, May 17, 1906.
C-sharp minor: Roland Tenschert, “Strauss as Librettist,” in Richard Strauss, “Salome,” ed. Derrick Puffett (Cambridge UP, 1989), p. 47. See also BGRS, pp. 82–83.
eight-note dissonance: See the last chord of one bar before 361. The vocal score omits the B-sharp in the flutes and clarinets.
“satanic and artistic”: Ernst Decsey, “Nachtrag,” Grazer Tagespost, May 17, 1906.
“Me, too”: Wilhelm Kienzl, Meine Lebenswanderung: Erlebtes und Erschautes ( J. Engelhorns Nachf., 1926), pp. 149–50.
“It is raining”: Richard Strauss, Strom der Töne, p. 169.
“I am sorry”: Richard Strauss, Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, ed. Willi Schuh (Piper, 1989), p. 227.
“one of the greatest masterworks”: Gustav Mahler: Letters to His Wife, ed. Henry-Louis de La Grange, Günther Weiss, and Knud Martner, trans. Antony Beaumont (Cornell UP, 2004), p. 258.
voice of the people: AMM, p. 98.
at a restaurant: Berg, Der unverbesserliche Romantiker, pp. 62–63.
“What a gifted”: Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus (Fischer, 1971), pp. 155–56.
“I have actually outlived”: Kurt Wilhelm, Richard Strauss: An Intimate Portrait, trans. Mary Whittall (Rizzoli, 1989), p. 284.
Tchaikovsky was captivated: Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), pp. 347–48.
” a democrat, a new man”: Gerald D. Turbow, “Wagnerism in France,” in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. David C. Large and William Weber (Cornell UP, 1984), p. 152.
“counter-religion”: Charles Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (Phaidon, 1964), p. 128. For M. Carey Thomas, see Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: An American History (University of California Press, 1994), pp. 227–28. For Herzl and Tannhäuser, see Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Vintage, 1981), p. 163.
“This Book contains”: Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford UP, 1999), pp. 172–73.
“first English progressivist”: Ibid., p. 369.
“an oracle”: Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage, 1967), p. 103.
“Il faut méditerraniser ”: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage, 1967), p. 159. For more on Nietzsche’s “neoclassicism,” see Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (University of California Press, 2005), pp. 23–28.
“I have felt the pulse”: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, ed. and trans. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (Norton, 1988), p. 210.
“If we want thousands”: Kurt Blaukopf and Herta Blaukopf, Mahler: His Life, Work, and World (Thames and Hudson, 2000), p. 138.
“Richard III”: BGRS, p. 1.
“You can be certain”: Max Steinitzer, Richard Strauss: Biographie (Schuster und Loeffler, 1922), p. 34.
mocked a passage: “Selections from the Strauss-Thuille Correspondence,” trans. Susan Gillespie, in Richard Strauss and His World, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Princeton UP, 1992), p. 214.
Strauss’s parents: For a revealing commentary, see Michael Kennedy, Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma (Cambridge UP, 1999), pp. 3–11.
“immoral” and “the seeds of death”: Willi Schuh, Richard Strauss: A Chronicle of the Early Years, 1864–1898, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge UP, 1982), pp. 282 and 285.
“Dream on”: Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 111.
“apostles of moderation”: Schuh, Richard Strauss, p. 401.
“scourge of the Philistines”: Ibid., p. 505.
“crimes against religion” and “spiritual fodder”: David Clay Large, Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich (Norton, 1997), p. 10.
“book of images”: Claude Debussy, Debussy on Music, ed. and trans. Richard Langham Smith (Knopf, 1977), p. 160.
Latter-day Strauss scholars: See Walter Werbeck, Die Tondichtungen von Richard Strauss (Hans Schneider, 1996), esp. pp. 453–54; the work of Bryan Gilliam (BGRS, BGFI); and Charles Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition (Indiana UP, 2005).
“imbecile”: RSRR, p. 155. See also Richard Strauss–Stefan Zweig: Briefwechsel, ed. Willi Schuh (Fischer, 1957), p. 128.
court of Kaiser Wilhelm: Chris Walton, “Beneath the Seventh Veil: Richard Strauss’s Salome and Kaiser Wilhelm II,” Musical Times 146 (Winter 2005), pp. 14–19.
he indicated to Hofmannsthal: BGRS, p. 86.
“I was never”: ASSI, p. 137.
“music of Herr Richard Strauss”: Wilhelm, Richard Strauss: An Intimate Portrait, p. 100.
“More of a stock company”: Karl Kraus, “Cultural Bankruptcy” (1924), trans. Susan Gillespie, in Gilliam, Richard Strauss and His World, p. 360.
Libre Parole: RSRR, p. 148.
“If one of the two”: Alma Mahler, Mein Leben (Fischer, 1963), p. 346.
“from then on”: Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, Volume II: The Wunderhorn Years (University of California Press, 1995), p. 74.
“Don’t you compose”: LGM2, pp. 371–72.
“Is music such a serious”: Jonathan Carr, Mahler (Overlook, 1997), p. 95.
May Day: Kurt List, “The Music of Soviet Russia,” politics, May 1944, p. 106.
“Down with programs!”: LGM2, p. 522.
“pure musician”: ibid., p. 524.
“satanic”: LGM3, p. 425.
“Krupp makes only cannons”: ibid., p. 534.
switch the middle movements: Gilbert Kaplan, ed., The Correct Movement Order in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony (Kaplan Foundation, 2004), demonstrates beyond a doubt that Mahler never went back on his decision, although Alma Mahler and the editor Erwin Ratz later claimed otherwise.
“fully grown cow”: LGM3, p. 413.
“walked up and down”: AMM, p. 100.
“over-instrumented”: Klaus Pringsheim’s recollections, quoted in Norman Lebrecht, Mahler Remembered (Norton, 1988), p. 192.
“reduced almost to tears”: Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler, trans. Lotte Walter Lindt (Quartet Books, 1990), p. 51.
lightened the orchestration: LGM3, pp. 810–11.
“I extend to [Strauss]” and “very sweet”: Ein Glück ohne Ruh’: Die Briefe Gustav Mahlers an Alma , ed. Henry-Louis de La Grange and Günther Weiss (Siedler, 1995), pp. 306–8.
“Tonio Kröger” GMRS, p. 142.
“redeemed from”: Peter Heyworth, Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times, Volume 1, 1885–1933 (Cambridge UP, 1996), p. 60.
“I am to find”: Recollection of Bernard Scharlitt, Neue Freie Presse, May 25, 1911.
“The time is coming”: La Grange and Weiss, Glück ohne Ruh’, p. 129.
“In his mature years”: Leon Botstein, “Whose Gustav
Mahler?” in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton UP, 2002), pp. 20–21.
“had to return”: Musical Times, July 1, 1906, p. 486.
“gift to the nation”: LGM3, p. 431.
“Vorbei!”: Ibid., p. 792.
“the highest fee”: Ibid., pp. 661–62.
rehearsals took place in German: Glenn Watkins, Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (University of California Press, 2003), p. 300.
ten thousand people: Ezra Schabas, Theodore Thomas: America’s Conductor and Builder of Orchestras, 1835–1905 (University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 136.
“electric sign” Horowitz, Wagner Nights, p. 210.
two hundred dollars: Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph: From Edison to Stereo (Appleton-Century, 1965), p. 146.
million copies: Fred Bronson, Billboard’s Hottest Hot 100 Hits (Billboard Books, 2003), p. 179.
Telharmonic Hall: Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2002), pp. 44–52.
“anarch of art”: James Huneker, Overtones: A Book of Temperaments (1904; Scribner’s, 1922), dedication page.
White House, Senate: “Richard Strauss Meets the President,” New York Herald, April 27, 1904.
house of Agamemnon: Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Dover, 1966), vol. 2, p. 449.
Wanamaker’s: RSC, p. 252.
“They do things”: “Dr. Strauss at Wanamaker’s,” New York Times, April 17, 1904.
Strauss was promptly pilloried: BGRS, pp. 81–82.
Boxes 27 and 29: “Strauss’s ‘Salome’ the First Time Here,” New York Times, Jan. 23, 1907.
J. P. Morgan’s daughter: Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (Random House, 1999), pp. 561–62.
“man of middle life”: “‘Salome’ Condemned,” New York Times, Jan. 24, 1907.
“indefinable dread”: “Strauss’s ‘Salome’ the First Time Here.”
fogbank: “Message from Out the Fog: Says Puccini Is Off the Hook and Hopes to Be in Town To-day,” New York Times, Jan. 18, 1907.