The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
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“Bret Harte’s novels”: “Puccini Just in Time,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 1907.
“coon songs”: “Puccini Hears Coon Songs,” New York Times, Feb. 25, 1907.
black minstrel: On the “exotic” sources of The Girl of the Golden West, see Annie J. Randall and Rosalind Gray Davis, Puccini and “The Girl”: History and Reception of “The Girl of the Golden West” (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
“German atmosphere”: Theresa M. Collins, Otto Kahn: Art, Money, and Modern Time (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 83. See also “Conried Resigns as Opera Director,” New York Times, Jan. 24, 1908.
Philharmonic was reconstituted: Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (Norton, 2005), pp. 185–88.
“completely unprejudiced”: Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed. Knud Martner, trans. Eithne Wilkins, Ernst Kaiser, and Bill Hopkins (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), p. 319.
On a good night: AMM, p. 166.
Philharmonic musician: Recollections of Benjamin Kohon, in Lebrecht, Mahler Remembered, p. 294.
“Wherever I am”: Ibid., p. 300.
“I see everything”: Martner, Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, p. 329.
“I have found that people”: Ferruccio Busoni, Letters to His Wife, trans. Rosamond Ley (Edward Arnold, 1938), p. 182.
“victim of the dollar”: “A Victim of Dollars,” New York Times, May 21, 1911.
“You cannot imagine”: Zoltan Roman, Gustav Mahler’s American Years, 1907–1911: A Documentary History (Pendragon, 1989), p. 475.
“I have never worked”: Ibid., p. 474.
Charles W. Kruger Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler: Chronique d’une vie, vol. 3, Le génie foudroyé (Fayard, 1984), p. 247; see also “Thousands Mourn Dead Fire Chief,” New York Times, Feb. 17, 1908.
Strauss was stunned: Wilhelm, Richard Strauss, An Intimate Portrait, p. 106.
“antipode”: Walter Thomas, Richard Strauss und seine Zeitgenossen (Langen Müller, 1964), p. 155.
“this aspiring”: GMRS, p. 153.
“about” Mahler: Tim Ashley, Richard Strauss (Phaidon, 1999), pp. 116–17.
2. Doctor Faust
“Lies, Frau Marta”: Lawrence Weschler, “Paradise: The Southern California Idyll of Hitler’s Cultural Exiles,” in Exiles + Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (Abrams, 1997), p. 346.
“lost paradise”: Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of “Doctor Faustus,” trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (Knopf, 1961), p. 229.
“extremely difficult”: Thomas Mann, Tagebücher, 28.5.1946–31.12.1948, ed. Inge Jens (Fischer, 1989), p. 56.
“I have found”: Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus (Fischer, 1971), p. 477.
“You will lead”: Ibid., p. 244.
“bloodless intellectuality”: Ibid., p. 373.
“I can see through walls”: Oscar Levant, The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (Bantam, 1966), p. 120.
“Great art”: Hanns Eisler, “Notes on ‘Dr. Faustus,’” in Hanns Eisler: A Miscellany, ed. David Blake (Harwood, 1995), p. 252.
“Strange regions”: Thomas Mann, Stories of Three Decades, trans. Helen T. Lowe-Porter (Knopf, 1936), p. 283.
“Do you think”: Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories, trans. David Luke (Bantam, 1988), p. 87.
Vienna was the scene: On aspects of fin-de-siècle Vienna, see Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Vintage, 1981); Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (Touchstone, 1973); William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind (University of California Press, 1972); Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge UP, 1989); and Steven Beller, ed., Rethinking Vienna 1900 (Berghahn Books, 2001).
“truth-seekers”: Carl Schorske, talk at the symposium “Wozzeck: The Play—The Opera—Past and Present,” Princeton University, July 8, 2003.
“critical modernists”: Allan Janik, “Vienna 1900 Revisited: Paradigms and Problems,” in Beller, Rethinking Vienna 1900, pp. 40–41.
“Now with my murderer”: Georg Trakl, Dichtungen und Briefe, ed. Walther Killy and Hans Szklenar (Müller, 1969), p. 132.
Peter Altenberg: Andrew Barker, “Berg and the Cultural Politics of ‘Vienna 1900,’” in The Cambridge Companion to Berg, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge UP, 1997), p. 25.
“If I must choose”: Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, p. 91.
“the greatest man”: Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (Braumüller, 1919), p. 456.
Schoenberg and his pupils: For Webern reading Weininger, see HMAW, p. 113.
“Everything purely aesthetic”: Wolfgang Gratzer, Zur “Wunderlichen Mystik” Alban Bergs: Eine Studie (Böhlau, 1993), pp. 97–98.
“Ethics and aesthetics”: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (Routledge, 1981), p. 183. Compare with Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, p. 320: “…alle Ästhetik doch ein Geschöpf der Ethik bleibt .”
84 percent: William Weber, “The Rise of the Classical Repertoire in Nineteenth-Century Orchestral Concerts,” in The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations, ed. Joan Peyser (Billboard Books, 2000), p. 376.
“If it is art”: ASSI, p. 124.
“budding insanity”: Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, Volume II: 1878–1883, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 963.
“Everything that is sacred”: Henry Weinfield, introduction to Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems (University of California Press, 1994), p. xii.
“Music really ought”: Debussy Letters, ed. François Lesure and Roger Nichols, trans. Roger Nichols (Harvard UP, 1987), p. 52.
Debussy at Mallarmé’s gatherings: See François Lesure, Claude Debussy: Biographie critique (Klincksieck, 1994), p. 115. For more on Debussy and the occult, see Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge UP, 1982), pp. 14–17.
Universal Exposition: See Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (University of Rochester Press, 2005), pp. 165–95.
“contained all gradations”: Claude Debussy, Correspondance, 1884–1918, ed. François Lesure (Hermann, 1993), p. 107.
Turner and Whistler: See Leon Botstein, “Beyond the Illusions of Realism: Painting and Debussy’s Break with Tradition,” in Debussy and His World, ed. Jane F. Fulcher (Princeton UP, 2001), pp. 141–79.
“clear…unclear”: Christopher C. Hill, “Consonance and Dissonance,” in The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Michael Randel (Harvard UP, 1986), p. 198.
The interval of the octave: Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, trans. Alexander J. Ellis (Dover Books, 1954), pp. 188–89.
Debussy and Helmholtz: Gary W. Don, “Brilliant Colors Provocatively Mixed: Overtone Structures in the Music of Debussy,” Music Theory Spectrum 23:1 (Spring 2001), pp. 61–73.
“Long shall my discourse”: Mallarmé, Collected Poems, p. 39.
“I love you”: See the passage from 42 to 44 of Act IV.
cante jondo: For Debussy’s aptitude for Spanish music, see Carol A. Hess, Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 176.
The son of a publisher: See Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford UP, 1999), p. 66.
“Satie was”: Notes to the recording Erik Satie, Vol. 2: Early Piano Works (Philips 420 472–2).
“smell of the lamp”: Debussy Letters, p. 117.
S volume: Dika Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections, 1938–1976 (Pendragon, 1980), p. 316.
Zemlinsky’s parents: Antony Beaumont, Zemlinsky (Cornell UP, 2000), pp. 3–10.
desecration of Parsifal: Erich Alban Berg, Alban Berg: Leben und Werk in Daten und Bildern (Insel, 1976), p. 89.
“paradox of the most violent description” and “Take good care”: AMM, p.
78.
“Why am I still writing”: Richard Specht, Gustav Mahler (Schuster und Loeffler, 1913), p. 29.
“Thank you”: Josef Bohuslav Foerste, Der Pilger: Erinnerungen eines Musikers (Artia, 1955), p. 681.
“very talented”: Roswitha Schlötterer, Richard Strauss, Max von Schillings: Ein Briefwechsel (W. Ludwig, 1987), p. 78.
“blessedly light up”: Nuria Nono-Schoenberg, ed., Arnold Schönberg, 1874–1951: Lebensgeschichte in Begegnungen (Ritter Klagenfurt, 1992), p. 45.
“I would like to take”: HHS, p. 66.
“He was very friendly”: Arnold Schoenberg, “Attempt at a Diary,” trans. Anita Luginbühl, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 9:1 ( June 1986), p. 29.
vocal score: Schoenberg’s Salome score can be seen at ASC.
“Perhaps in twenty years’ time”: Willi Reich, Schoenberg: A Critical Biography, trans. Leo Black (Praeger, 1971), p. 25.
“one of us”: Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle (Cornell UP, 2002), p. 73.
“I must not”: The translation is by Philip Miller, published in the booklet for Glenn Gould’s recording of Schoenberg Lieder (Sony Classical SM2K 52 667). Date comes from manuscript at ASC.
affair with Gerstl: Bryan R. Simms, “‘My Dear Hagerl’: Self-Representation in Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2,” Nineteenth-Century Music 26:3 (Spring 2003), p. 267.
Gerstl’s suicide: Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Richard Gerstl, 1883–1908 (Kunstforum der Bank Austria, 1993), pp. 182–86; and Beaumont, Zemlinsky, pp. 164–66.
“I have only one hope”: Simms, “‘My Dear Hagerl,’” p. 276.
“I have cried”: JASR, pp. 53–55.
four-note figures: Stuckenschmidt identifies the notes A, D, G-sharp, and their various transpositions as the “primal cell” of Schoenberg’s early music (HHS, p. 525), and he relates it to the four-note cell that appears in the Second Quartet’s scherzo (F-sharp, F, C, B, and transpositions), throughout The Book of Hanging Gardens, and many times thereafter. The possible derivation of this cell from tritonally opposed tonalities can be glimpsed in the sketches for the Second Chamber Symphony—for example, in the juxtaposition of F-flat major and B-flat minor on p. 34 [Sk212] of Sketchbook 3, ASC.
Maximilian Kronberger: See Norton, Secret Germany, pp. 326–41.
“I feel the heat”: Nono-Schoenberg, Arnold Schönberg, p. 70.
fistfight: LGM3, pp. 608–609.
“seat-rattling”: Egon Wellesz, Arnold Schönberg (Heinrichshofen, 1985), p. 31.
“Stop it!”: Martin Eybl, Die Befreiung des Augenblicks: Schönbergs Skandalkonzerte 1907 und 1908(Böhlau, 2004), pp. 177–87. See also NSM, p. 87; and Willi Reich, Arnold Schönberg; oder, Der konservative Revolutionär (Fritz Molden, 1968), p. 54.
Heinrich Schenker: Egon Wellesz and Emmy Wellesz, Egon Wellesz: Leben und Werk (Zsolnay, 1981), p. 57.
Liebstöckl: For more on this character, see Julius Korngold, Die Korngolds in Wien: Der Musikkritiker und das Wunderkind: Aufzeichnungen (M & T, 1991), pp. 73–74.
“I have your quartet”: Mahler’s Unknown Letters, ed. Herta Blaukopf, trans. Richard Stokes (Northeastern UP, 1987), p. 175. For Mahler’s reactions to the Five Pieces, see Specht, Gustav Mahler, pp. 28–29; for “If I go,” see AMM, p. 198.
“There is no architecture” and “daring experiments”: ASC.
one hundred marks: Anton Webern, Briefe an Heinrich Jalowetz, ed. Ernst Lichtenhahn (Schott, 1999), p. 163.
“shoveling snow”: Alma Mahler, Mein Leben (Fischer, 1963), pp. 223–24. For Erwin Stein’s involvement, see Stein to Alma Mahler, March 28, 1914, in the Alma Mahler-Werfel Collection, University of Pennsylvania.
Schoenberg snapped: ASL, p. 51.
“Schoenberg! Schoenberg!”: For accounts of the Gurre-Lieder premiere, see Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered, p. 237; Reich, Arnold Schönberg; oder, Der konservative Revolutionär, p. 99; and Nono-Schoenberg, Arnold Schönberg, p. 120.
“huddled in the most distant”: Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered, p. 237.
“rather indifferent”: ASSI, p. 41.
Self-Portrait, Walking: See Esther da Costa Meyer and Fred Wasserman, eds., Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider ( Jewish Museum, 2003), p. 147.
“Loud laughter”: Foerster, Der Pilger, p. 682.
“The public was laughing”: Neue Freie Presse, April 22, 1913, p. 13.
irritating flash of light: Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, pp. 168–70.
“When a periodic”: Fred Lerdahl, “Spatial and Psychoacoustic Factors in Atonal Prolongation,” Current Musicology 63 (1999), p. 18.
“the will to annihilate”: Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (University of California Press, 1983), p. 409.
“Art belongs”: JASR, p. 89.
“I strive for”: Ferruccio Busoni, Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Antony Beaumont (Faber, 1987), p. 389.
“colors, noises”: Letter to Alma Mahler, Oct. 7, 1910, in the Alma Mahler-Werfel 57, University of Pennsylvania.
treated like idiots: See David Josef Bach’s sardonic riposte to Schoenberg’s propaganda in “Der neuste Fall Schönberg,” Arbeiter Zeitung, Jan. 2, 1909. For more, see Leon Botstein, “Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870–1914” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1985), p. 1208.
“emancipation of the dissonance”: ASSI, p. 216.
“We shall have no rest”: Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, p. 314.
North Pole: Radio lecture on the Variations for Orchestra, March 22, 1931, ASC.
“MUSIC OF NOISE”: NSM, p. 1021.
“You are proposing”: Busoni, Selected Letters, p. 391.
tonal centricity: For more on this point, see Ethan Haimo, “Schoenberg and the Origins of Atonality,” in Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (University of California Press, 1997), p. 71.
“We broke its neck!”: Anton Webern, The Path to the New Music, ed. Willi Reich (Universal, 1960), p. 48.
“Our age sees”: Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, pp. 1–2.
“inbreeding and incest”: Ibid., p. 314. For other quoted words, see pp. 195–96, 238, and 258.
“[T]he end of the system”: Ibid., p. 196.
“Every living thing”: Ibid., p. 29.
“All that is born”: Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, p. 324.
“homeless phenomena”: Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, p. 258.
“adapts himself”: Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, p. 426.
Ringer has argued: Alexander Ringer, “Assimilation and the Emancipation of Historical Dissonance,” in Brand and Hailey, Constructive Dissonance, pp. 23–34.
“no more and no less”: HMAW, p. 411. See also ASL, p. 92.
“at the center of culture”: Beller, Vienna and the Jews, pp. 216–17.
“This book I have learned”: Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, p. 1.
“Viennese school”: Joseph Auner, “The Second Viennese School as a Historical Concept,” in Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second Viennese School, ed. Bryan R. Simms (Greenwood, 1999), p. 3.
“raised to the tenth”: Schoenberg, “Attempt at a Diary,” p. 39.
sometimes moved ahead: See the opening section of the Quartet of 1905. For more speculation, see Allen Forte, The Atonal Music of Anton Webern (Yale UP, 1998), p. 372.
“reached the farthest”: Webern, Path to the New Music, p. 48.
successive stages of grief: HMAW, p. 126.
Webern and Pelléas: HMAW, p. 104.
“Whereof one cannot speak”: Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 189.
Don’t play the note: HMAW, p. 484.
“Such a dear person”: Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge UP, 1991), p. 17.
“[Berg] wasn’t lacking”: The Memoirs of Elias Canetti (Far
rar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), p. 760.
“sex appeal”: Soma Morgenstern, Alban Berg und seine Idole: Erinnerungen und Briefe, ed. Ingolf Schulte (Aufbau, 1999), p. 343.
Anton Bruckner: Erich Alban Berg, Der unverbesserliche Romantiker: Alban Berg, 1885–1935 (Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1985), p. 25.
George Borgfeldt: Rosemary Hilmar, Alban Berg: Leben und Wirken in Wien bis zu seinen ersten Erfolgen als Komponist (Böhlau, 1978), pp. 15–23. On Hermann Berg’s discovery of the teddy bear, see www.teddybearfriends.co.uk/history-of-teddy-bears.php (accessed Jan. 5, 2007).
His tasks in the year 1911: See The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence: Selected Letters, ed. Juliane Brand, Christopher Hailey, and Donald Harris (Norton, 1987), pp. 3–25.
“Are you composing”: Ibid., p. 44.
He dismissed: For more of Schoenberg’s hostility to the Altenberg cycle, see ibid., p. 257; and Willi Reich, Alban Berg, trans. Cornelius Cardew (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), p. 41.
steal a baton: Reich, Alban Berg, p. 19.
six more times: Ibid., p. 20.
“How I would like”: Mosco Carner, Alban Berg: The Man and the Work (Holmes and Meier, 1983), p. 6.
“rather too obvious”: Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence, p. 143.
“War!”: “Gedanken im Kriege” (Nov. 1914, republished 1915), in Thomas Mann, Politische Schriften und Reden (Fischer, 1968), p. 10.
“war psychosis”: Nono-Schoenberg, Arnold Schönberg, p. 134.
“Now comes the reckoning!”: Aug. 28, 1914, letter, in Alma Mahler-Werfel Collection, University of Pennsylvania.
diary of the weather: “War Clouds Diary,” trans. Paul A. Pisk, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 9:1 ( June 1986), pp. 53–77.
“very shameful”: Carner, Alban Berg, p. 42.
“total material and intellectual”: Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (Ballantine, 1994), p. 321.
Richard Strauss refused: RSRR, pp. 160–61.
“It is sickening”: A Working Friendship: The Correspondence Between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ed. Franz Strauss, Alice Strauss, and Willi Schuh, trans. Hanns Hammelmann and Ewald Osers (Random House, 1961), p. 216.
Patricia Hall notes: Patricia Hall, “Berg’s Sketches and the Inception of Wozzeck: 1914–18,” Musical Times 146 (Autumn 2005), pp. 3–24.