The Devil's Pleasure Palace

by Michael Walsh

  This is the central conundrum of our time. We live in a free society that cannot speak its mind, and we have created an unfree society that cannot admit that fact to itself. Talk about cognitive dissonance. And yet, as in an opera, what is said and what is sung may often be very different things.

  To approach an opera as if it were a play is wrong, because there is an additional and very important level of meaning going on beneath the surface of the words, one that can either reinforce it or completely contradict it. We give creative primacy to the composer in opera and not to the librettist, because it is just this layer of added meaning that distinguishes opera from nearly every other art form except perhaps the cinema at its highest levels. Wagner’s leitmotifs in the Ring—short phrases that stand for particular things (Siegfried’s sword, Wotan’s spear) or concepts (the redemption-by-love motif)—are perhaps the most evident example, and yet composers going back to Mozart employ similar techniques in different ways.

  At the end of the Stone Guest scene in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which the rakehell is finally dragged down to perdition, the orchestra triumphantly thunders out the final chords in the “light” key of D major—not the spooky “dark” of D minor that has attended the Don throughout the opera, from the Overture on. Thus, musically, the triumph is society’s, not the anti-hero’s. For the later Romantics, Don Giovanni was the most important opera of the eighteenth century and the starting point for their efforts in the otherworldly genre. Similarly, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor was highly prized as a passionate excursion into the dark side of tonality.

  In an early scene from the relatively sunnier Così fan tutte, the two men, Ferrando and Guglielmo, declare their love for their fair lady friends, and the orchestration positively vibrates with sexual passion—making their later betrayal of the sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella that much more painful and ironic. Lorenzo da Ponte’s perfectly crafted libretto exudes the rakish cynicism about love we expect from the late eighteenth century, but Mozart’s music transforms it with the warm humanity of the Enlightenment. Così, conceived as a harmless game by its librettist, is transformed by the composer’s music into something deeply, affectingly human—so much so that to this day, stage directors debate whether to return the initial pairs of lovers to each other, or let them stay with the person we’ve watched them falling in love with throughout the show.

  Sometimes no words are needed at all, as in the famous intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana, by Mascagni—a very strong candidate for the greatest three minutes of dramatic instrumental music ever written—the calm before the fatal storm of passion that will take Turridu’s life in a fight over a woman. The music is so potent that it has been used to great dramatic effect by filmmakers: Martin Scorsese chose it to accompany the opening titles of Raging Bull, and Francis Ford Coppola used it to underscore the lonely death of Michael Corleone at the end of The Godfather trilogy. It is music that guides the doomed hero of each of these sagas to an end that he not only knows is coming, but that he also in some sense has willed for himself as the only possible outcome.

  In other words, what is unsaid is nonetheless communicated in music and is far more important than what is said. The context and subtext contain the real message. This is true on both sides of today’s political battles. On the one side, we have the remnants—scratched and bleeding, but still partially cohesive—of the old American Christian culture, largely Protestant but with a strong admixture of Catholics; on the other is the far less numerous but culturally potent Unholy Left, adhering to its own secular religion, although it professes atheism. As with the battle between radical Islam and the West, one side has explicitly avowed war on the other, while the other, more powerful, refuses to acknowledge it or even conceive of it. Which side, under these circumstances, is more likely to be successful?

  In retrospect, it is instructive, upon reviewing the works of the Frankfurt School scholars, to see how poorly they argue, even in the areas of their putative specialties. Rhetoric directed against their enemies can just as fittingly be applied to them. When Adorno denounces “a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members,” he thinks he is talking about Nazi Germany, but he could just as easily and accurately be talking about Soviet Russia, ruled for nearly a century by the extremely dead hands of Karl Marx and the Devil’s disciple, Lenin. Or, alternatively, he could be speaking of the culture of abortion today in the United States, with its horrific death toll and a population inured against equating “choice” with death.

  Theodor Adorno (born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; he later adopted the surname of his Corsican Catholic mother) presents an especially interesting case. They say of newspapers that a reader tends to believe most of what he reads until he comes to a story that concerns his own area of professional or personal experience, and then he laughs and tosses the paper in the trash. I spent a quarter-century as a music critic for three American publications, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and Time magazine, and to say that my own work was never in the slightest influenced by Adorno would be an understatement. Nor did he influence any of my colleagues, as far as I could tell. Who could possibly be impressed by such a pedestrian, quotidian observation as this parade of clichés and banal wordplay, from Adorno’s essay “Music and Language: A Fragment” (1992):

  Music resembles a language. Expressions such as musical idiom, musical intonation are not simply metaphors. But music is not identical with language. The resemblance points to something essential, but vague. Anyone who takes it literally will be seriously misled.

  In the world of practical, as opposed to theoretical, music criticism, Adorno is a non-entity, a far lesser figure than, say, Wagner’s nemesis, Eduard Hanslick; the erudite Americans James Huneker, Harold C. Schonberg, and Joseph Kerman; and one of the earliest and best music critics, the great composer Robert Schumann. Like every other member of the Frankfurt School, Adorno lies in his grave largely unread.

  My own mentor, Schonberg—for many years the chief music critic of the New York Times—used to say that critics ought to be remembered for their hits, not their misses, the talents they discovered, not the talents they overrated. In my case, I am proud to have championed the works of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams at a time when they were scorned by others as “needle-stuck-in-groove” minimalists. Schumann’s famous hailing of the young Chopin—“hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”—remains the classic of the genre, written in Schumann’s very first published review:

  It seems to me, moreover, that every composer has his own particular way of arranging the notes on paper; Beethoven looks different to the eye than Mozart, just as the prose of Jean Paul differs from that of Goethe. But now I felt as I were being watched by strange, wondering eyes, the eyes of flowers, of basilisks, peacock-eyes, young girls’ eyes. In a few places the light became clearer—I thought I could discern Mozart’s Là ci darem la mano wrapped in a hundred chords. I saw Leporello blinking at me and Don Giovanni flying past in a white cloak.

  The piece in question, Chopin’s Op. 2, was the Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” from Don Giovanni, for piano and orchestra, with which the young French-Polish composer announced his arrival on the European musical scene in 1831. Chopin and Schumann were both born in 1810, a few months apart, with Schumann the younger. And yet, as the music critic of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung and a budding composer himself, he was keenly sensitive to, and appreciative of, contemporary musical trends. Schumann and Chopin had little stylistically in common, especially pianistically, but Schumann knew genius when he heard it, perhaps because he was one himself.

  Contrast Schumann’s poetic description of Chopin’s gloss on Mozart with these plodding and flatly wrong observations from Adorno (one of Alban Berg’s composition pupils and an Arnold Schoenberg devotee, one should remember) when discussing the contemporary music of his time. Apologies in advance for the mind-numbing prose (ably translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor) of Adorno’s P
hilosophy of New Music (1949):

  The best works of Béla Bartók, who in many respects sought to reconcile Schoenberg and Stravinsky, are probably superior to Stravinsky’s in density and ampleness. And the second neoclassical generation—names such as Paul Hindemith and Darius Milhaud—has adjusted to the general tendency of the age with less scruple and thus, at least to all appearances, reflects it with greater fidelity than does the movement’s own leader, with his cloaked and therefore absurdly exaggerated conformism. This is not, however, because historical priority is their due and the others are derivative of them but because they alone, by virtue of their uncompromising rigor, drove the impulses that inhere in their works so far that these works become legible as ideas of the thing itself.

  It is difficult to take this gibberish (like the meaningless but emphatically Marxist phrase “false musical consciousness”) seriously, either as musical criticism or philosophy, despite the whiff of Kant. Bartók has little or nothing to do either with Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the two great rival expatriates in Southern California when Adorno also was living in Los Angeles. The German Schoenberg, the father of the twelve-tone system (and the unhappy model for the mad, syphilitic serialist composer Adrian Leverkühn in Mann’s last novel, Doctor Faustus), and the Russian Stravinsky were rival leaders of two camps: one adhering to the new “comprehensive” system of egalitarian twelve-tone composition, and the other representing an older wing of the avant-garde, now tamed and transmogrified into neoclassicism. Stravinsky would later turn to the twelve-tone system himself in such later works as Agon, signaling a surrender to the “arc of history.”

  Bartók, by contrast, was a stubbornly Hungarian composer and musicological researcher, making liberal use of Magyar—not Romany—folk elements in his compositions. Outside of Hungary, he established no “school of” and left few acolytes. Neither was he as formally innovative as either Schoenberg or Stravinsky, although his music is every bit the equal of theirs technically and a good deal superior to Schoenberg’s, expressively. About the only relationship between Bartók and Stravinsky might be their shared interest in folk music (much greater on Bartók’s part) and that both wrote early ballets. It’s also hard to see how either Milhaud or Hindemith figures into the argument, since those two composers have little or nothing do with each other.

  But then Adorno wasn’t very much interested in the musical side of music criticism; rather, it was the larger philosophical issues that obsessed him. Music just happened to be the vehicle for his musings, “new music” in particular (specifically the so-called Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern). Proving to a largely uninterested world the value of the dodecaphonic (twelve-tone) method of composition became Adorno’s particular axe to grind, and he concludes his essay on “Schoenberg and Progress” in this way:

  The world is the Sphinx and the artist is the blinded Oedipus, and the artworks resemble his wise answer, which topples the Sphinx into the abyss. Thus, all art stands opposed to mythology. Its natural “material” contains the “answer,” the one possible and correct answer, always already contained, though indistinctly. . . . New music sacrifices itself to this. It has taken all the darkness and the guilt of the world on itself. All its happiness is in the knowledge of unhappiness; all its beauty is in denial of the semblance of the beautiful. No one, neither individuals nor groups, wants to have anything to do with it. It dies away unheard, without an echo. Around music as it is heard, time springs together in a radiant crystal, while unheard it tumbles perniciously through empty time. Toward this latter experience, which mechanical music undergoes hour by hour, new music is spontaneously aimed: toward absolute oblivion. It is the true message in the bottle.

  And “absolute oblivion” is about where the “new music” has ended up. Theoretically dominant in my student days at the Eastman School of Music, in Rochester, New York, the works of the Second Viennese School are rarely played in concert today. Berg, Adorno’s teacher, remains in the repertory, especially via his operas Wozzeck (not twelve-tone, except in one section) and Lulu, but Schoenberg’s influence as a teacher has waned almost to the vanishing point, his “comprehensive” method of composing with all twelve tones now all but abandoned by twenty-first-century composers.

  From a distance, one hears the echoes of a degenerate Wagnerism in Adorno’s simultaneously overwrought and stultifying writings—a Wagnerism evident in the only major work of Schoenberg still performed with any regularity today, the early tone poem Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). “Absolute oblivion” is nothing if not Wagnerian; the desire for death is never very far from the same Central European ethos that gave us both the Frankfurt School and Hitler’s Reich, however much they might appear to otherwise oppose each other. The modern suicide cult of the Left owes a great deal to these leftist movements: a desire to sink slowly, lifeless, to the ground in the manner of a Wagnerian heroine.

  But when you look closely at Adorno’s writing, as in these all-too-representative excerpts, you see a hollowness at the core: fire from ice, amounting to nothing. Adorno’s effect on the musical life of his time was negligible: special pleading for a “system” that had found only theoretical favor and that has now lost even that. Its pretensions to “comprehensitivity” destroyed, we can now see this “system” as a form of intellectual charlatanism, a studied fascination with process and minutiae that bespeaks the true soul of the born bureaucrat—the man who does nothing in particular, and to no societal good, but who by his own lights does it very well.

  In Adorno’s music criticism, there is plenty of criticism but precious little about music, all Faust and no Heinrich. It is as if the art existed purely for his exegetical pleasure, an opportunity to torment the “awful German language” (in Mark Twain’s famous phrase) the way Mephisto tormented poor Faust. (Mr. Morgan, in Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: “Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”)

  Complexity comes with the language, the territory, and the mind-set. Germany is a land in which a pianist cannot properly probe the depths of the late Beethoven piano sonatas until he is a decade or so past the age that Beethoven was when he died (fifty-seven); Liszt, somehow, managed to play the thorniest of them all, the “Hammerklavier,” in Paris in 1836, when he was about twenty-five, and he ran through most of the rest of the cycle in the 1840s. Today, an eighty-year-old conductor might barely, just barely, be able to plumb the depths of The Magic Flute, written when Mozart was thirty-five.

  Adorno is very much a child of his time and of his native language, his sentences crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic like a steamship line with no home port. The facile twist, which he learned from Marx, is one of his stocks-in-trade, as if he were a cheeky New York Times op-ed columnist: “All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire” (Minima Moralia). Defending his beloved new music, he is so caught up in the majesty of his own analysis that he inadvertently makes the case for the opposition: “Among the reproaches that they obstinately repeat, the most prevalent is the charge of intellectualism, the claim that new music springs from the head, not from the heart or the ear; or likewise, that the music is not sonorously imagined but only worked out on paper. The poverty of these clichés is manifest.” This is a near-perfect description of the bulk of Schoenberg’s output and most of what followed him: music worked out on paper.

  Adorno seems to have learned nothing from his teacher, Berg, who showed in works such as his Lyric Suite and Violin Concerto to what magnificent use some of Schoenberg’s theories and methods could be put in the hands of a proper musician. “They are put forward as if the tonal idiom of the past 350 years were itself given by nature,” Adorno complained in Philosophy of New Music, “and as if it were an attack on nature to go beyond what has been habitually ground in, whereas, on the contrary, what has been gro
und in bears witness to social pressure.” On the contrary!

  Black is white, up is down, war is peace. What is, isn’t; and what isn’t, is. Who are you going to believe? Adorno, or your lying ears? Like Faust, we have rejected the familiar for the unknown and then, belatedly, found out we didn’t much care for it after all. But, just as it was when I was a music student, what was good for us had to be plainly better than not only what we liked but also what we felt in our hearts. A System had arrived, express delivery from Darmstadt (one of the postwar centers of “new music” after the war). Like all systems, it purported to solve all the problems of the earlier systems, to supersede them. Like Islam, it would be the seal of revelation, after which nothing further would be necessary. Thereafter, it would just be a matter of study and mastery, with an infinite world of expressivity lying just beyond the horizon, once everyone had completely rejected the old way of thinking and composing and adopted the new.

  The irony was, as many of us noticed at the time, that there was little difference aurally between rigorously serialized music (in which no note could be repeated before the other eleven in the “tone row” had been heard) and what was called aleatoric, or “chance,” music (in which many of the musical lines were simply improvised in an often random and haphazard fashion). That is to say, complete control of the material and a near-complete lack of control curiously produced more or less the same aural results. Audiences couldn’t really tell the difference, so why bother?

  The answer from the serialists was: because. Because a great deal of intellectual work had gone into the structure of the dodecaphonic piece, worked out on paper; it could not be compared with chance music, even if there was a resemblance in performance. One was “deep,” the other was not. And both were superior to the tonal idiom of the past 350 years because . . . they were new.