Forbidden Music

by Michael Haas

  Max Brod and Theodor Adorno, among others, have written about the ‘Jewishness’ of Mahler's music. How ‘Jewish’ it might be is less important than how liberating it was for the following generation. Nevertheless, the inner fights of Mahler with his Jewish destiny are illuminated by Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Mahler's confidante from 1890 to 1902. She gives an account in her unedited journals of Mahler relating a nightmare he had as an eight-year-old, in which Ahasver, the ‘Wandering Jew’, tries to force his walking stick into the hands of the terrified young Gustav. The symbolism speaks for itself.39 Mahler's nervousness about his Jewishness has been much debated. In addition to rejecting Leo Blech for fear of taking on a second Jew at the opera, we have the instances in which he told Bruno Walter at various times to change his surname from Schlesinger, to convert and to serve in the military as a means of deflecting the mendacity of anti-Semites. Far from accentuating his Jewishness, as Alma claimed, he was well aware of having to keep it under wraps when necessary. He shuddered at the sight of kaftan-wearing, bearded Jews from Eastern Europe and refused to identify with them. Yet as Korngold rhetorically asked regarding the Third Symphony: ‘What does the music tell us?’

  Richard Taruskin is of the opinion that after Mahler, Germany and Austria handed the symphony as a musical ideal to the Slavs, Anglo-Americans and Scandinavians.40 As we shall see, exiled Austro-German composers did return to the symphony, but mostly with limited success. Mahler, however, had cleared a path that was wide enough for the next generation of Jewish composers to explore. Having the way opened to follow him, it was no longer necessary to imitate him.

  If Mahler, like Heine before him, saw conversion as his billet d'entrée to opportunity, Schoenberg would, with his reconversion to the religion of his birth, declare the opposite. Though Hitler provided Schoenberg with an immediate motivation, Mahler provided an inheritance of such undeniably great and original music that reconversion to Judaism could be understood as an act of defiance. This was one of Mahler's most remarkable, and as yet unsung, accomplishments.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Jugendstil School of Schoenberg, Schreker, Zemlinsky and Weigl

  Art is individualism and individualism is a destructive and corrupting power. It is in this fact that we discover its monstrous significance. What it's attempting to destroy and corrupt is the pathetic monotony of conventionality, the enslavement of habit, the tyranny of decorum and the degradation of man to ‘machine’. … Ideas about art are understandably taken from what we have known of art up to the present, whereas a new work is beautiful specifically because it represents something never witnessed before….

  Die Kunst ist Individualismus und der Individualismus ist eine zerstörende, zersetzende Kraft. Darin liegt seine ungeheure Bedeutung. Denn was er zerstören, zu zersetzen sucht, ist die armselige Eintönigkeit des Typus, die Sklaverei der Gewohnheit, die Tyrannei der Sitte und die Erniedrigung der Menschen auf ‘Maschine’. … Denn die Ideen über die Kunst sind doch naturgemäß aus dem genommen, was die Kunst eben bis zu diesem Augenblick gewesen ist, während das neue Kunstwerk eben dadurch schön ist, daß es ist, was die Kunst bis dahin nie gewesen ist….

  Peter Altenberg, unpublished manuscript

  Fin de siècle

  According to Bertha Zuckerkandl, the popular cultural philosopher and historian Egon Friedell ‘had both the misfortune and good luck to be an Austrian. Misfortune because Austrian genius has rarely, if ever, succeeded in obtaining domestic recognition, and good luck because Austria, as no other place, provided a unique hotbed of creativity that allowed uninhibited growth of vision, originality and individuality.‘1 Zuckerkandl could have been referring to any of the Viennese composers in the title of this chapter, particularly Arnold Schoenberg.

  Describing the Vienna of 1901, the year in which Schoenberg left the city to work at Ernst von Wohlzogen's Überbrettl cabaret in Berlin, William Johnston, in The Austrian Mind, mentioned the prevalent atmosphere as one of ‘therapeutic nihilism’,2 a medical term that refers to a state in which the patient retained a debilitating condition out of fear of applying any treatment. Fear of change was so traumatising that it was preferable to dwell on the inevitably fatal outcome if change did not take place; stagnation, however, was not a survival option. The music critic Paul Stefan, the artist Oskar Kokoschka and the poet Peter Altenberg were just a few of the chroniclers of the period who despaired of Vienna's inability to accept the change that they and many other Viennese were busy trying to bring about.3

  Glimpses of ‘therapeutic nihilism’ can be found in the Viennese press at the turn of the century. On 6 May 1890, in a feuilleton (signed by a triangle of asterisks), we encounter an early mention of the term ‘fin de siècle’ in the Neue Freie Presse:

  The nineteenth century is old and tired and draws towards its end. Some may note a certain lightness of the old lady and claim that despite the gravity of the war budget and the eternal issues surrounding the problems of the working classes, she's dancing merrily into her grave. Whether celebrating or complaining, the final foot-steps of the approaching end can be clearly heard; the last decade is upon us and soon even this will have flowed past unnoticed with only the pages of the calendar left in a heap on the floor. Inevitably such a transition from one age to another is anticipated as a major world-changing event, though in fact, it isn't that at all. The hands of the clock move at a hardly perceptible rate. Time won't stop for even a second until reaching midnight 1899 with the mighty voice of Actus dropping the curtain at the end of the play, only to draw it up again offering us a new scene. […] Among the feelings of remorse for the dying century, we also sense the anticipation of the century to come. When the year 1900 is finally upon us […] a suspended harmony resonates inside our being, mixing the tones of impending death along with those of a heightened urge to live.

  To define this spiritual state, the Parisians have come up with a term that appeared several years ago and now […] can be heard in every street and by-way. There is no paper, no novel, no play, in which one thing or another is not praised or condemned as ‘fin de siècle’. This new concept, cobbled together by three words, can be used for either gracing or disgracing its object. It's not possible to translate and nobody is prepared to venture what it actually means. If someone were to mention that a person or a thing was thoroughly ‘fin de siècle’, then it apparently implies that said person or thing is capable of sensing the end of the century, or already senses what is to come afterwards. One thinks of the bloom of fresh life shining from beneath the pallor of death. But can't one find a single word for this concept? The best way to understand what is meant by the expression ‘fin de siècle’ is to examine how the Parisians themselves use it: Whatever is more modern than modern, whatever is taller than tall and whatever trumps the very newest, the most inconspicuous along with the biggest – all of these various things are referred to as ‘fin de siècle’.4

  Subsequent articles in the Neue Freie Presse published in 18995 and 1900 deal with both of these aspects: the decadence of the dying century and the invigorating dynamism of the new. Indeed, the (anonymous) article from 30 December 1900 was meant to be an obituary for the very phrase ‘fin de siècle’, which had been so over-used since 1890, that the feuilletonist couldn't wait for the emergence of the new century when it would no longer be applied.6

  Contemporary discussions and debates on modernism from this period provide scant preparation for what went into creating Schoenberg's musical world. An example of what was understood by the concept of ‘modern’ comes in an article from the Neue Freie Presse for 19 and 20 November 1900 in which the former director of Vienna's Burgtheater, Max Burckhard, writes on modern art. He introduces Darwinian elements and attempts to show that modern art is an organic and logical progression that fits neatly into the laws of natural selection. He pits artistic realism – which offered unvarnished portrayals of life among the lower orders – against the art of the aesthetes appreciated solely for its innate loveliness. He sees modern dev
elopments moving towards something he calls ‘neo-idealistic’, a movement that maintains the portrayal of brutal realism while remaining sensitive to aesthetic beauty.7 If this is a description of the emerging cultural landscape at the turn of the century, it hardly encompasses the spirit that would erupt in a work such as Schoenberg's 1909 melodrama Erwartung.

  In 1896, the Neue Freie Presse continues its examination of ‘modern’ art with an extensive survey of the concept of ‘Socialist art’.8 By the turn of the century, we have articles entitled, variously, ‘Insanity on the stage‘9 and ‘Sick Art‘10, yet in none do we have the slightest premonition of the abandonment of accepted artistic conventions that characterised the Schoenbergian revolution. Indeed, ‘modern’ art meant reacting against the Aestheticism that had gone before, by showing sometimes awful and repugnant visions of real life. Yet these visions continued to be expressed – whether in painting, drama or music – in language that was familiar to all. An example of the sort of musical ‘modernism’ debated in feuilletons during the early years of the century can be found in Eugen d'Albert's opera Tiefland (first performed in 1903). This offered a level of sexual frisson and social realism that was very different from, say, the Pre-Raphaelite beauty of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande of 1902, though Debussy's score was far more daring than d'Albert's re-working of verismo for the German public. Even Stravinsky, eight years younger than Schoenberg, was not yet composing music that gave any indication of where Schoenberg was leading: compare Stravinsky's Fireworks with Schoenberg's Erwartung, both first performed in 1909. Arguably Richard Strauss's Elektra, also given its premiere in 1909, comes close – more so than anything by Debussy, Reger, Mahler, or even Bartók and Stravinsky at the time. Nothing up to this point had prepared the world for Schoenberg's violent rejection of traditional tonality.

  Ethics and the End of Time

  Only from Berta Zuckerkandl in 1902, when she states in a casual reference to the Flemish painter George Minne that ‘artists are builders of our ethical properties’,11 do we get a hint of the thinking behind the impending musical upheaval and begin to sense a Schoenbergian view of art as something that must reflect as disturbing, an inner truth, whatever the consequences.

  This ethical element emerging in the arts would take hold and resonate clearly in Vienna at the time. The notorious Sex and Character, published in 1903 by the Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger, followed by his spectacular suicide at the age of 23, was a demonstration of ethical perversion, though much admired at the time for its sheer audacity. Both the young Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hitler admired Weininger for taking the ‘ethical’ consequences of the spectacularly nihilistic conclusions of his dissertation: Hitler because of Weiniger's unbridled anti-Semitism and Wittgenstein because suicide seemed the only ethical response to an imperfect world.

  A more realistic representation of Weininger's hold on early twentieth-century thinking can be found in the autobiographical novel Die Flucht ins Mittelmäßige12 by the Bavarian political exile Oskar Maria Graf, in which he reproduces a fictional exchange on the subject of Weininger among a group of middle-aged exiles in a 1950s New York cocktail party. A former Austrian refugee comments:

  When I was a student at the University in Vienna, Otto Weininger was en vogue. […] It followed therefore that every seriously intellectual Jew must also be an anti-Semite, since Weininger's own anti-Semitism was absolutely iron-clad! Reading him today, one wonders how the Nazis never chanced upon him. I even heard that he was also homosexual, which explains his hatred of women: in fact, by and large, his book gives us nothing more than a gruesome mix of varying degrees and types of hatred. To Weininger, Jews and women were simply less than human. […] Yet in the middle of this pseudoscientific nonsense one finds amazing shafts of blazing truth.13

  Needless to say, Karl Kraus, the quintessential anti-Semitic Jewish intellectual, found much to admire in Sex and Character; both Weininger and Kraus were perfect embodiments of Johnston's ‘therapeutic nihilism’.

  Another important example of the overpowering ethical force that drove creative thinking in Vienna's fin de siècle was the 1908 essay Ornament and Crime by the architect Adolf Loos. It was to become a manifesto against the inorganic and non-functional use of the merely decorative in design prevalent in Habsburg Vienna. Propulsion of these ethical forces was provided by Karl Kraus's satirical periodical Die Fackel – launched in 1899 – which attacked the hypocrisy of the day in all of its numerous and often contradictory manifestations.

  Ultimately, the position of ethics within the intellectual and artistic dialogue of the day was hammered home by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, conceived during his time at the Front during World War One and completed in 1918. In Sentence No. 6,421 of the Tractatus we read that ‘Ethics and aesthetics are the same’. Schoenberg's Harmonielehre from 1911 grows out of the unyielding ethical positions already taken by Kraus, Loos and even Weininger. The inner truth it demands went far beyond the outer truths represented by the Naturalists or social realists. The nature of this particular ethical element being applied to art was a relatively new dimension. With Kraus, Schoenberg and Wittgenstein coming from families representing varying degrees of Jewish assimilation, it can be argued that ethics was part of their intellectual baggage. An inner sensibility attuned to a deep awareness of justice, combined with a clear understanding of right and wrong, is hardly a surprising attribute to be found among people who were marginalised for so many centuries. Even Wittgenstein, though brought up a Christian, gives us the much quoted dictum ‘whereof one cannot speak, therefore one must remain silent’,14 an apparent resonance with the Jewish prohibition on naming God. This ethical fortitude also had a profound Talmudic, and thus cultural echo for Austro-German Jews. It would inevitably shape much of the work of even non-religious artists, musicians and writers who came from Jewish backgrounds, and it would also influence many who did not.

  The need to create art that could tell an inner and inevitably unsettling truth, and serve as a warning against the consequences of ‘therapeutic nihilism’, began to churn beneath the subsoil of Austria and Germany in the early years of the twentieth century. In the run-up to the First World War, progressive artists began to resemble mad prophets shouting in the desert about the complacency of a society that only craved easy, immediately appealing and affirming music, literature and art. This ethical conviction went well beyond the empathy with the underprivileged that was the hallmark of ‘Socialist’, Naturalist or ‘Veristic’ art. Artistic ethical judgments were not to be understood as acts of kindness, but as brutal wake-up calls.

  Egon Wellesz relates in his memoirs how his musicology professor Guido Adler was fascinated by the younger generation of his students who stated that they composed music which was moving away from tonality not because they wanted to, but because they felt compelled to.15 The apocalyptic premonitions of the age were felt by many, Jew and non-Jew, but it was Schoenberg who gave them their most coherent and powerful voice.

  The Old Testament tone regarding ethical duty can be sensed in Schoenberg's 1911 Harmonielehre:

  The view that today, one ‘can write any- and everything’ is depressing as it keeps young people from learning the essentials, understanding the great masters and acquiring broader cultivation. In fact it was always possible to write ‘any- and everything’ even in earlier times as well, but it simply wasn't any good. Only the truly great are not allowed to write ‘any- and everything’. Instead, they do what they must in order to carry out their work. They prepare for this duty with industriousness, labouring under a thousand doubts wondering if a thousand scruples suffice – questioning if one truly understands what is being assigned by a higher power. This is reserved only for those who have the courage and the passion to bear the consequences as well as the strength to carry that which has been bestowed upon them, even if it is against their will. This is quite different from striking wantonly out on one's own – and it's also much braver.16

  Furt
her on, Schoenberg grows almost messianic:

  Once one is cured of the insane delusion that artists are only in the service of beauty, and is aware of the fact that it is the compulsion to create that results in what in the future will perhaps be found beautiful, only then does it start to become clear that the artist has no need of bringing conventional coherency to his work – rather he must feel compelled to offer those elements for which his listener is hungering. […] It is especially those who have a heightened sense of aesthetic beauty who shield themselves with what they find appealing against that which is new and aspires to beauty. […] Who is right, the aesthete or the artist? History leaves us in no doubt that right resides with the creator – even if it isn't beautiful. […] Music has, in addition to its central message, […] one further element that it can call upon: it is the simultaneous sounding of the imperative. Perhaps this is why music communicates more widely than other art forms. Nevertheless, thus viewed, the value of this accomplishment gives today's music something that distinguishes it and makes it quite independent of conventional trends and tastes. […] I value originality without overvaluing it – primarily a fault amongst those who lack it entirely. Originality is a symptom always present in the greatest works but also occurring in lesser ones: as such, it can never be used as a unit with which to pass judgement. Having said this, I believe in the new and believe that it is good and beautiful. I believe that we aspire to it as we aspire to the future. It is a future that contains an as yet hidden, yet glorious fulfilment, towards which all of our hopes are aimed. Perhaps it is the future that promises a higher level of our development that makes us long for that which gives us no peace during the present. Perhaps it's only a longing for death: or perhaps it's the certainty of a more elevated life afterwards. With the Future comes the new and perhaps it is for this reason that the future is rightly seen as being identical with beauty and goodness. … The laws of nature that determine genius are the laws of future mankind.17