Forbidden Music

by Michael Haas

  If Mahler had provided the portal through which younger Jewish composers could walk, embracing their uniqueness as artists, it comes as no surprise to discover that much of this uniqueness stemmed from their ethical projections onto music – by no means a uniquely Jewish prerogative. Beethoven's Fidelio and his setting of Schiller's An die Freude in the Ninth Symphony are unambiguous in their ethical, humanist views. But, as the conductor Leon Botstein points out, Schoenberg was also attempting to move away from irrational nineteenth-century Romanticism and return to the values of the Enlightenment.18 Projecting an innate purity in music on the one hand, while expressing an inner ethical voice on the other, was for Schoenberg a musical Haskalah, a point of artistic departure that finds few equivalents among his non-Jewish contemporaries such as Stravinsky but is found among his non-Jewish disciples.19 Schoenberg opens his Harmonielehre by declaring that it could only have been written thanks to what he has learned from his pupils. Wellesz believed that it was Schoenberg's pupil Webern who encouraged him to ever greater artistic audacity, with Schoenberg's relationship with Webern such that ideas flowed in both directions.20

  In 1920 Wellesz published the first biography of Schoenberg, just preceding the period of dodecaphonic (twelve tone) composition. Wellesz deals specifically with Schoenberg's motivation to explore beyond the confines of traditional tonality and quotes from a programme note by Schoenberg on the Book of the Hanging Gardens Op. 15 in which we learn that Schoenberg considered this to be the first of his works that fulfilled the musical vision that he had been attempting to realise for a long time. He admits that this is likely to provoke possible rejection, even from sympathetic listeners (thus anticipating his words in the Harmonielehre). Wellesz goes on to cite the important influence of painting in Schoenberg's quest to give expression to this inner voice.21 He tactfully ignores the affair between Schoenberg's wife Mathilde and the painter Richard Gerstl. Nor could Wellesz have known that Gerstl would be one of the first painters to define Expressionism as an artistic movement, a development in Gerstl's work documented by his few surviving paintings, which move abruptly from figurative to jagged lines and slashes of colour, often obscuring everything but the most basic form.

  That Gerstl, as a painter and friend, then a rival in love, would also be an important artistic influence was not something Wellesz felt able to discuss following the painter's suicide in 1908. Coincidentally this was the year in which Schoenberg ‘found’ his inner voice. Wellesz explains in his own memoirs how Schoenberg demonstrated in the Harmonielehre that on each degree of the scale, chords could be constructed which were constrained to maintain a relationship to the tonic-root. Using this as his starting point, Schoenberg began expanding harmonic relationships until arriving at a style that had departed from tonality as previously understood, allowing each tone in effect to become its own tonic. Wellesz also tells us that Schoenberg rejected the term ‘a-tonal’ in favour of ‘a-tonic’.22

  What remains most redolent of an Old Testament prophet is Schoenberg's view that beauty and truth are not the same. The ‘inner’ truth that he was compelled to reveal was meant to be destabilising. Viewed in retrospect, this was not the futuristic music of a distant utopia, but a chilling prophecy of horrors to come. Over the next ten years, less talented composers and apostles would solemnly believe that they were playing a part in bringing about a Schoenbergian visionary future of a world still to come, while others, such as Alban Berg with his Three Orchestral Pieces, written just before 1914, found resonance with Schoenberg's sense of the impending apocalypse. Adorno's comment that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz is unintentionally clarified by Schoenberg's pupil, Hanns Eisler, speaking at the International Congress of Composers and Music Critics in Prague in May 1948: ‘Long before airplanes were invented he anticipated the horror of bombing attacks on people taking refuge in air raid shelters. He is the lyric composer of Auschwitz's gas chambers, of the concentration camp Dachau, of the total despair of the common man crushed under the heel of fascism. That is his humanity. It is proof of Schoenberg's genius and nature that he expressed all these emotions at a time when the world seemed safe. Whatever is said against him, he never lied.‘23 Eisler continues his argument that Schoenberg anticipated the horrors of Hitler and even acknowledged this in his Five Orchestral Pieces Op. 16 from 1909, the first of which is called ‘Vorgefühl’ – ‘Premonition’.24

  Schoenberg's musical revelations – true, alarming, not beautiful – provided the poetry that warned of Auschwitz. Eisler goes on to mention that one of the most important things he learned from Schoenberg was Redlichkeit in der Musik – a term that can be translated as ‘musical integrity’ or simply ‘ethics’.25

  It is a paradox that Schoenberg's best-known followers were by and large not Jewish. Indeed, Schoenberg remains the ultimate paradox: he rejected the talk of ‘soul’ that characterised Romanticism, while insisting that he was responding to an ‘inner voice'; he was a modernist who set great store by the new and unknown, while remaining unconvinced by what was merely ‘modern’. Eisler wrote an entire essay on this apparent contradiction, concluding with the observation that Schoenberg ‘unleashed a revolution in order to become a reactionary’.26

  A Society of Creative Musicians

  Despite the prophetic power of Schoenberg's mature music, before 1908 he was only one of many independent voices in a generation of Viennese composers with Jewish antecedents. These early developments are described by Wellesz in his Schoenberg biography, where he offers an account of the formation in 1904 of the Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler,27 whose members were Alexander Zemlinsky, Rudolf Stephan Hoffmann, Oskar Karl Posa, Josef von Wöss, Bruno Walter, Arnold Schoenberg and Karl Weigl. Mahler was Honorary President. All of its members, with the exception of Wöss (remembered for his piano transcriptions of Bruckner and Mahler), were Jewish. Hoffmann would become a well-known writer on contemporary musicians; Posa was a composer who taught at Vienna's Music Academy. The major figures in the Vereinigung were Zemlinsky, Weigl, and Schoenberg – a very different composer in 1904 from the one he would soon become.

  The Vereinigung represented a musical response to Jugendstil, a decorative style in the arts and crafts, painting, architecture and design. This was a reaction to the heavy historic style that dominated much of Vienna's outward appearance. Jugendstil was the principal artistic development within the Central European Aesthetic movement, adapting cleaner lines, and taking exotic inspiration from ancient Egypt and the Far East. The painters Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and Max Kurzweil, along with the architects Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Otto Wagner, formed a group that rebelled against Vienna's traditionalist Association of Artists, and declared themselves Secessionists with the founding of the Union of Austrian Artists in 1897.

  Though the formation of the Vereinigung suggests a musical equivalent of the Union of Austrian Artists, its composers were all considerably younger. Musically, they were influenced by French Impressionism, combining melismatic passages with eastern modal sequences suggesting the Orient. The Wagner of Tristan was constantly apparent, with the use of frequent chromatic modulations and complex polyphony, all striving towards music with a sensual outer glow. Though it lasted for just one season, the Vereinigung resulted in a number of important concerts: not only the premieres of Zemlinsky's Die Seejungfrau (based on Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid) and Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande, but also works by Mahler, Strauss and the unlikely figure of Siegmund von Hausegger, who would later be fêted by the Third Reich.

  It is a paradox that Franz Schreker, the most representative of the ‘Jugendstil’ composers, did not belong to the Vereinigung despite his close associations with its members. However, with Zemlinsky born in 1871, Schoenberg in 1874, Schreker in 1878 and Karl Weigl in 1881, we have a decade of composers who wrote sensual, elaborate works that seemed to translate the modernist spirit of fin de siècle Vienna into sound. It was Schoenberg who later caught the dynamic of the age with
his Second String Quartet Op. 10 from 1907–8, in which he sets poems by Stefan George. To quote from George's text, all of the Vereinigung's composers ‘felt the air of another planet’ and, taken collectively, were indeed musical ‘Secessionists’.

  Zemlinsky and Schoenberg

  Following a Prague performance of Mahler's Eighth Symphony in March 1912, a photograph was taken of Schreker, Zemlinsky and Schoenberg standing in front of the assembled Vienna Philharmonic Chorus. The photograph invites a comparison between these three pillars of Austro-German Modernism. If Schreker continued to compose in a style abandoned by Schoenberg, Schoenberg departed from a style that he also absorbed from his brother-in-law and principal teacher Zemlinsky. It is in Zemlinsky's early works that we encounter a fusion of Brahms and Wagner, mediated through Mahler, who chose to present Zemlinsky's Es war einmal28 at the Vienna Opera in 1900, which was met with guarded comments by Eduard Hanslick. Mahler flummoxed Julius Korngold when he advised him to take Erich's musical instruction away from Robert Fuchs – Mahler's own composition teacher – and to place him with Zemlinsky where ‘in freely organised lessons, the boy will learn everything he needs’.29

  This must have caused a good deal of anxiety for Julius Korngold, as one of the first things he had to review upon taking his position at the Neue freie Presse was a revival of Zemlinsky's Es war einmal, resulting in an assessment that reads as if Korngold was over-eager to score points with his mentor. He takes Hanslick's review from the previous year and quotes copiously from it, giving vent to what he presumed Hanslick would have enjoyed reading. In his own article on the work's premiere, Hanslick regretted that ‘the voice instead of being allowed to sing from its entire soul is consigned to the significance of the second violins’. This is ruthlessly re-cycled by the cub-feuilletonist in a review that is even more hostile than Hanslick's.30 In his memoirs, Korngold admits that he had to overcome a good deal of scepticism in order to follow Mahler's advice about what was best for his son's musical education.

  Worse was to come: on 3 February1905 Korngold reviewed the Vereinigung concert which included the premieres of Schoenberg's symphonic poem based on Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande and Zemlinsky's symphonic fantasy after Hans Christian Andersen, Die Seejungfrau, both conducted by their respective composers:

  ‘Curious’ is Maeterlinck's favourite word. Curious is also the effect elicited by Schoenberg's symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande. We were able to make its acquaintance recently at the second orchestral concert of the Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler, during which one could only nervously smile while casting flirtatious glances towards the doors marked ‘Exit’. How delightful the role of the critic is these days! We would, no doubt, find ourselves in the best of company, should we choose to join in the timid giggling and subsequent indignation before dashing out of the hall at the earliest opportunity. But we critics can neither allow nor even wish our lives to be so easy – after all, young composers don't take these things easily either. The sense of duty, honour and conviction that speaks to us from their work demands our serious appraisal.31

  Korngold goes on to discuss the merits of the string sextet Verklärte Nacht of 1899 and regrets the development from that piece to the new orchestral work. He complains that Schoenberg's vision of Pelleas lasts nearly 45 minutes and, after giving us the plot, complains that Schoenberg is only creating ‘atmosphere made by joining together chords and melisma. This is atmospheric Impressionism and it's the latest watchword of modern music, which is today where literature was several years ago. And as with literature, this latest musical development comes to us from France.‘32 Korngold dismisses Debussy as a mingler of pretty sounds which ‘dethrone the melodic element to the benefit of the harmonic and cast music into a pit of dim, misty shapelessness’. He ends with another Maeterlinck quote: ‘“It cannot be said with certainty that disease is not actually the most authentic and diverse poetry of the flesh.” Similarly it seems with our young composers, that it cannot be said with certainty that dissonance is not to be savoured as music's most diverse and authentic beauty.‘33

  Korngold finishes by calling the work an ‘impenetrable musical fog’, while hoping that ‘the undisputed talent of the composer will eventually lift the mists and let in some sunlight’.34 When he comes to review Pelleas again on 5 June 1920, Korngold refers to it as a ‘kind of wordless melodrama’. He sees the problems as more pronounced than ever, yet by now he views Schoenberg as a major figure on the world stage of new music.35

  Korngold writes on Zemlinsky's Die Seejungfrau:

  Far less subversive [than Schoenberg's work] is Alexander v. Zemlinsky's orchestral Fantasy. Zemlinsky is presently the great hope of Young Vienna. To us, his original recommendation by Brahms was far more important than his subsequent development. His first songs, followed by a remarkable [string] quartet [Op.4], are perhaps preferable to his later banquets of […] orchestral offerings, not to mention the thundering success of his opera Es war einmal. With this, his latest orchestral work, we are accorded yet another fairy-tale. It's by [Hans Christian] Andersen and called The Little Mermaid, which Zemlinsky has duly adorned into music. Saint-Saëns, Dvořák and Rimsky-Korsakov have all told us musical fairy-tales in similar fashion, probably with more melodic substance and spirit. The work is constructed in three not necessarily contrasting parts. There is no indication in the course of the work where we find ourselves within the narrative of the story. Modern orchestral composers clearly require a well-prepared audience, which means that adults as well as children need to arrive with the fairy-tale imbedded into their memories. It starts off with the deep throbbing tone that once plunged us to the bottom of the Rhine, but now takes us to the bottom of the ocean. Its principal motif, however, is not quite that deep.36

  Korngold then explains the programmatic treatment of the work and finishes off with the observation that Andersen's fairy-tale ends with ‘the mermaid turned into foam on the surface of the ocean, which is perhaps the appropriate manner to view Zemlinsky's music, in which lapses of expressiveness and creativity are augmented by virtue of beautiful sounds thanks to his orchestration’.37

  Needless to say, Korngold's opinions started to change once his son Erich was placed in Zemlinsky's musical care: his reviews of the operas Kleider machen Leute (1910),38 Eine florentinische Tragödie (1917),39 and Der Zwerg (1923)40 are far more favourable, though in his review of Der Zwerg he turns the very points he criticised in Die Seejungfrau into attributes which, he suggests, elevate this one-act opera above anything by Schreker – a composer with whom Korngold had very different and very particular problems.

  Karl Weigl

  The third principal composer in the Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler was Karl Weigl. Like Schoenberg, he was a pupil of Zemlinsky and, like Webern and Wellesz, he studied musicology with Adler. In common with Mahler, Wolf, Schreker, Franz Schmidt and many of the most significant Viennese composers of the day, his composition teacher was Robert Fuchs. In 1904, Mahler appointed Weigl as principal coach at the Hofoper and during these years Weigl focused on composing Lieder. After the First World War, he taught harmony at Vienna's Conservatory, and in June 1928 he was awarded the honorific title of ‘Professor’, though by then, he had left formal teaching for full-time composing. In 1930, he returned to teaching and took over the position at the University previously held by Hans Gál, who by 1929 had left to head the Music Academy in Mainz. Among Weigl's students were Erich Korngold, Hanns Eisler, Kurt Roger and Erich Zeisl. He joined Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, Berg, Bartók, Janáček and Schreker in the catalogue of Universal Edition, and his works were taken up by the likes of Georg Szell, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Paul Wittgenstein, and the Busch and Kolisch Quartets. While Weigl was a member of the Vereinigung, he was certainly one of Vienna's most adventurous young composers. Over time he would remain on the same stylistic path, rejecting the subsequent developments of Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. In criticising Weigl's Symphonic Fantasy in 1910, Julius Korngold refers to the now forgott
en composer Franz Gut, who featured on the same programme. Korngold writes that Franz Gut was guilty of repeating a mistake that was ‘typical among modern composers today’. He went on to add that Weigl's error was greater, ‘succumbing to mistakes typical among the composers of yesterday’.41 Korngold then goes on to explain:

  Symphonic music today […] is in danger of falling for false attractions offered by the ‘one-movement work’. Such a single, broadly spun-out movement as Weigl's Symphonic Fantasy demands a particular construction and an energetic rejection of the soupy a-rhythmic nature [of] post-Wagnerian orchestral music. […] When Weigl attempts to tackle an orchestral work, he gives the impression of a sweet-natured gentleman being forced to bellow and bark. One knows of better works by this talented young composer and we expect finer things of his E major symphony [No.1].42

  Later, when reviewing a Vienna performance of this same symphony on 5 June 1920 under Georg Szell, Korngold dismisses it as too old-fashioned:

  The first movement aspires towards the gentle charms of a serenade. The finale, which sounds as if it has been crow-barred on, maintains itself if only thanks to its Tchaikovsky-like bullish rhythmic energy. The most rewarding movement is the Adagio, which is lyrically Brahmsian in feel while maintaining the instrumental glow of Austria's younger composers. One finds (in this now familiar work) both cultivation and craftsmanship, but perhaps not entirely the full symphonic weight required; at least, not according to today's standards. The contemporary path has turned sharply away from the medium of the Romantic Symphony. Today, a work must plumb the depths and ascend to the heights while not forgetting to reflect a ‘world-vision’. But, one hastens to add, to achieve all of this, one needs also to be in possession of the correct ‘musical-vision’.43