by Michael Haas
Much of Toch's music from this period is exceptionally appealing, but rarely can a musical personality have diverged so markedly as did the prewar and postwar Toch. While Julius Korngold implied that Schreker's change in style was due to opportunism, Toch's was due to witnessing the horrors of battle and the belief that, with the fall of the old order, everything needed to change. His exquisitely crafted works from before the war now seemed inappropriate. Like so many others, he saw no future in Austria, and his patriotism turned to indifference, if not outright disdain. He moved back to Mannheim, since German law compelled Austrian citizens to return to where they had lived prior to 1914. During 1919 both Toch and Hindemith took a sobering turn towards New Objectivity.
In 1921, Prince Max Egon zu Fürstenberg founded what would become the first of many new music festivals in interwar Germany in the Black Forest town of Donaueschingen. Hindemith's Third Quartet Op. 16 was given its premiere during the festival's inaugural season in 1921, and Hindemith became Artistic Director of chamber concerts until a falling out with Fürstenberg meant relocating activities to Baden-Baden. With the performance of Toch's Op. 26 quartet by the Amar Quartet (in which Hindemith played viola) in 1922, Toch also became a regular feature in Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden. By the early 1920s, both Toch and Hindemith had produced a bolder reaction to the sobering spirit of the age than was the case in art, theatre or literature, which were still largely caught up in the dying throes of Expressionism.
In 1925, an exhibition at Mannheim's Kunsthalle called ‘The Art of Post-Expressionism: New Objectivity’ was the first time that the style in which Hindemith and Toch had been composing was given a name, though in reference to the visual arts, and it was curated by Toch's friend Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, director of the Kunsthalle. In 1924, Toch established a Society for New Music which would place Mannheim at the forefront of contemporary music in the 1920s – a position it maintained until 1933.
From 1922 onwards, no new-music festival seemed complete without something by Toch. In 1927, the New York Times printed a portrait of Toch together with Bartók in an article on new music in Germany;54 and in 1930, another large portrait and article on Toch and Hindemith appeared in the same paper.55 In 1932, the New York Times covered the performance of Toch's Piano Concerto No. 1 and a recital of his music.56 These American reports of Toch were as nothing compared with the extensive coverage of his music in Germany during the same period. By 1929, Toch and his wife had abandoned Mannheim for a large villa in one of Berlin's greenest and plushest suburbs, where he began writing a steady stream of music for stage, radio and screen.
Why is Hindemith's music familiar to us today and Toch's largely forgotten? At the heart of this question, there are both aesthetic and practical factors. By the early 1930s, Toch had not composed nearly as much music as Hindemith, nor was he as skilled at self-promotion as his indefatigable younger colleague. Hindemith's enthusiasm for controversy and ‘bad-boy’ creativity would ultimately land him in trouble, first because he was too eager to find an accommodation with the Nazis in 1933, and then because the Nazis didn't want to have anything to do with him after Hitler objected to his comic Zeitoper Neues vom Tage,57 in which a nude soprano sings an aria about central heating while lying in the bath. This messy chapter in Hindemith's life left him morally and ethically compromised.
Toch, on the other hand, arrived in the United States in 1933 with publication of his music in the hands of the American affiliate of his German publisher Schott, and also, thanks to the friendship of George Gershwin, membership of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), which allowed him to collect royalties from performances. Things looked very bright for the newly arrived refugee and his family until ASCAP's rival BMI bought up Toch's American publisher, resulting in a ruthless suppression of ASCAP composers. These were issues that Hindemith, arriving in the United States in 1940, managed to avoid by joining BMI from the outset. Unlike Hindemith, Toch had countless Jewish relatives who needed help emigrating from Austria. He had little choice but to go to Hollywood in order to earn as much as possible to secure the necessary affidavits. Hindemith became a professor of composition at Yale and was not to experience the sort of compositional hiatus that resulted from Toch's obligations to produce music by the yard for Hollywood studios.
After freeing himself from the movie industry after the Second World War, Toch embarked on a frenzy of composing in an attempt to recapture the prewar successes of works such as his Cello Concerto (first performed by Emanuel Feuermann in 1925) and First Piano Concerto of 1926. With performances of this work by the likes of Walter Gieseking with Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic – and the premiere on 20 August 1934 at the London Promenade Concerts of his Second Piano Concerto with the composer as soloist and conducted by Sir Henry Wood – Toch seemed to have joined the European mainstream before Hindemith. Like his near contemporary Wellesz, he must have been seen by younger composers as an elder statesman of the international new-music circuit. During these years, Toch enjoyed a reputation that was nearly as exalted as Schoenberg, and his book on the construction of melody, Melodielehre (1923), was hailed as a companion to Schoenberg's Harmonielehre. (Schoenberg himself, already propagating his twelve-tone theory, neither greeted the arrival of Melodielehre nor acknowledged any connection.) Melos, Schott's answer to Universal Edition's Anbruch, unsurprisingly banged the drum for their house composer who, as a performer, enjoyed the additional prestige of a contract with the piano manufacturer Blüthner. The pianist and teacher Eduard Beninger in the February 1928 issue praises the First Piano Concerto in terms that tell us as much about the context of New Objectivity in which Toch was composing as it does about the work itself: ‘The qualities which I wish to highlight in Toch's piano works, apart from their harmonic freedom, are the successful implementation of large cyclic structures; lack of expressive shades of light and colour; reduction of the overloaded chord and an underpinning of the piano's intrinsic neutral character by way of motorised performance technique.‘58
As if to snatch away the last vestiges of Schoenbergian thunder, Toch even took the idea of Sprechgesang and developed it into something brilliantly mischievous with his three pieces for spoken chorus from 1930 entitled Gesprochene Musik (Spoken Music), which included the still famous Fuge aus der Geographie, or Geographical Fugue, translated into English by Henry Cowell and a bedazzled John Cage, who had heard its premiere in Berlin.
In public, Toch was serious and withdrawn. Berthold Goldschmidt, in conversation with the author, recalled that whenever Toch appeared at any of the new-music festivals in Germany, he seemed the very personification of the modern composer. Unbeknown to Goldschmidt, the photographer August Sander, while working on a highly regarded series of genre photos from the interwar years, chose Toch as the model for his representation of ‘The Composer’.
Like Hindemith and Weill, Toch was not particularly taken with the idea of atonal or dodecaphonic music. In any case, by the mid-1920s, some of the extremes that had convulsed music had settled into the newly defined diatonic homes offered by Neue Sachlichkeit. Toch's ambition was rather to find ways of incorporating unresolved dissonances within his music without tonal derailment.
His ethical sense was as strong as Schoenberg's, as can be seen in his writings, letters and essays where we come closer to encountering the real Toch. He corresponded with nearly everyone involved in contemporary music during his lifetime and wrote countless essays, many apparently not intended for publication but meant as a means of sorting out his own thoughts. He often wrote these in German and translated them into English, perhaps as exercises to be kept alongside stacks of notebooks filled with lists of English synonyms and their German equivalents. Such essays were full of bitter sarcasm and often had intriguing titles such as Die Germanen sind Blond (The Teutons Are Blond). He also kept a ‘dream journal’ in which we find the confused synthesis of his present life in Los Angeles and his past. He reports dreams of being visited by r
abbis and relatives from Austria, and his mortification that they have no understanding of how to behave in American society.
Toch was raised in a traditional Jewish home and it appears that his spiritual life was quite different from that of his practical wife Lili (née Zwack), the daughter of a wealthy banker. Contradictions abound between Toch's private letters and essays and his wife's ‘oral history’ housed at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. If she mentions Judaism at all, it's not in relation to her own family which was apparently secular. Despite the murder of her sister in a Nazi camp, she expresses no feelings for either the religion or its domestic and social traditions. Toch is very different: even though he refused to allow himself to be pinned down as a traditional, devout Jew, he composed a number of works in exile based on Jewish subjects such as the ‘Covenant’ movement from the multi-composer Genesis Suite,59 his Cantata of the Bitter Herbs, written in memory of his mother who died just before Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany, or his Fifth Symphony, sub-titled Jephtha. His essay Glaubensbekenntnis eines Komponisten (Composer's Credo) from March and April 1945 is profoundly ethical, even spiritual:
Today there is a tendency to believe that science, in the fullness of time, will be able to explain everything. In the future, there will be no more mysteries – neither in nature nor within our inner lives. Thus would effectively be removed the need for what we generally refer to as ‘religion’. But it wasn't mere ignorance of scientific triumphs that often resulted in many of the most brilliant academic and artistic minds also being believers. Indeed, it was especially these individuals who were increasingly aware of the mystery of a spiritual presence that resides within and around us. This recognition of religion has almost nothing to do with a specific church. Instead, it comes closer to the devotion found within ancient cultures that saw every event, whether happy or sad, as being enigmatically linked with human destiny. It was called yielding-up to life in the fullest sense of the word. And though science attempts to bore ever deeper while analysing the discoveries it makes, it is specifically within this border-region of the human spirit that the arts thrive. And in this region, music thrives even more than the others. […] The true nature of art, which comes from religious depth and naivety, is both un-teachable and un-learnable. This is what makes great art neither modern nor old-fashioned but timeless. […] In the past couple of decades we have seen the production of much music that both excited our interests and stimulated our wits. We discovered and gained a great deal. But at the same time, we lost something. Perhaps it will be a while before we even notice that it's missing, but in due course it will become obvious. And this ‘something’ is simply too important to do without. As fed up with Romanticism as we eventually became, one should not forget the basic fact that music, in its innermost makeup, is de facto romantic. And if sentimentality has no place in true art, we should never forget that sentimentality should not be confused with emotion. […] The continued rejection of modern music comes not from our unquestioned lack of respect for it, but from our inability to love it. One usually cites atonality as the reason for this. This is of course nonsense. The development of our tonal language is natural, logical and inevitable. It cannot represent a destruction of the old but an enrichment of the new. […] Atonality cannot be held responsible for what a composer wishes to express. […] If the music of our century is unable to satisfy our needs as in the past, then one should not hold the technical aspects of the work's construction responsible. Rather, it is within the spiritual that one needs to look.60
Though this essay dates from 1945, it offers a reflection of the musical values that characterised New Objectivity and ultimately amounts to its rejection by one of its most high-profile protagonists. Reading both Melos and Anbruch in the interwar years, the impression is that the musicians and thinkers who cleaved most firmly to New Objectivity felt the need to accord music a sense of scientific legitimacy so that it could be seen as a dynamic tool in the shaping of post-1919 society – a misappropriation that would be repeated with some variation by the post-1945 avant-garde. Toch was only one of many composers in the interwar years who tried to compensate for the lack of empirical scientific evidence that music had to offer. His Melodielehre is highly technical and it attempts to draw conclusions and extrapolate methods where, apart from counterpoint, hardly any had previously existed.
The postwar years of both 1919 and 1946 shared common objectives characterised by the belief that through alienating human responses to music, mankind and the human condition could be lifted out of the romantic and irrational stupor that had led to the follies of war. This is symbolised in an undated postcard from Hindemith to Toch regarding the preparation of a film music event (presumably Baden-Baden's film music festival in 1928): Hindemith asks if Toch's composition will be requiring ‘machines or musicians’, a juxtaposition of opposing concepts. My translation uses ‘musicians’ to illuminate some of the alliterative irony conveyed by Hindemith's ‘mechanisch oder menschlich’, which sums up the ethos of neue Sachlichkeit by offering the alternative, more general translation of: ‘will you be requiring mechanisation or humanity?‘61
CHAPTER 7
Hey! We're Alive!
We believe that it is specifically the un-Romantic character of our era that encourages the Art that one day could provide expression to those great events taking place during our time.
…wir glauben, daß gerade dieser unromantische Charakter unserer Epoche die Entstehung einer Kunst befördert, die zum Ausdruck jener großen Ereignisse werden könnte, welche sich in unseren Tagen abspielen.
Kurt Weill, Romantik in der Musik, 1929
The Political Science of Music
‘Wissenschaft’ or ‘science’ as a suffix became a useful means of establishing academic credibility in disciplines far removed from the physical and natural sciences. With its mathematical permutations, much of the arcane fascination with dodecaphony arose because it appeared to bring music closer to ‘Wissenschaft’. A cursory glance down the index of ‘scientific’ articles found in Melos and Anbruch only confirms how involved Jewish critics, writers and musicians were in the process of making music rational and subject to empirical evaluation. Most of these writers would later be included in the notorious Lexikon der Juden in der Musik compiled by the eminent Nazi ‘Music Scientists’ Theo Stengel and Herbert Gerigk. Most of Anbruch’s Jewish ‘music scientists’ had left their religious beliefs behind in the drive towards assimilation, and having jettisoned one set of ‘irrational’ beliefs, were unwilling to take on another. Only a few of the major figures did so: Walter Braunfels and Egon Wellesz, for instance, both became devout Catholics and many of their works from the interwar years (and afterwards) reflect this. Viktor Ullmann became a follower of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy movement, which believed in a quasi-pantheistic interaction between mankind and nature but also that spiritual experience could be subjected to the same objective criteria as physical and natural sciences. Much of Ullmann's work, notably his operas Der Sturz des Antichrist and Der Kaiser von Atlantis,1 attempts to convey these complex ideas. Other composers, such as Toch and Weill, simply put the devotional life they had acquired during childhood into a drawer, taking it out now and again for personal use and occasional reflection.
The vast majority of secular Jewish composers and writers, however, were resolutely anti-religion: Korngold and Schreker are examples of composers who did not actively practise religion but wrote music that was deeply spiritual within its own terms. Those who turned to ‘New Objectivity’, such as Hanns Eisler, could often be militantly anti-spiritual but profound believers when it came to Communism, the secular alternative to both Judaism and Christianity, and providing a belief system as dogmatic as any formal confession. Marxist terms such as ‘dialectical materialism’ offered young believers the twin advantages of religious mystery and satisfyingly ‘scientific’ weightiness. In a deliberate attempt to draw parallels with religion, Eisler's secular cantatas and Lehrstücke were c
onsciously modelled on Bach's cantatas and passions. Eisler, along with Paul Dessau and others, wrote ‘secular hymns’, or ‘fight-songs’, for Communist pageants and rallies which challenged anything conventional religion could offer. It comes as no surprise that the other great secular cult of the age, National Socialism, hijacked some of Eisler's most trenchant melodies. Young believers who had previously struck out Leftwards towards the new dawn promised by Marx now set off in the opposite direction, singing the same heart-pounding tunes with different words.
The growth of these secular religions did not happen in a vacuum. Prewar middle-class prosperity had created an entrenched and resentful underclass of urban and rural poor. To this was added the casual racism towards different nationalities that were in practice accorded second- or even third-class citizen status. The dynastic houses of Europe, supported by their established churches, saw in these disenfranchised masses cheap labour and plentiful cannon-fodder.
The World as Viewed by Max Nordau
The Austrian Zionist philosopher Max Nordau, who gave us the term ‘degenerate’ to describe the condition of both society and culture, wrote lengthy end-of-year summaries of the political and social state of the world, which from 1897 until 1915 appeared annually in Vienna's Neue Freie Presse. Dipping into these, we see how events were unfolding in a way that neither nations nor governments could be expected to control. Nordau's article from 1 January 1901 is remarkable in its casual racism as he cites the need for new markets in order to purchase the over-production of Europe. To this end he writes: ‘The Chinese, like other coloured races, must finally be forced into facing the subjugation of the rest of non-whites if the superiority of the European people is not to be proved an embarrassing, anthropological mistake.‘2
