by David Schiff
On Sesame Street they might say that Pierrot Lunaire is brought to you by the (Blavatskian) numbers three and seven and the colors white, black, and red. Schoenberg, who chose and arranged the text from Giraud's volume, subtitled the cycle “Three Times Seven Poems”; there are three parts, with seven poems in each. It opens with a seven-note motive, a rhythmic idea that returns in various guises throughout, most dramatically at the close of “Die Kreuzen” (The Crosses), which ends part II.
There are four explicit “color” movements: “4. Eine blasse Wäscherin” (white), “8. Nacht” (black), “11. Rote Messe” (red), and “18. Der Mondfleck” (white again). The movements share numerology as well. Number 4 begins with seven three-note chords, scored for flute, clarinet, and violin. Number 8 is a passacaglia built on a repeated three-note theme. In number 11 each line of the poem has seven syllables. To evoke the colors, Schoenberg mixed instrumental timbres just as Ellington would do in “Mood Indigo,” but with his own tricks. He revoiced the trio of instruments in number 4 from chord to chord, so, for instance, in the first chord the clarinet plays the top note, the flute the bottom, and the violin the middle, while in the next chord the flute is on top, clarinet is on the bottom, and in the next, violin is on top, and so on. In the score he asked that the three instruments “play at completely equal volume and without expression” to produce a composite, disembodied sonority, a “white” sound.
In “Nacht” Schoenberg combined the sounds of the bass clarinet, cello, and the piano in its low register to represent “giant black moth wings killing off the sun's radiance” as night descends. The middle section of this movement, as vapors begin to rise, counterpoints flutter-tongued clarinet, the cello playing tremolos on the bridge, more squeaks than pitches, and staccato notes on the piano, a swirl of shadows. For “Rote Messe” Schoenberg contrasted high squeaks (piccolo and the upper register of the piano) and low mutters (bass clarinet, viola, and cello), a comic effect, almost like cartoon music, to paint a gruesome scene: Pierrot reveals the dripping red Host to the congregation by dipping his fingers in his heart's blood.
“Rote Messe,” like much of Pierrot Lunaire, feels at once lurid and funny, qualities not much evident in Schoenberg's earlier work. By employing Kandinsky's mystical symbolism in place of the attempts at direct expression found in Erwartung, Schoenberg took his music to new and unexpected (and not particularly Kandinskian) places: objectivity and satire, with expression itself, the coin of the realm of romantic music, exposed (as it is in Kafka's “Hunger Artist”) as an addictive codependency between the artist (up on the cross) and the audience who get their kicks watching the bloody spectacle, then crawl back to their humdrum everyday lives.
To replace the weltschmerz that died on the cross at the end of part II, Schoenberg ratcheted up the colors and the comedy in part III. Here Pierrot returns to the daylight world (lit by a green sun) in a kind of sadomasochistic vaudeville. In number 18, “Der Mondspeck,” the color white, earlier a benign image of the imagination, returns as a symptom of obsessive compulsion as Pierrot vainly attempts to remove a speck of moonlight from the back of his coat. The instruments parody his pointless attempts to wipe the speck (genius? guilt? both?) away, “Wischt und wischt,” with a five-part double fugue scored mostly in the upper register; its twin subjects might be called Itchy and Scratchy. The song reduces the esoteric “devices” of fugal writing, imitation, stretto, canon, augmentation, retrograde, to so many nervous tics, deconstructing pedantry with pedantry. What remains, though, dazzles. All the counterpoint just turns into brilliant glitter, white like a diamond.
There is no indication that Kandinsky ever heard Pierrot Lunaire. In a letter to Kandinsky on August 19, 1912, Schoenberg referred to Pierrot semi-apologetically as “perhaps no heartfelt necessity as regards its theme, its content [Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire], but certainly as regards its form” and mentions his next project based on Balzac's Swedenborgian novel Seraphita. That project resulted in two works that mark the terminus of Schoenberg's colorized spiritualism. First came the orchestral song “Seraphita,” op. 22, no. 1, to a poem of Ernest Dowson, scored for an unusual ensemble of voice, twenty-four violins, twelve cellos, nine basses, six clarinets, one trumpet, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, xylophone (of course), and tam-tam. Whether its precise instrumental proportions reflect acoustical concerns or numerological symbolism, the song has a unique otherworldly but sensuous timbre.
Schoenberg spent most of the war years working on a huge oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter, that might have fulfilled Kandinsky's prophecy of a higher art form. Like the contemporary visionary compositions, Scriabin's Mysterium and Ives's Universe Symphony, both intended for performances on mountaintops, Schoenberg's oratorio seems planned from the outset as a spiritual exercise whose dimensions would preclude actual performance. In the course of work on the oratorio, however, Schoenberg began to conceive a different way of relating the surface of music to an inner structure, the twelve-tone system, which would make its official debut in the unspiritual setting of a waltz, the last of Schoen-berg's Five Pieces for Piano, op. 23, written in 1921.
INTERMEZZO: A PALER SHADE OF WHITE
The occult spiritualism of Schoenberg and Kandinsky (and early Stravinsky) ended, musically, with the arrival of jazz, first heard in France as played by James Reese Europe's 369th Infantry Hellfighters Band. Within a few years most European composers abandoned expressionism for jazz-tinged “objective” styles such as neoclassicism or Neue Sachlichkeit.52 Although at first perceived as just another exotic fad, jazz confronted European music with a pertinent, persuasive rendering of contemporary experience that proved to be surprisingly tenacious and, at first, seductive. Euro-jazz by Milhaud, Ravel, Hindemith, Krenek, and Weill dominated the new music scene of the 1920s.
The eruption of jazz in European music incited a series of backlashes, both musical and political. Tone color and skin color remained linked, as evidenced by the discourse surrounding the 1928 Stravinsky/Balanchine ballet Apollon musagète, conceived as an apotheosis of whiteness. Balanchine's choreography followed Stravinsky's description of his score as a “ballet blanc,”53 that is, with dancers in tutus. In his Autobiography Stravinsky wrote that he had “pictured it to myself as danced in short white ballet skirts in a severely conventionalized theatrical landscape devoid of all fantastic embellishment”.54 The music, which evinced its whiteness by using only strings, began with the tonal emblem of whiteness, a simple cadence in C major. The timbre and tonality bore a heavy ethical message, which Stravinsky made explicit in his Poetics of Music, delivered at Harvard in 1939 (just as Ellington was composing “Ko-Ko”): “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminished constraint diminished strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.”55 The music and choreography for Apollon musagète (a.k.a. Apollo) have become classics of high modernism, but it is edifying to view them as a statement of European essentialism (not without protofascist overtones). But don't take my word for it:
George Balanchine: I myself think of Apollo as white music, in places as white-on-white.…For me the whiteness is something positive (it has in itself an essence) and at the same time abstract.56
Lincoln Kirstein: In its grave sequence Balanchine carved four cameos in three dimensions: Calliope portrayed the metric and caesura of spoken verse; Polyhymnia described mimicry and spectacular gesture; Terpsichore, the activity, declaration, and inversion of academic dancing itself. These are all subservient to Apollo, animator and driver; they are his handmaidens, creatures, harem and household.
With Lifar, Balanchine had been given a boy who might conceivably become a young man. In America, with Lew Christenson (who danced the role in New York in 1937), he found a young man who could be credited as a potential divinity. Praxitelean head and body, imperceptibly musculated but firmly and largely proportione
d, blond hair and bland air recalled Greek marbles and a calm inhabitant of Nicolas Poussin's pastorals.57
Boris de Schloezer: “Whatever may have been the circumstances which led to the birth of Apollo, the work reveals to us its author's secret, his thirst for renunciation, his need for purity and serenity.”58
It's not easy being white.
SOUNDS AND PERFUMES: SYMBOLISM IN WHITE AND BLACK
Kandinsky's theories about the relation of music, color, and words were a belated summation of the larger artistic movement, Symbolism, whose aesthetic ideology shaped the modernist literature of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Stefan George, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, among many others.59 Symbolist literature aspired to the condition of music. It often cloaked this goal, however, in a mask of obscurantism. In the compositions of Debussy and Ellington Symbolist aesthetic ideas became far more accessible to everyday life. Arcane modernism became “jazz modernism.”
Debussy's music is key to understanding the newly exalted role played by tone color as a means of representation. In his oeuvre Debussy gave musical form to the complex interplay of sensual perception and imaginary evocation that Baudelaire termed “correspondences”:
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissen parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
Nature is a temple of living pillars
where often words emerge, confused and dim;
and man goes through this forest, with familiar
eyes of symbols always watching him.60
In this forest of symbols the human subject does not control meaning rationally but perceives it through sensory association as an endless chain of metaphors.
Debussy imbibed this Symbolist creed, further elaborated in Verlaine's “Art poétique,” Rimbaud's “Voyelles,” and J. K. Huysmans's novel A Rebours, and in the preface to Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, at the famous “Tuesdays” at Mallarmé's apartment and, on Fridays at the Chat Noir.61 In the 1880s Debussy set poems by Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Baudelaire, developing a richly allusive idiom of musical symbolism. Sounds became symbols.
In his songs Debussy often employed a symbolic sonority in the accompaniment to “read” the text. In “En Sourdine,” the first song in the Verlaine cycle Fêtes galantes, composed in 1891, a leitmotif beginning with three repeated notes sounds throughout the first section; it disappears and then returns at the end where the singer names its symbolic role: “Voix de notre désespoir, /Le rossignol chantera” (Voice of our despair, /the nightingale shall sing). In retrospect, we realize that the motive represents the nightingale's call, but as a symbol of despair, not a scenic effect. The repeated note itself is a double metaphor: the piano sounds like a flute that sounds like a nightingale. But the song has grander, even more esoteric echoes. The voice of despair springs from a forbidden love; the poem depicts Verlaine and Rimbaud hiding amorously in the bushes. The poem, mirroring a mirror, also replicates in a very condensed form the entire second act of Tristan, the lovers' tryst, in which Brangäne, the voice of despair, warns of the inevitable intrusion of the real world. The nightingale's motive frames the central intimacy just as Brangäne's admonitions form a kind of protective wall around the great love duet. In case we might miss this tone parallel, Debussy launched the song with the famous “Tristan chord,” the exact pitches heard at the opening of Wagner's opera but transposed an octave higher, one sound symbol evoking another.
Debussy tried his hand at writing Symbolist poetry, or rather prose, in his Proses lyriques, published in 1895. Here he pushed the piano-as–orchestra to an extreme, so that the second song, “De grève…” (Of the Shore…), forecasts the sound of La Mer composed a decade later. In terms of sound-as-symbol, however, the most interesting song is the last, “De soir…” (Of the Evening…). We might retitle it “Sunday in Paris with Claude,” for, like Seurat's contemporary “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” it is a painting of “modern life”—the earliest piece of music depicting the hustling “leisure” of the weekend city, including an excursion by train to the suburbs.62
In “De soir…” the piano sounds less like an orchestral reduction than an imaginary superorchestra. The contrapuntal moto perpetuo accompaniment rolls out a ceaseless stream of sound evocations all drawn from a short motive. As the motive evolves, its visual correlatives change as well. At first it evokes a clamor of church bells. Then, augmented in a dotted rhythm, it suggests the rattling bounce of a suburban train. As the train is “devoured” by a tunnel a new contrapuntal texture appears, waves of sixteenth notes in the right hand against a grandly rising and falling arch in the left, all played on the black keys of the piano. Though the black keys may indicate the darkness of the tunnel, they also produce a pentatonic scale. The scale and rhythmic counterpoint sound like gamelan music. The significance of this occidental/oriental double image becomes clear when Debussy inverts the counterpoint, lifting the slow arch motive to the upper register of the piano as the words speak of “Dimanche, dans le bleu de mes rêves” (Sunday in the blue of my dreams), as if the day trip to the outskirts of Paris were just a poor substitute for more exotic travel. (Des Esseintes, the hero of A Rebours, preferred imaginary travel to the real thing.) As evening settles on the city the arch motive turns back into bell sounds, no longer clangorous but distant, nostalgic, slowly fading as the speaker falls asleep.
The Symbolist songs prepared Debussy for the full expression of textless musical symbolism in the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, an orchestral work inspired by Mallarmé's poem. The Prélude is not a tone poem but what Ellington would term a “tone parallel.” Debussy explained to a critic that the music was “perhaps the dream left over at the bottom of the faun's flute.”63 Debussy reduced Mallarmé's almost inscrutable text to its essential sonoric value, an unaccompanied C# on the flute in its breathy, slightly muted middle register, a pitch “naturally out of tune on French flutes of the period.”64 The unaccompanied flute solo that begins the Prélude is not a diegetic sound within the action (real or dreamed) of the poem but a floating sound symbol poised to take on any of the poem's inflections. Placing the sound of the flute first before addressing, however indirectly, the action of the poem, Debussy was implementing Verlaine's instruction: “De la musique avant toute chose” (Music first!).
Debussy's most sophisticated works of timbral symbolism, though, are not his songs or orchestral pieces but his piano compositions, especially Book I of the Préludes, a set of twelve “tone parallels” published in 1910. Debussy here applied the techniques of musical Symbolism to the central idea of Impressionist painting, the fleeting character of sensory experience. As in Turner and Monet, wind and water present images of constant change, but Debussy chose subjects that also placed those elements in relation to other works of art. Each prelude poses the question of how art can resist and embrace temporality. To indicate the thematic interplay of the enduring and the perishable Debussy framed the first book of Préludes with two dances, one from ancient Greece, preserved on a frieze in the Louvre, the other from contemporary America, a ragtime Debussy had heard performed by street musicians (probably in blackface) while on vacation in England.
Debussy's piano never sounds simply like a piano but creates sonic metaphors. Lockspeiser describes Debussy's approach to the piano as illusionistic: “To both Marguerite Long and Louise Liebich [Debussy] insisted that the piano was to sound as if it were ‘an instrument without hammers’ and he wanted the fingers on the keyboard to appear to ‘penetrate into the notes.’ The illusion was to be complete. Nothing was to be allowed to destroy the impression that the mechanical piano, a mere ‘box of hammers and strings’ was not a piano.”65 Illusionism is not the same as illustration; it w
ould be a mistake to hear these pieces as musical depictions. The sound images evoked in the Préludes are themselves symbols; the music is part of the symbolic forest in which humankind wanders, a forest Debussy had evoked at the very opening of his opera Pelléas et Mélisande.
Debussy signaled the complex symbolism of these relatively simple pieces by the placing and selection of titles. Titles appear in parentheses at the end of each prelude rather than at the top of the first page, as if they were just tentative, transient associations. Seven of the titles link the music to artworks, making the preludes reflections of reflections. “Danseuses de Delphes” refers to a Greek caryatid in the Louvre, “a support column sculpted in the form of a female figure.”66 “Voiles” may refer either to the dancer Loïe Fuller or to sailboats, depending on the gender assigned to the title word. “Le vent dans la plaine” begins a line of a poem by Favart that serves as an epigram for Paul Verlaine's “C'est l'extase langoureuse,” which Debussy had set to music in his Ariettes oubliées. “Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir” is a line from Baudelaire's “Harmonie du soir,” which Debussy had set to music in 1885. “La fille aux cheveux de lin” takes its title from a poem by Leconte de Lisle, itself based on a poem by Robert Burns. “La Cathédrale engloutie” refers to a Breton myth that formed the basis of the opera Le Roi d'Ys by Edouard Lalo. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, as illustrated by Arthur Rackham, is the source of “La Danse de Puck.” Of the remaining five, three, “Les collines d'Anacapri,” “La Sérénade interrompue,” and “Minstrels,” are portraits of popular music (Italian, Spanish, and American, respectively). Scholars have yet to nail down specific references for the remaining two preludes, the violent “Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest” and the desolate “Des pas sur la neige,”67 whose title could have sprung from any number of Impressionist snow scenes, a favorite genre of Monet and Sisley in particular (see, for example, Sisley's “Snow at Louveciennes” at the Musée d'Orsay).68
