by Alex Ross
In his last New York season, Mahler ran into trouble with Mrs. Sheldon’s Programme Committee. A streak of adventurous programming, encompassing everything from the music of Bach to far-out contemporary fare such as Elgar’s Sea Pictures, met with a tepid response from traditional concertgoers, as adventurous programming often does. Meanwhile, Toscanini was ensconced at the Met, winning over New York audiences with, among other things, a Puccini premiere—the long-awaited Girl of the Golden West. For a time, it looked as though Mahler would return to Europe: the local critics had turned against him, as their Viennese counterparts had done, and he felt harried on all sides. In the end, he signed a new contract, and retained his equanimity of mood.
On the night of February 20, 1911, Mahler announced to his dinner companions, “I have found that people in general are better, more kindly, than one supposes.” He was running a fever, but thought nothing of it. The following night, against his doctor’s advice, he led a program of Italian works that included the premiere of Ferruccio Busoni’s Berceuse élégiaque, a beautifully opaque piece that seems to depict a soul entering a higher realm. This was Mahler’s final concert; a fatal infection, in the form of subacute bacterial endocarditis, was moving through his body. The remaining Philharmonic concerts were canceled. Mahler returned to Vienna, and died there on May 18.
European commentators made an anti-American cultural parable out of Mahler’s demise, as they had in the case of Symphonia domestica at the Wanamaker store. The conductor was a “victim of the dollar,” one Berlin newspaper said, of “the nerve-wracking and peculiar demands of American art.” Alma Mahler helped to foster this impression, perhaps as a way of diverting attention from her affair with Walter Gropius, which had caused her husband more angst than any of Mrs. Sheldon’s memos. “You cannot imagine what Mr. Mahler has suffered,” she told the press. “In Vienna my husband was all powerful. Even the Emperor did not dictate to him, but in New York, to his amazement, he had ten ladies ordering him about like a puppet.”
Mahler himself did not blame the dollar. “I have never worked as little as I did in America,” he said in an interview a month before his death. “I was not subjected to an excess of either physical or intellectual work.”
Resting on Mahler’s desk was the manuscript of his Tenth Symphony, which must have been the work that he described to Maurice Baumfeld as “something entirely new”—a reflection of certain things he saw and felt in America. One American feature of the score is well known: the funeral march at the beginning of the finale—a dirge for tuba and contrabassoons, interrupted by thuds on a military drum—was inspired by the funeral procession of Charles W. Kruger, deputy chief of the New York Fire Department, who had died in 1908 while fighting a blaze on Canal Street.
There might also be an American impression in the symphony’s first movement, the climax of which contains a dissonance of nine notes. This awe-inspiring, numbing chord is usually associated with the crisis in Mahler’s marriage, but it may also point to a natural phenomenon, some craggy, sublime feature of the American continent. Like the chords at the beginning of Strauss’s Zarathustra, it is derived from the overtones of a resonating string. The relationship becomes clear at the end of the movement, where the harmonic series is spelled out note by note in the strings and harp, like a rainbow emerging over Niagara Falls.
Stunned by his rival’s death, Richard Strauss could barely speak for days afterward. He commented later that Mahler had been his “antipode,” his worthy adversary. By way of a memorial he conducted the Third Symphony in Berlin. In a more oblique tribute, he decided to resume work on a tone poem that he had begun sketching some years before—a piece called The Antichrist, in honor of Nietzsche’s most vociferous diatribe against religion. Mulling over this project in his diary, Strauss wondered why Mahler, “this aspiring, idealistic, and energetic artist,” had converted to Christianity. Each man misunderstood the other to the end; Strauss suspected Mahler of surrendering to antiquated Christian morality, while Mahler accused Strauss of selling out to plebeian taste. The split between them forecast a larger division in twentieth-century music to come, between modernist and populist conceptions of the composer’s role.
In the end, Strauss’s last big orchestral work carried the more prosaic title An Alpine Symphony. It depicts a daylong mountain climb, complete with sunrise, storm, a magical moment of arrival at the summit, descent, and sunset. Beneath the surface, it may be partly “about” Mahler, as the critic Tim Ashley has suggested. In the section “At the Summit,” the brass intone a majestic theme, recalling the opening of Zarathustra. At the same time, the violins sing a Mahlerian song of longing in which one pleading little five-note pattern—two steps up, a little leap, a step back down—brings to mind the “Alma” theme of the Sixth. The intermingling of Mahlerian strings and Straussian brass suggests the image of the two composers standing side by side at the peak of their art. Perhaps they are back in the hills above Graz, gazing down at the splendor of nature while the world waits for them below.
The vision passes, as joyful scenes in Strauss tend to do. Mists rise; a storm breaks out; the climbers descend. Soon they are shrouded in the same mysterious, groaning chord with which the symphony began. The sun has set behind the mountain.
2
DOCTOR FAUST
Schoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality
One day in 1948 or 1949, the Brentwood Country Mart, a shopping complex in an upscale neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, was the scene of a slight disturbance that carried overtones of the most spectacular upheaval in twentieth-century music. Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of the émigré novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, was examining grapefruit in the produce section when she heard a voice shouting in German from the far end of the aisle. She looked up to see Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonal music and the codifier of twelve-tone composition, bearing down on her, with his bald pate and burning eyes. Decades later, in conversation with the writer Lawrence Weschler, Feuchtwanger could recall every detail of the encounter, including the weight of the grapefruit in her hand. “Lies, Frau Marta, lies!” Schoenberg was yelling. “You have to know, I never had syphilis!”
The cause of this improbable commotion was the publication of Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Thomas Mann, a writer peculiarly attuned to music, had fled from the hell of Hitler’s Germany into the not-quite paradise of Los Angeles, joining other Central European artists in exile. The proximity of such renowned figures as Schoenberg and Stravinsky had encouraged Mann to write a “novel of music,” in which a modern composer produces esoteric masterpieces and then descends into syphilitic insanity. For advice, Mann turned to Theodor W. Adorno, who had studied with Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg and who was also part of the Los Angeles émigré community.
Mann self-confessedly approached modern music from the perspective of an informed amateur who wondered what had happened to the “lost paradise” of German Romanticism. Mann had attended the premiere of Mahler’s Eighth in 1910. He had briefly met Mahler, and trembled in awe before him. Some three decades later, Mann watched as Schoenberg, Mahler’s protégé, presented his “extremely difficult” but “rewarding” scores to small groups of devotees in Los Angeles. The novel asks, in so many words, “What went wrong?”
Leverkühn is an intellectual monster—cold, loveless, arrogant, mocking. His music absorbs all styles of the past and shatters them into fragments. “I have found that it is not to be,” he says of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, whose “Ode to Joy” once spoke for mankind’s aspiration toward brotherhood. “It will be taken back. I will take it back.” The illness that destroys Leverkühn is acquired in a curious way. He tells his friends that he is going to see the Austrian premiere of Salome in Graz. On a secret detour he sleeps with a prostitute named Esmeralda, whose syphilitic condition is visible on her yellowed face. Leverkühn contracts the disease deliberately, in the belief that it will grant him supernatural creative powers. When the de
vil appears, he informs the composer that he will never be popular in his lifetime but that his time will come, à la Mahler: “You will lead, you will strike up the march of the future, boys will swear by your name, and thanks to your madness they will no longer need to be mad.” Since Faustus is also a book about the roots of Nazism, Leverkühn’s “bloodless intellectuality” becomes, in a cryptic way, the mirror image of Hitler’s “bloody barbarism.” The cultish fanaticism of modern art turns out to be not unrelated to the politics of fascism: both attempt to remake the world in utopian forms.
Schoenberg was understandably incensed by this scenario, which gave a pathological veneer to his proudest achievements. The real-life composer could be a bit spooky at times—“I can see through walls,” he was once heard to say—but he was hardly a cold or bloodless man. He set about revolutionizing music with high passion and childlike enthusiasm. As a born Viennese who venerated the Austro-German tradition, he could never have mocked Beethoven’s Ninth. As a Jew, he divined the true nature of Nazism sooner than did Mann. Aloofness was not his style; he was, among other things, a galvanizing, life-changing teacher, dozens of whose students, from the operatic Berg to the aphoristic Anton Webern, from the Communist Hanns Eisler to the hippieish Lou Harrison, played conspicuous roles in twentieth-century music.
Yet Mann knew what he was doing when he put his composer in league with the devil. Faust’s pact is a lurid version of the kinds of stories that artists tell themselves in order to justify their solitude. Eisler, when he read Mann’s novel, connected it to the perceived crisis of classical music in modern society. “Great art, as the Devil maintains, can now only be produced, in this declining society, through complete isolation, loneliness, through complete heartlessness…[Yet Mann] allows Leverkühn to dream of a new time, when music will again to a certain extent be on first-name terms with the people.” Other composers of the fin de siècle similarly conceived their situation as a one-man fight against a crude and stupid world. Claude Debussy, in Paris, assumed an antipopulist stance in the years before 1900 and not coincidentally broke away from conventional tonality in the same period. But Schoenberg took the most drastic steps, and perhaps more important, he set forth an elaborate teleology of musical history, a theory of irreversible progress, to justify his actions. The Faust metaphor honors the dread that Schoenberg’s juggernaut inspired in early listeners.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Schoenberg’s music no longer sounds so alien. It has radiated outward in unpredictable ways, finding alternative destinies in bebop jazz (the glassy chords of Thelonious Monk have a Schoenbergian tinge) and on movie soundtracks (horror movies need atonality as they need shadows on the walls of alleys). With the modernist revolution splintered into many factions, with composers gravitating back to tonality or moving on to something else, Schoenberg’s music no longer carries the threat that all music will sound like this. Still, it retains its Faustian aura. These intervals will always shake the air; they will never become second nature. That is at once their power and their fate.
Vienna 1900
In his early stories Thomas Mann produced several lively portraits of a widespread turn-of-the-century type, the apocalyptic aesthete. The story “At the Prophet’s,” written in 1904, begins with an ironic ode to artistic megalomania:
Strange regions there are, strange minds, strange realms of the spirit, lofty and spare. At the edge of large cities, where street lamps are scarce and policemen walk by twos, are houses where you mount til you can mount no further, up and up into attics under the roof, where pale young geniuses, criminals of the dream, sit with folded arms and brood; up into cheap studios with symbolic decorations, where solitary and rebellious artists, inwardly consumed, hungry and proud, wrestle in a fog of cigarette smoke with devastatingly ultimate ideals. Here is the end: ice, chastity, null. Here is valid no compromise, no concession, no half-way, no consideration of values. Here the air is so rarefied that the mirages of life no longer exist. Here reign defiance and iron consistency, the ego supreme amid despair; here freedom, madness, and death hold sway.
In Mann’s 1902 story “Gladius Dei,” a young man named Hieronymus strides through Richard Strauss’s hometown of Munich, scowling at the extravagance around him. He goes inside an art shop and berates its owner for displaying kitsch—art that is merely “beautiful” and therefore worthless. “Do you think gaudy colors can gloss over the misery of the world?” Hieronymus shouts. “Do you think loud orgies of luxurious good taste can drown the moans of the tortured earth?…Art is the sacred torch that must shed its merciful light into all life’s terrible depths, into every shameful and sorrowful abyss; art is the divine flame that must set fire to the world, until the world with all its infamy and anguish burns and melts away in redeeming compassion!”
All over fin-de-siècle Europe, strange young men were tramping up narrow stairs to garret rooms and opening doors to secret places. Occult and mystical societies—Theosophist, Rosicrucian, Swedenborgian, kabbalistic, and neopagan—promised rupture from the world of the present. In the political sphere, Communists, anarchists, and ultranationalists plotted from various angles to overthrow the quasi-liberal monarchies of Europe; Leon Trotsky, in exile in Vienna from 1907 to 1914, began publishing a paper called Pravda. In the nascent field of psychology, Freud placed the ego at the mercy of the id. The world was unstable, and it seemed that one colossal Idea, or, failing that, one well-placed bomb, could bring it tumbling down. There was an almost titillating sense of imminent catastrophe.
Vienna was the scene of what may have been the ultimate pitched battle between the bourgeoisie and the avant-garde. A minority of “truth-seekers,” as the historian Carl Schorske calls them, or “critical modernists,” in the parlance of the philosopher Allan Janik, grew incensed by the city’s rampant aestheticism, its habit of covering all available surfaces in gold leaf. They saw before them a supposedly modern, liberal, tolerant society that was failing to deliver on its promises, that was consigning large parts of its citizenry to poverty and misery. They spoke up for the outcasts and the scapegoats, the homosexuals and the prostitutes. Many of the “truth-seekers” were Jewish, and they were beginning to comprehend that Jews could never assimilate themselves into an anti-Semitic society, no matter how great their devotion to German culture. In the face of the gigantic lie of the cult of beauty—so the rhetoric went—art had to become negative, critical. It had to differentiate itself from the pluralism of bourgeois culture, which, as Salome demonstrated, had acquired its own avant-garde division.
The offensive against kitsch moved on all fronts. The critic Karl Kraus used his one-man periodical, Die Fackel, or The Torch, to expose what he considered to be laziness and mendacity in journalistic language, institutionalized iniquity in the prosecution of crime, and hypocrisy in the work of popular artists. The architect Adolf Loos attacked the Art Nouveau compulsion to cover everyday objects in wasteful ornament, and, in 1911, shocked the city and the emperor with the unadorned, semi-industrial facade of his commercial building on the Michaelerplatz. The gruesome pictures of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele confronted a soft-porn art world with the insatiability of lust and the violence of sex. Georg Trakl’s poetry meticulously documented the onset of insanity and suicidal despair: “Now with my murderer I am alone.”
If members of this informal circle sometimes failed to appreciate one another’s work—the bohemian poet Peter Altenberg preferred Puccini and Strauss to Schoenberg and his students—they closed ranks when philistines attacked. There would be no backing down in the face of opposition. “If I must choose the lesser of two evils,” Kraus said, “I will choose neither.”
The most aggressive of Vienna’s truth-seekers was the philosopher Otto Weininger, who, in 1903, at the age of twenty-three, shot himself in the house where Beethoven died. In a city that considered suicide an art, Weininger’s was a masterpiece, and it made a posthumous bestseller of his doctoral dissertation, a bizarre tract titled Sex and Character. The a
rgument of the book was that Europe suffered from racial, sexual, and ethical degeneration, whose root cause was the rampant sexuality of Woman. Jewishness and homosexuality were both symptoms of a feminized, aestheticized society. Only a masculine Genius could redeem the world. Wagner was “the greatest man since Christ.” Strange as it may seem in retrospect, this alternately incoherent and bigoted work attracted readers as intelligent as Kraus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and James Joyce, not to mention Schoenberg and his pupils. The young Alban Berg devoured Weininger’s writings on culture, underlining sentences such as this: “Everything purely aesthetic has no cultural value.” Wittgenstein, who made it his mission to expunge pseudo-religious cant from philosophy, was quoting Weininger when he issued his aphorism “Ethics and aesthetics are one.”
The entire discourse surrounding the Viennese avant-garde demands skeptical scrutiny. Certain of these “truths”—fatuous generalizations about women, obnoxious remarks about the relative abilities of races and classes—fail to impress the modern reader. Weininger’s notion of “ethics,” rooted in Puritanism and self-hatred, is as hypocritical as anyone’s. As in prior periods of cultural and social upheaval, revolutionary gestures betray a reactionary mind-set. Many members of the modernist vanguard would tack away from a fashionable solidarity with social outcasts and toward various forms of ultranationalism, authoritarianism, even Nazism. Moreover, only in a prosperous, liberal, art-infatuated society could such a determinedly antisocial class of artists survive, or find an audience. The bourgeois worship of art had implanted in artists’ minds an attitude of infallibility, according to which the imagination made its own laws. That mentality made possible the extremes of modern art.
