The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  During the first days in this house I was haunted by a sense of having gone through this experience before; gradually that memory became focused upon golden palaces of Soviet Russia now turned into offices and orphans’ homes and theatres for the Russian proletariat. I remembered a theatre meeting in the great Hall of Mirrors in Leningrad where reflected from every side in those mirrors which once gave back the image of the Empress and later the execution of her officers, I saw the faces of Stalin, Litvinov, Lunachaisky [sic], Petrov and other leaders of political, educational and theatrical life. They met to discuss their mutual problem: how the theatre could serve in educating the people and in enriching their lives.

  That last image—Stalin’s face staring from a mirror—marked an unpromising beginning for an American arts bureaucracy.

  Flanagan’s projects had an obvious socialist realist flavor. Artists were encouraged to create strong, simple scenarios in which working people played heroic roles and moneyed interests were the villains. In the “Living Newspaper” play Triple-A Plowed Under, which criticized the Supreme Court for striking down the farm-subsidy system of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, one actor played the role of Earl Browder, the head of the American Communist Party. The ghost of Thomas Jefferson also chimed in, appearing to give credence to Browder’s ideas. This revisionist picture of the Founding Fathers matched Browder’s “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism” philosophy. At the same time, Triple-A Plowed Under was a brief on behalf of Roosevelt, who was sparring with the Supreme Court. The Republican Party properly took umbrage at the use of a federally funded theater program to generate propaganda on behalf of an embattled president in an election year. By engaging in such blatant activism, Flanagan’s playwrights, directors, and composers almost single-handedly doomed the entire arts program to oblivion.

  The FTP’s most legendary production was Marc Blitzstein’s pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock. The scion of a wealthy Philadelphia family, Blitzstein received a first-class musical education from the likes of Alexander Siloti, a pupil of Liszt’s; Nadia Boulanger, in Paris; and Schoenberg, in Berlin (“Go ahead, you write your Franco-Russian pretty music,” Schoenberg told him). Early on, Blitzstein disdained radical politics and dismissed Kurt Weill’s music as “little more than drivel.” But disgust for the conventional classical world took hold of him, and he was drawn politically to the left by the Berlin-born novelist Eva Goldbeck, whom he married in an effort to disguise his homosexuality. He went on to join the Communist Party. In 1935, through Goldbeck, he met Bertolt Brecht, who challenged him to “write a piece about all kinds of prostitution—the press, the church, the courts, the arts, the whole system.”

  Cradle was Blitzstein’s attempt to follow through on Brecht’s command. It told of the union’s fight for freedom in an abstract place called Steeltown, the villain of the piece being a Brechtian capitalist named Mister Mister, an art-snob robber baron. The satires of upper-class circles and the artists who aim to please them are the most successful passages in the work; in general, the workers’ struggle in Cradle is probably best understood as a metaphor for the artists’ struggle in the American marketplace. At one point, Dauber the artist and Yasha the violinist, in thrall to the patronage of Mrs. Mister, sing an ironic paean to the ghetto in which American musicians had long dwelled:

  Be blind for art’s sake

  And deaf for art’s sake

  And dumb for art’s sake

  Until for art’s sake

  They kill for art’s sake

  All the art for art’s sake.

  There follows a menacing quotation from the main theme of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture—which, we earlier learned, plays on Mrs. Mister’s car horn. Blitzstein is sneering at the upper-class cult of imported European art, which covers up the machinery of exploitation and oppression.

  The Broadway premiere of The Cradle Will Rock was scheduled for June 16, 1937, with the prodigiously gifted twenty-two-year-old Orson Welles directing. A few days before opening night, the WPA temporarily shut down all theater productions for budgetary reasons; the unsubstantiated rumor in the theater world was that the administration wished to suppress Cradle because it feared outbreaks of violence in steel towns across the country. Literally at the last minute, Welles heard of a vacant theater twenty blocks to the north, and most of the company marched there dramatically on foot. To get around the WPA ruling, the singers performed from seats around the auditorium while the composer played his score at the piano. Cradle was an immediate sensation among New York leftists, and a sell-out run of performances followed. But Blitzstein wanted more than press coverage and controversy. According to Welles, the composer believed that his work could become a conduit for revolutionary energies on American soil. “You can’t imagine how simple he was about it,” Welles said. “They were going to hear it, and that would be it!”

  The unlikeliest of Federal Theatre revolutionists was the Parisian expatriate Virgil Thomson. Already in Four Saints in Three Acts Thomson had shown a knack for exploiting musical Americana, and his plaintively powerful Symphony on a Hymn Tune of 1926–28 anticipated aspects of Copland’s populist style. In 1936, Thomson served as musical director for Orson Welles’s production of Macbeth, which came courtesy of the Negro Theatre Project, one of Flanagan’s more commendable initiatives. Much of the music was supplied by a group of African drummers, and at one point Thomson took it on himself to tell them how proper voodoo music should be played. “It don’t sound wicked enough,” he said to the group’s director, who happened to be the dancer, choreographer, singer, and composer Asadata Dafora, a pioneer in the dissemination of West African tribal culture. The same year, Thomson wrote violently percussive music for the “Living Newspaper” play Injunction Granted, which was so strident in its denunciation of capitalism and the courts that even Flanagan criticized it as “hysterical.”

  Thomson also scored two federally funded film documentaries, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938). Both were commissioned by the Resettlement Administration, which was relocating displaced farmers to model communities around the country. Resettlement even had a Special Skills Division, designing a model culture for model towns, with Charles Seeger as musical adviser. The Plow That Broke the Plains, beautifully directed by Pare Lorentz, depicts the devastation wrought by soil erosion on the Great Plains. Thomson’s score, interweaving hymns, ballads, fugues, and jazz, creates subtle counterpoint to the images on-screen, showing the grasslands in their primal state—the Edenic mood again—and then the incursion of capitalist misuse. The excellence of the product could not hide the dubiousness of the enterprise; as in the case of Triple-A Plowed Under, a government agency was using an art form to defend itself against political criticism and hostile judicial rulings. The narration of The River, likewise, makes an aesthetically and ethically jarring transition from Whitmanesque rhetoric (“The water comes downhill, spring and fall; / Down from the cut-over mountains”) to bureaucratic boilerplate (“Down in the Valley, the Farm Security Administration has built a model agricultural community”).

  Anthony Tommasini, Thomson’s biographer, paraphrases the position taken by Roosevelt’s foes: “The German Führer had his Leni Riefenstahl; now FDR had his Pare Lorentz.”

  Circa 1936, Copland’s “commando unit,” his crack squad of young American composers, consisted of five men: Thomson, Harris, Sessions, the elegant neoclassicist Walter Piston, and Copland himself. By the early forties, with the addition of Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, Samuel Barber, Morton Gould, and David Diamond, it had grown to battalion proportions. For a time, these composers seemed to be writing almost with one voice. Fast movements jumped along with jazzy syncopations; slow movements cried out plaintively in empty spaces. Scoring was brassy and brilliant. Climaxes transpired in high Shostakovich style, all pealing trumpets and precisely pounding timpani, the better to punch through the fuzz of radio static.

  American composers had apparently worked out a common practice, a
lingua franca. Behind the scenes, though, the old style wars continued. In a 1938 article, Thomson divided music into three types of audiences, with three types of composers to serve them:

  1) The luxury-trade, capitalist Toscanini public riding with sedate satisfaction in streamlined trains from Beethoven to Sibelius and back. 2) The professor-and-critic conspiracy for internationalist or “contemporary” music which prizes hermetism and obscurantism and makes a cult out of the apparent complexities in systematically discordant counterpoint. 3) The theatre-public of the leftist-front, a public of educated, urban working people who want educated, urban spokesmen for their ideals.

  Exhibit A in category 1 was Samuel Barber—cultivated Italophile, son of a Pennsylvania surgeon, nephew of the Met contralto Louise Homer. He studied composition and voice at the newly founded Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, whose officials promoted him vigorously. In 1935 he appeared on NBC, singing his own easefully beautiful setting of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” None other than Arturo Toscanini was listening; and when the Maestro decided to conduct two of Barber’s works, the Essay for Orchestra and the Adagio for Strings, a minor media sensation ensued. Two years later Artur Rodzinski led both the New York Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic in Barber’s First Symphony, which owed a debt to the Sibelius Seventh. While so many of his generation favored lean textures and brief motifs, Barber produced long melodic lines and rich orchestral textures, leaving audiences with the feeling that they had consumed a high-protein meal.

  Barber’s rise stirred resentment among some musical operatives of the Popular Front, who saw him as a useless bourgeois. R. D. Darrell, in New Masses, called the First Symphony a “grotesque harlequinade of specious modernity (which, it goes without saying, is about as ‘modern’ as Richard Strauss).” Ashley Pettis, of the Federal Music Project, dismissed the Adagio as “‘authentic,’ dull, ‘serious’ music—utterly anachronistic as the utterance of a young man of 28, A.D. 1938!” But Copland himself, rarely doctrinaire or petty in his reactions to colleagues’ work, came to admire the spellbinding quality of Barber’s creation, and later said that it had the virtue of absolute sincerity. The time-suspending atmosphere of the piece derives from a metrical trick that Barber might have picked up from Sibelius: although the music streams by in a steady flow, the ear has trouble detecting where the bar lines fall. The result is something like a modern form of Gregorian chant, and it is no more or less anachronistic than anything else written in A.D. 1938.

  The university-intellectual composers, in Thomson’s category 2, resisted Copland’s demand for “no more Schoenberg.” Their most articulate spokesman was Sessions, who absorbed some of the values of the Schoenberg circle during a Berlin sojourn that lasted from 1931 to 1933. In his Violin Concerto, finished in 1935, Sessions pivoted from neoclassicism toward free atonal expressionism, producing a Bergian mood of ambiguity and loss. He emerged from his European years with the conviction that American composers should obey only an inner creative urge—an “essential innerlich notwendig [inwardly necessary] musical impulse,” as he put it in a letter to Copland—and not a political or commercial obligation to write music for the masses (“forced and essentially anemic Ersatz-Musik”). He failed to entertain the possibility that one could write populist music out of inward necessity. In the 1930s, Sessions’s attitude was a minority position, although it would gain traction in the postwar period, not least through the writings and teachings of his student Milton Babbitt.

  Thomson’s three groups—traditionalists, elitists, populists—match up neatly with the main musical parties of the Weimar Republic, the ones centered on Pfitzner, Schoenberg, and Eisler. As in Weimar, the possibility lingered of a “great fusion,” an agglomeration of classical and popular inheritances. Weill’s Mahagonny and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess both aimed for approximately the same synthesis. By cosmic coincidence, the composer of Mahagonny arrived on American soil in September 1935, the same month as Porgy’s premiere. Weill, who had been living in Paris and London since the Nazis took over, came to America to compose the score for a sort of Jewish pageant-opera titled The Eternal Road, with a libretto by Franz Werfel and a production by Max Reinhardt. The music carried on the incisive populist style of Mahagonny, its vigorous march rhythms again echoing the symphonies of Mahler. Weill came to New York to attend the premiere; the production was delayed for several months; and, as the situation in Europe worsened, Weill elected to remain on American soil. Once again, he was starting from scratch, this time in the real-life Mahagonny of Manhattan.

  In quest of an American identity, Weill tested the waters at the Group Theatre, where, Harold Clurman told him, people passed the time by singing The Threepenny Opera. He did some work on an unrealized Federal Theatre Project production titled The Common Glory, about “the socialist idea in early America,” and also on Davy Crockett, in which the hero of the Alamo would have battled capitalism in Tennessee. Weill’s first big American score was for the 1936 Group Theatre production Johnny Johnson, which won respect less for its political message—it was antiwar, but in a wholesome way—than for its playful, propulsive style, its sharp use of the American vernacular.

  Having had his fill of agitprop with Brecht in Berlin, Weill began to visualize himself as a mainstream theater composer. He had his first Broadway hit with Knickerbocker Holiday in 1938 and struck again with Lady in the Dark in 1941. Weill’s hard-bitten Berlin style transferred to the American stage with remarkable ease; the bittersweet added-sixth harmonies of “September Song,” the big number in Knickerbocker Holiday, bear a family resemblance to “Mack the Knife.” Weill’s Americanization proceeded to the point where he could swear like Clark Gable in a 1940 interview: “I don’t give a damn about writing for posterity…I have never acknowledged the difference between ‘serious’ music and ‘light’ music. There is only good music and bad music.”

  In this same period, the Broadway musical grew more ambitious. The grand new mode of music theater that Kern had set in motion with Show Boat and Gershwin had carried forward in Porgy and Bess achieved maximum commercial impact with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!—whose legendary first run began in 1943 and ended in 1948. While Weill generally told New York stories, Rodgers and Hammerstein extolled the heartland. The work’s “open-air spirit,” as Rodgers called it, had much in common with Copland’s “open prairie,” and when Rodgers set about writing a dance sequence for farm boys and girls, he apparently looked to Copland’s cowboy ballet Rodeo for inspiration.

  The rapid advance of Broadway composers set in relief the fact that their counterparts in the classical world were writing relatively few operas or music-theater pieces, preferring to concentrate on orchestral writing. The Broadway musical was splitting off as a separate genre of American music, with its own language, its own styles of singing, its own schools and subgenres. The distinction between “opera” and “Broadway” was hardening into fact—a missed opportunity for the populist generation.

  In the elections of 1938, the Republicans picked up a large number of seats in Congress and joined forces with conservative Democrats to mount an assault on the New Deal. The House Un-American Activities Committee, under the leadership of Congressman Martin Dies, launched an investigation of the WPA, and the arts programs proved a juicy target. Congressman J. Parnell Thomas charged that the Theatre Project was “one more link in the vast and unparalleled New Deal propaganda machine.” The Music Project faced a separate challenge from the American Federation of Musicians, which saw government-funded performances as unfair competition for professional orchestras, opera companies, and bands. Roosevelt came to the conclusion—justified or not—that the broad American middle would not accept the burden of “encouraging art, music, and literature,” as he put it in a letter to Nelson Rockefeller.

  The death knell for the federal arts programs sounded on June 30, 1939, when Congress called for the abolition of the Federal Theatre Project and allowed the other arts projects to continue on
ly under state and local sponsorship. Roosevelt made a show of decrying the way in which the FTP had been singled out for abuse, claiming that it could have carried on under the terms extended to the other divisions, but all that was a whitewash: as had been predicted in the House hearings, few WPA organizations were able to survive on local support alone.

  A late efflorescence of WPA spirit took place at the New York World’s Fair, which opened in Queens in April 1939. Money for this grand venture came largely from private sources, but New Deal idealism still filled the air, blending uneasily with the adspeak of corporate America. Millions of visitors gazed awestruck at the self-styled “World of Tomorrow”—the sleek forms of the Trylon and Perisphere at the center of the fairgrounds; the “Futurama” spectacular, with its radiant vision of suburban communities interconnected by superhighways; and, at the RCA pavilion, a device called television, which the ever-optimistic David Sarnoff hailed as “a new art.” Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms were monumentalized in sculptures that Mussolini might have found appealing.

  Several prominent composers of Popular Front orientation contributed to the fair, struggling to reconcile their ideals with the requirements of big business. Weill wrote music for the historical pageant Railroads on Parade, in which fifteen working locomotives moved across a massive reinforced stage and blew their whistles on cue. Eisler, suspending his anticapitalist crusade, teamed with Joseph Losey on the puppet film Pete Roleum and His Cousins, which explained the oil industry to children.