by Alex Ross
The crucial work of Schoenberg’s “American” period was the String Trio of 1946, which hints at the conflicting pleasures, agonies, hopes, and regrets of life in California. On its surface, it is a piece of unapologetic difficulty, reminiscent of Schoenberg’s wildest early atonal music. The score is full of distortion and noise, with the players asked to execute such eerie effects as sul ponticello (bowing the strings at the bridge) and col legno (bowing or tapping the strings with the wood of the bow). Yet the contrasting lyrical episodes radiate nostalgia for the former tonal world. By his own testimony, Schoenberg was depicting in musical terms a severe asthma attack he experienced in the summer of 1946, during which his pulse temporarily stopped and he was given an injection to the heart. Some passages represented the injections, he said, others the male nurse who treated him. The composer Allen Shawn, in a book about Schoenberg, notes that the String Trio is a kind of fantastic autobiography, “as if in his delirium he had reviewed his life.” The ending is soft and wistful.
Ronald Schoenberg, the older of the composer’s two American sons, still lives in the Brentwood house where his father spent the last part of his life. He recalls that in his childhood tour buses would regularly come up the street, and a voice on a loudspeaker would point out the home of Shirley Temple. The guide would never mention that the composer of Erwartung lived across the way. “My father was always a little sad about that,” his son says. “But another time, we stopped at a juice bar out on Highway 1, and the radio was playing Verklärte Nacht, and I never saw him so happy.”
Igor Stravinsky came to California in 1940. He had arrived on the East Coast the previous year, to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. Not long after the final lecture, France fell, and Stravinsky again found himself a refugee from twentieth-century history.
Los Angeles naturally attracted him, not only for the pleasant climate but also for the opportunity to try his hand at film. Like Schoenberg, Stravinsky was a movie buff, enjoying Chaplin’s classic silents, the comic masterpieces of Buster Keaton, the Hepburn-Tracy romantic comedies, and Disney’s cartoons. The possibility of a Stravinsky-Disney collaboration particularly excited the press. “America may yet see Mickey Mouse liberating the princess in the Firebird,” the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote in 1940. There were ambitious ideas for an entire Disney film built around a Stravinsky score. Stravinsky talked to other studios, and sketched music for the films Commandos Strike at Dawn (about the Nazi occupation of Norway), The North Star (about a Russian village under siege), The Song of Bernadette (based on the novel by his friend Franz Werfel), and Jane Eyre (starring Orson Welles, whose Citizen Kane Stravinsky admired).
In the end, Stravinsky’s music appeared in only one Hollywood movie—Disney’s animated magnum opus Fantasia, where dinosaurs danced in time to the rhythms of the Rite. Stravinsky later claimed to have been horrified by Fantasia, although there is no record of his saying anything negative at the time. “Igor appears to love it,” Hindemith commented in a 1941 letter.
Why did Stravinsky have so little luck in Hollywood? The trouble wasn’t money, as in Schoenberg’s case. Studio heads were confident that Stravinsky’s name would prove a box-office draw; Louis B. Mayer reportedly agreed to give the composer a whopping $100,000, which would be well over a million dollars in today’s money. In a review of the composer’s Hollywood activities, Charles Joseph observes that in almost every case Stravinsky demanded too much time to finish the music and too much control over the finished product. The studios may have revered Stravinsky as a cultural figure, but they could not bring expensive projects to a halt while the composer lined his paper and manipulated his colored pencils in pursuit of the perfect Norwegian commando sonorities. In other ways, Stravinsky happily played along with the culture industry, writing a Tango that was taken up by Benny Goodman’s band; a Circus Polka that was danced by fifty young women and fifty elephants in pink tutus at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus (choreography by Balanchine); a Scherzo à la russe for Paul Whiteman; and an Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman.
Somewhat surprisingly, the main works of Stravinsky’s first years of exile were symphonies: the Symphony in C (begun in Paris in 1938, finished in Los Angeles in 1940, premiered by the Chicago Symphony that year); Ode (three symphonic movements commissioned by the Boston Symphony, premiered in 1943); and the Symphony in Three Movements (New York Philharmonic, 1946). America’s seemingly limitless hunger for symphonic utterances, whether by Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich, or Roy Harris, may have given Stravinsky incentive to explore a form that he had avoided since his studies with Rimsky-Korsakov (if the Symphony of Psalms is placed in a category by itself ).
The Symphony in Three Movements became another peak in a mountain range of an output. It is unusual among Stravinsky’s works in that it follows a quasi-Romantic narrative plan, one of struggle and resolution. The first movement is all dynamism and conflict, the pastoral Andante provides respite, the finale carries on the conflict at a more strident pitch. Departing from his usual post-1918 line of defining music as a self-contained, anti-expressive art, Stravinsky later cited newsreel footage of goose-stepping soldiers as a source of inspiration. The piece begins with a striking, almost cinematic gesture—a swooshing upward rush of strings, lower winds, and piano, coupled with a four-horn fanfare, reminiscent of the columnar opening bars of Oedipus Rex. Then a rugged, foursquare march begins. Yet Stravinsky remains Stravinsky: the opening gesture is repeated in irregular fragments, as if the newsreels were being rearranged in a cubistic collage. Rhythms keep doubling back or springing ahead, plain chords bang against each other in unexpected ways. More warlike noises enliven the finale: trudging and swinging rhythms, exuberant whoops in the horns, and, at the end, a splashy, souped-up, self-confessedly Hollywoodish chord of victory—the sound of America on the march.
On August 7, 1945, the day after the atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima, Stravinsky added an extra pulse to the final chord, perhaps by way of honoring the immense military might of the country of which he was about to become a permanent citizen.
On July 19, 1942, NBC broadcast Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, with Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony. It was the most spectacular new-music event of the radio era, heralded by the Time magazine cover portrait of Shostakovich in his fireman’s helmet.
Most of the émigré composers—Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Eisler, Rachmaninov, Hindemith, and Bartók—were listening, and almost all seem to have experienced a mass attack of envy and resentment. Schoenberg praised Shostakovich on other occasions, but this time he snapped, “With composing like this, one must be grateful that he has not already gone up to Symphony No. 77!” Hindemith condemned the trend toward “despicable rubbish” in orchestral music and sat down to write a set of fugues—the Ludus tonalis—in which he hoped to “remind those who have not completely succumbed what music and composition really are.” None of the émigrés reacted more strongly than Bartók, who was listening at home in New York. When he wrote his Concerto for Orchestra the following summer, he included a savage reference to the Leningrad; in “Intermezzo interrotto,” the fourth movement, the clarinet plays a sped-up, cartoonish version of the Bolero-ish “invasion” theme, accompanied by chortling trills and sneering trombone glissandos.
Bartók, like Hindemith, apparently believed that Shostakovich was indulging in oversimplified writing for cheap effect. Neither composer seemed to realize that the first movement of the Leningrad was a complicated act of parody, or that Shostakovich had little to gain, financial or otherwise, from American success. For Bartók, who had fled fascist Hungary in 1940 and endured periods of severe financial need in the first years of his American exile, a few high-profile performances by the likes of Toscanini and Koussevitzky would have made a world of difference. Fortunately, help was on the way; Koussevitzky commissioned the Concerto for Orchestra and gave it a brilliant premiere in Boston in December 1944.
The Concerto might be a tribute to the pluralism that Ro
osevelt’s America in its ideal form embodied. There are folk melodies of the Hungarian, Romanian, and Czech peasant traditions, Gypsy dances, North African rhythms, echoes of both the impressionism of Debussy and the expressionism of Schoenberg (they are unified in the Elegy movement), Stravinsky’s Rite, and, riding high above, pealing fanfares of all-American brass. Ridicule aside, the Shostakovich quotation adds to the polyglot diversity of the piece. Almost every instrument in the orchestra has a solo role, even as the collective emotion swells. Bartók’s parting gift to his adopted country—he died on September 26, 1945—is a portrait of democracy in action.
Appalachian Spring
In Roosevelt’s last years, the chief custodian of the rapidly fading New Deal spirit was Henry Wallace, who served as vice president from 1941 until January 1945. As Roosevelt’s agriculture secretary, Wallace had presided over some of the New Deal’s most ambitious and controversial programs, including the Agricultural Adjustment Act, whose demise provoked the Federal Theatre Project production Triple-A Plowed Under. As vice president, Wallace moved further to the left than any mainstream politician of the time, espousing radical economic measures and universal civil rights. In a November 1942 address to the Congress of American-Soviet Friendship—in whose parent organization Aaron Copland was later involved—Wallace disavowed what he called “political or Bill-of-Rights democracy” and praised the alleged “economic democracy” of the Soviet Union. On May 8 of the same year, he delivered a widely publicized speech in which he dared to criticize America’s wartime mood of triumphalism. Henry Luce, the mightily influential publisher of Time and Life, had prophesied an “American Century,” an age of American world domination. Wallace proposed instead the “century of the common man.” “The people’s revolution is on the march,” he thundered, “and the devil and all his angels cannot prevail against it.”
Left-wing intellectuals such as Orson Welles, Paul Robeson, Thomas Mann, and Aaron Copland thrilled to the soaring rhetoric of Wallace’s speech, which was immediately published in book form. When, in the fall of 1942, Copland submitted a brief orchestral fanfare to the Cincinnati Symphony in response to a commission, he gave it the title Fanfare for the Common Man.
The source of the title should have been obvious to anyone who followed American politics, but Eugene Goossens, the English-born conductor of the Cincinnati orchestra, missed the reference and formed the impression that the Fanfare was a humorous tribute to the hardworking American taxpayer. He therefore programmed the premiere on March 15, which was tax day at the time. Copland wrote back: “The title was not meant to be funny. I got the idea from Vice-President Wallace’s speech in which he talked about the next century being the century of the common man. Even so, I think it was a swell idea to have played it around March 15th.” As ever, Copland declined to make his politics explicit. The Fanfare was soon enshrined alongside Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Lincoln Portrait in Copland’s gallery of “hits.” Decades later, the rock group Queen incorporated part of the main melody and the stamping rhythm of the Fanfare into its 1977 stadium anthem “We Will Rock You.”
In quick succession Copland manufactured another all-American music icon: the ballet score Appalachian Spring. The idea for the piece came from the choreographer Martha Graham, who wished to use her airy, athletic style of modern dance to create a mythic picture of life on the American frontier. Naturally, she went to Copland for the music.
The original scenario, which Graham had changed considerably by the time Copland finished composing, was set in western Pennsylvania before and during the Civil War, its cast of characters populated with nameless American archetypes. The Mother embodies the purity of the preindustrial American soul; the Daughter is a plucky pioneer type; the Citizen, who marries the daughter and carries her across the threshold of his newly built farmhouse, is a fighter for civil rights, perhaps something of an intellectual, certainly an abolitionist; the Fugitive represents the slaves; and the Younger Sister “suggests today.” The central drama arrives in the “Fear in the Night” episode, when the Fugitive enters and brings with him all the pain and fear of the Civil War. Once the struggle is over, the music subsides toward a final Sabbath scene, which, according to Graham, “could have the feeling either of a Shaker meeting where the movement is strange and ordered and possessed or it could have the feeling of a negro church with the lyric ecstasy of the spiritual about it.”
The title comes from Hart Crane’s great, flawed poetic cycle The Bridge, and specifically from the section “The Dance”:
O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;
Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends
And northward reaches in that violet wedge
Of Adirondacks!…
Graham decided on the title only after Copland had completed the score, but according to Howard Pollack the idea of somehow using The Bridge as a source was present from the start. Crane and Copland had met in bohemian-modernist circles in the twenties, and although they had little contact, both were striving to create modern American myths. The bridge at the center of Crane’s poem is the Brooklyn Bridge, which is said to “lend a myth to God.” It is a sacred symbol in a city given over to flashing images and frantic movement. Elsewhere in the poem, Crane finds moments of transcendence variously in transient sexual connection—love, he says, is “a burnt match skating in a urinal”—and in the emptiness of the American wilderness. Lines from the section “The River” prefigure Copland’s Popular Front vision in their simultaneously celebratory and critical evocation of modern American life:
RADIO ROARS IN EVERY HOME…
So the 20th Century—so
whizzed the Limited—roared by and
left three men, still hungry on the tracks…
This is the famous 20th Century Limited, the luxury train that whisked passengers from New York to Chicago in fifteen hours. Crane may have been thinking equally of the century itself, with its perennial sacrifice of superfluous human material to the idea of progress. He was one of the unlucky ones; beaten down by financial hardship, alcoholism, and guilt over his homosexuality, he committed suicide in 1932.
Appalachian Spring tries to stop the speeding train. Like so many other Copland works, it offers images of an ideal nation, the America that could have been or might still be. It begins with fifty bars in pure A major—white-key music, meaning that if it were transposed to the key of C it would use only the white keys of the piano. There are gentle pangs of dissonance as one simple strand is interwoven with another. A string of bucolic sketches culminates in variations on the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” whose words spell out Copland’s aesthetic in brief: “When true simplicity is gained / To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed.”
In the “Fear in the Night” episode—which in Graham’s final version becomes a fire-and-brimstone dance by a Revivalist—the idyll is cast in shadow. There are mechanical driving rhythms, icy passages for strings sul ponticello (as in the Schoenberg String Trio), percussive thuds like a fist rapping on a door. The finale brings reconciliation. A reprise of “Simple Gifts,” stunningly harmonized over a descending scale, gives way to a bluesy passage marked “Like a prayer,” whose phrases fall into the kinds of asymmetrical patterns that Copland identified with black music. This is perhaps the “negro church” of Graham’s initial plan. In the final section, the frontier music of the opening alternates with the prayer music in evenly divided paragraphs—as if a divided country, black and white, were being made whole.
There is an affecting recording of the elderly Copland leading a rehearsal of Appalachian Spring. When he reaches the end, his reedy, confident Brooklyn voice turns sweet and sentimental: “Softer, very sul tasto, misterioso, great mood here…That’s my favorite place in the whole piece…organlike. It should have a very special quality, as if you weren’t moving your bows…That sounds too timid. It should sound rounder and more satisfying. Not distant. Quietly present. No diminuendos, like an organ sound. Take it freshly again, like an Amen.
” Copland conjures a perfect American Sunday, like the one at the end of Ives’s Three Places in New England, when the music of all peoples streams from the open doors of a white-steepled church that does not yet exist.
9
DEATH FUGUE
Music in Hitler’s Germany
Classical music was one of the few subjects, along with children and dogs, that brought out a certain tenderness in Adolf Hitler. In 1934, when the new leader of Germany appeared at a Wagner commemoration in Leipzig, observers noted that he spoke with “tears in his voice”—a phrase that appears infrequently in Max Domarus’s twenty-three-hundred-page edition of the Führer’s utterances. The previous year Hitler saluted the first Nuremberg Party Congress with a quotation from Wagner’s Meistersinger—“Wach’ auf!” (“Awake!”). Nor was Hitler the only Nazi who expressed reverence for the German musical tradition. Hans Frank, the governor-general of occupied Poland, said that his favorite composers were Bach, Brahms, and Reger. The Berlin Staatskapelle played Siegfried’s Funeral Music at the funeral of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, whose father had played in Hans von Bülow’s orchestra and sung major tenor roles at Bayreuth. And Josef Mengele whistled favorite airs as he selected victims for the gas chambers in Auschwitz. There are many such anecdotes about music in the Third Reich, and they reinforce Thomas Mann’s controversial but not easily refuted contention that during Hitler’s reign as dictator of Germany great art was allied with great evil. “Thank God,” Richard Strauss said after Hitler came to power, “finally a Reich Chancellor who is interested in art!”
