The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  No one can know himself,

  Detach from his self,

  Yet he tries to become every day

  What is finally clear from the outside,

  What he is and what he was,

  What he can and what he may.

  Strauss sketched a choral work based on Goethe’s text, and, as Jackson discovered, some of that material went into Metamorphosen. The composer was musing in some deep way on the course of his life, perhaps questioning the philosophy of individualism that had long guided him.

  Metamorphosen, scored for twenty-three strings, begins with consecutive chords of E minor, A-flat major, B-flat major, and A major, anchored on a descending chromatic line. Dusky and doleful, the harmonies run through eleven of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale in just two bars, as if to acknowledge that Schoenberg might not have been so crazy after all. Contrapuntal lines intertwine like kudzu on a ruined mansion. As the movement unfolds, the music tries to settle into a more relaxed, lyrical voice, but at regular intervals a kind of drainage occurs and a Tristan mood of wounded desperation resumes. At a dramatic moment toward the end, most of the instruments drop out, leaving a sibilant G in the upper violas and cellos. The effect recalls the climax of the Adagio of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, when the ensemble falls away to expose a unison C-flat high in the violins. Strauss’s high cry seems prepared to serve as a dramatic leading note to a brighter tonal region—something akin to Mahler’s beatific resignation. Instead, it gravitates implacably to the deathly C minor that has been sounding throughout.

  In the final section a new element enters: a quotation from the funeral march of Beethoven’s Eroica. As the story goes, Beethoven had planned to dedicate the Eroica to Napoleon, but when Napoleon crowned himself emperor the composer crossed out the dedication and wrote instead, “To the memory of a great man.” It has long been thought that Strauss was saying the same about Hitler, burying a man in whom he once believed. In light of the hidden citation of Goethe’s line “No one can know himself,” it is more likely that the hero being laid to rest is Strauss himself. There are anguished dissonances as Strauss’s own funereal anthem falls in and out of sync with Beethoven’s. Having seemingly reached bottom, it goes two more long steps down—a low G, then an even lower C. It is like the sunrise fanfare of Thus Spake Zarathustra moving in retrograde, the harmonic series rewinding to the fundamental. There is no “light in the night,” only night.

  Strauss finished Metamorphosen on April 12, 1945. Franklin Delano Roosevelt died the same day. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, vaguely similar in tone to the music that Strauss had just composed, played on American radio. That afternoon in the ruins of Berlin, the Berlin Philharmonic presented an impeccably Hitlerish program that included Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Bruckner’s Romantic Symphony, and the Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung. After the concert, members of the Hitler Youth distributed cyanide capsules to the audience, or so the rumor went. Hitler marked his fifty-sixth birthday on April 20. Ten days later, he shot himself in the mouth. In accordance with his final instructions, the body was incinerated alongside that of Eva Braun.

  Hitler possibly envisaged his immolation as a reprise of that final scene of the Ring, in which Brünnhilde builds a pyre for Siegfried and rides into the flames. Or he may have hoped to reenact the love-death of Tristan—whose music, he once told his secretary, he wished to hear as he died. Walther Funk thought that Hitler had modeled the scorched-earth policy of the regime’s last phase on Wagner’s grand finale: “Everything had to go down in ruins with Hitler himself, as a sort of false Götterdämmerung.” Such an extravagant gesture would have fulfilled the prophecy of Walter Benjamin, who wrote that fascist humanity would “experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.” But there is no evidence that the drug-addled Führer was thinking about Wagner or listening to music in the last days and hours of his life. Eyewitness reports suggest that the grim ceremony in the bombed-out Chancellery garden—two gasoline-soaked corpses burning fitfully, the one intact, the other with its skull caved in—was something other than a work of art.

  Part III

  1945–2000

  We live in a time I think not of

  mainstream, but of many streams, or even,

  if you insist upon a river of time, that we

  have come to delta, maybe even beyond

  delta to an ocean which is going back

  to the skies.

  —JOHN CAGE, KPFA RADIO, 1992

  10

  ZERO HOUR

  The U.S. Army and German Music, 1945–1949

  On April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler’s suicide, “zero hour” in modern German history, the 103rd Infantry and Tenth Armored divisions of the U.S. Army took possession of the Alpine resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which the war had hardly touched. Two hundred Allied bombers had been poised to lay waste to the town and its environs, but the strike was called off at the behest of a surrendering German officer.

  Early in the morning a security detachment turned in to the driveway of a Garmisch villa, intending to use it as a command post. When the senior officer, Lieutenant Milton Weiss, went inside the house, an old man came downstairs to meet him. “I am Richard Strauss,” he said, “the composer of Rosenkavalier and Salome.” Strauss studied the soldier’s face for signs of sympathy. Weiss, who had played piano at Jewish resorts in the Catskills, nodded his head in recognition. Strauss went on to recount his experiences in the war, pointedly mentioning the tribulations of his Jewish relatives. Weiss chose to install his post elsewhere.

  At 11:00 a.m. on the same day, a squad of jeeps came up the drive, these led by Major John Kramers, of the 103rd Infantry Division’s military-government branch. Kramers told the family that they had fifteen minutes to evacuate. Strauss walked out to the major’s jeep, holding documents that declared him to be an honorary citizen of Morgantown, West Virginia, together with part of the manuscript of Rosenkavalier. “I am Richard Strauss, the composer,” he said. Kramers’s face lit up; he was a Strauss fan. An “Off Limits” sign was placed on the lawn.

  In the days that followed, Strauss posed for photographs, played the Rosenkavalier waltzes on the piano, and smiled bemusedly as soldiers inspected his statue of Beethoven and asked who it was. “If they ask one more time,” he muttered, “I’m telling them it’s Hitler’s father.”

  All over Europe, young veterans were emerging from the rubble of the war into adulthood. Among them were several future leaders of the postwar musical scene, and they would be indelibly marked by what they had experienced in adolescence. Karlheinz Stockhausen was the son of a spiritually tortured Nazi Party member who went to the eastern front and never returned. His mother was confined for many years to a sanatorium, then killed in the Nazi euthanasia program. By the age of sixteen, Stockhausen was working in a mobile hospital behind the western front, where he tried to revive soldiers who had fallen victim to Allied incendiary bombs. “I would try to find an opening in the mouth area for a straw,” he recalled, “in order to pour some liquid into these men, whose bodies were still moving, but there was only a yellow ball-like mass where the face should have been.” On a given day Stockhausen and his comrades would haul thirty or forty corpses into churches that had been converted into morgues.

  Hans Werner Henze trained as a radio operator for Panzer battalions and spent the first part of 1945 riding aimlessly around the ruined landscape. Bernd Alois Zimmermann fought on the front lines of Hitler’s ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union. Luciano Berio was conscripted into the army of Mussolini’s Republic of Salò and nearly blew off his right hand with a gun that he did not know how to use. Iannis Xenakis joined the Greek Communist resistance, fighting not only the Germans but also the British, who, in an early demonstration of Cold War Realpolitik, made common cause with local Fascists when they occupied the country. At the end of 1944 a British shell landed on a building where Xenakis was hiding; after watching a comrade’s brains splatter against a wall, he
passed out and awoke to find that his left eye and part of his face were gone.

  In July 1945, the young English composer Benjamin Britten, who had just scored a triumph in London with his opera Peter Grimes, accompanied the violinist Yehudi Menuhin on a brief tour of defeated Germany. The two men visited the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen and performed for a crowd of former inmates. Stupefied by what he saw, Britten decided to write a cycle of songs on the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, the most spiritually scouring poetry he could find. On August 6 he set to music Sonnet 14, which begins, “Batter my heart, three person’d God.” Earlier the same day, the first operational atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. There is an eerie coincidence here, for J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the American nuclear program, cherished the same Donne poem, and evidently had it in mind when he gave the site of the first atomic test the name Trinity.

  On August 19, Britten finished his cycle by setting Donne’s sonnet “Death be not proud.” The singer declaims the words “And death shall be no more” on a rising scale; fixates for nine long beats on the word “Death”; and finally, over a clanging dominant-tonic cadence, thunders, “Thou shalt die.”

  In 1945 Germany was a primitive society such as Europe had not known since the Middle Ages. The former citizens of Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich were living a hand-to-mouth existence, scavenging for food, drinking from drainpipes, cooking over wood fires, living in the basements of destroyed houses or in hand-built trailers and cabins. In 1948 the glamorous young American musician Leonard Bernstein arrived in Munich to conduct a concert and reported back home: “The people starve, struggle, rob, beg for bread. Wages are often paid in cigarettes. Tipping is all in cigarettes. It is all misery.”

  Millions of prisoners of war-[lived in camps; millions more roamed the roads, having fled the Soviet occupation in the east or been expelled from neighboring countries by policies of ethnic cleansing. No sooner had Hitler made his exit than Stalin replaced him as a threat. The collected might of Anglo-American industry, which had been used to obliterate one German city after another, now became the engine of reconstruction. Germany would be reinvented as a democratic, American-style society, a bulwark against the Soviets. Part of that grand plan was a cultural policy of denazification and reeducation, which would have a decisive effect on postwar music.

  Germany and Austria broke apart into American, British, French, and Soviet zones. The head of the American occupation—the Office of Military Government, United States, or OMGUS—was an evenhanded, incorruptible, staggeringly efficient man named Lucius Clay. What made Clay interesting was that his background combined strict West Point training with a whiff of New Deal idealism; in the Army Corps of Engineers he had coordinated building projects with the WPA, and an early evaluation had called him “inclined to be bolshevistic.” The military governor wanted to reshape and lift up Germany as Roosevelt had reshaped and lifted up America. At a conference in Berchtesgaden, near Hitler’s old redoubt, Clay said, “We are trying to free the German mind and to make his heart value that freedom so greatly that it will beat and die for that freedom and for no other purpose.”

  The project of freeing the German mind went by the name “reorientation.” The term originated in the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, which was led by Brigadier General Robert McClure. Psychological warfare meant the pursuit of military ends by nonmilitary means, and in the case of music it meant the promotion of jazz, American composition, international contemporary music, and other sounds that could be used to degrade the concept of Aryan cultural supremacy.

  One key member of General McClure’s staff was the émigré Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov. “He’s hep on music and tells the Krauts how to go about it,” one military man said of this ebullient, charming, and slippery personality. Back in the twenties and early thirties, Nabokov had belonged to Serge Diaghilev’s cadre of composers at the Ballets Russes. His music was relatively negligible, his ability to cultivate high-level social and political connections positively virtuosic; in the postwar era he would show a Zelig-like ability to appear in the middle of any cultural imbroglio.

  With the coming of OMGUS, Psychological Warfare evolved into Information Control, taking responsibility for all cultural activity in the occupied areas. In keeping with the reorientation paradigm, military and civilian experts were brought in to guide extant organizations and encourage new, forward-looking ones. Many in Information Control’s Music Branches had thorough training and a progressive outlook on contemporary music. Two of the brightest were stationed in Bavaria, the birthplace of the Nazi Party. John Evarts, who served there from 1946 on, had taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Schoenberg’s pupil Heinrich Jalowetz was on the faculty. Joining Evarts in 1948 was the Mississippi-born pianist Carlos Moseley, who had studied alongside Leonard Bernstein at Koussevitzky’s music school in the Berkshires.

  Moseley arranged for one of Information Control’s triumphs—Bernstein’s startlingly successful conducting engagement in Munich in May 1948, which led some experienced concertgoers to exclaim that this young American knew German music better than the Germans. In a letter home Bernstein exulted: “It means so much for the American military Government, since music is the Germans’ last stand in their ‘master race’ claim, and for the first time it’s been exploded in Munich.”

  Moseley’s memories of his OMGUS service remained distinct more than five decades later, when he spoke to the author of this book at a restaurant in midtown Manhattan. Having arrived in Munich on a wet winter night, he had no time to dry his clothes before reporting to senior operatives for briefings. A senior general told him that one pressing task was to “look into that whole thing going on in Beulah.” By this the general meant Bayreuth, where ideas for a possible revival of the Wagner festival were circulating. Moseley went to Bayreuth and walked up the Green Hill to the Festspielhaus. The roof was leaking and water dripped into the amphitheater. Down in the orchestra pit, Moseley saw instruments lying about, including a rack of bells. Remembering a recording of Parsifal that he had listened to many times in his youth—the one led by Karl Muck—he struck the notes C, G, A, and E, the Grail temple motif.

  Afterward, Moseley went to Haus Wahnfried, Wagner’s home, which Allied bombs had also damaged. Winifred Wagner, the widow of Wagner’s son, Siegfried, had had to suffer the indignity of a denazification hearing, and she watched helplessly as the theater was used for Italian opera, light entertainment, and other “desecrations.” Soldiers played jazz on the Wahnfried piano; doughnuts were baked in the festival restaurant. The Festspielhaus even served as a barracks for African-American troops—a circumstance that Winifred noted in her reminiscences with four exclamation points of horror. She gave Moseley a tour of the ruins and showed him the Meister’s grave. “She began talking about ‘unser Blitzkrieg’—‘our Blitzkrieg’—and reminiscing fondly of the Hitler period. I froze up. I couldn’t take it. I just walked away from her, feeling a definite terror in my veins.”

  OMGUS’s music policies were summed up in a Psychological Warfare document titled “Music Control Instruction No. 1,” which can be found at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. “It is above all essential,” the memo says, “that we should not give the impression of trying to regiment culture in the Nazi manner.” Instead, “German musical life must be influenced by positive rather than by negative means, i.e., by encouraging the music which we think beneficial and crowding out that which we think dangerous.” Only two men occupied the “dangerous” category: Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner. “We must not…allow such composers to be ‘built up’ by special concerts devoted entirely to their works or conducted by them.” With this two-pronged approach, the document concludes, “we shall have little difficulty in giving a positive international direction to German musical life.” The anonymous author also flagged Sibelius, deeming him likely to reawaken feelings of Nordic supremacy: hence, Finlandia was banned in Germany.


  If not Strauss, Pfitzner, and Sibelius, which composers would be acceptable in the new Germany? The first order of business was to restore to the repertory music that the Nazis had banned on racial and ideological grounds. One early strategy had mixed results, as a report from August 1945 shows: “The rule of having to perform at least one ‘verboten’ work on each program has led to a stereotyped pattern of starting orchestral concerts with a Mendelssohn overture…The Mendelssohn situation has become critical, ridiculous, and urgent.” The author of this memo, Edward Kilenyi, was the son of Gershwin’s theory teacher.

  Music Control also placed great emphasis on American music, promoting major works of Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson along with more dubious fare such as Robert McBride’s Strawberry Jam Overture. There was a sudden surge in performances of a symphony by the little-known Harrison Kerr, who happened to work in the Cultural Affairs Division’s New York office. Censorship departments that were monitoring the German mails reported that on the whole American music was going down well, although symphonic works had less traction than popular songs. “I hear such nice American music over the radio,” wrote a German woman to a friend in Philadelphia. “I really like it very much; I do not know why we were always told that it amounts to nothing. The fact is, that our music is heavier and everlasting, but your songs and hits are so jolly and light.”