The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  ECONOMIC BILDUNG

  Max Weber (1864–1920) was also troubled by the “degenerate” nature of modern society. He was much influenced by Dilthey, Simmel, and Tönnies but differed from them in believing that what he saw around him was not wholly bad.39 No stranger to the “alienation” that modern life could induce, he thought that group identity was a central factor in making life bearable in modern cities and that its importance had been overlooked. A tall, stooping man, for several years around the turn of the century he had produced almost no serious academic work (he was on the faculty at the University of Freiburg), being afflicted by a severe depression that showed no signs of recovery until 1904. Once begun, however, few recoveries can have been so dramatic.

  Weber was that rare combination, being both very practical and very theoretical. He wrote on the practicalities of parliamentary government, attacked the “Bismarck legend” but at the same time gave much thought to the methodology of the social sciences. He was equally interested in religion, bureaucracy, the whole question of authority—why some people obey others—in urban societies and in the role of scholarship and universities in the modern world. He was convinced that we don’t have to be Caesar to understand him, that “understanding” involves interpretation, which is a different form of explanation from causative explanation in the hard sciences, and he developed and contrasted this with his notion of “adequate causation.” He thought that there were types of religion—ascetic, mystic, and prophetic (or savior) religions—the latter coming more into conflict with the world and the former showing less the tension that he thought always exists between “religiosity and cognition.” He was impressed by Confucianism, which “knew no radical evil or salvation,” its aim being “dignified acceptance of the world and graceful adjustment to it.”

  By far his most well-known work on religion and sociology was Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), the very opening of which shows Weber’s way of thinking: “A glance at the occupation statistics of any country of mixed religious composition brings to light with remarkable frequency a situation which has several times provoked discussion in the Catholic press and literature, and in Catholic congresses in Germany, namely, the fact that business leaders and owners of capital, as well as the higher grades of skilled labour, and even more the higher technically and commercially trained personnel of modern enterprises, are overwhelmingly Protestant.”40

  That observation is, for Weber, the nub of the matter, the crucial discrepancy that needs to be explained. (Thomas Nipperdey says that certain Englishmen had pointed out this link before but, as their observations were confined to Britain, they had not attracted a lot of attention.)41 Early on, Weber makes it clear he is not talking just about money. For him, a capitalist enterprise and the pursuit of gain are not at all the same thing. People have always wanted to be rich, but that has little to do with capitalism, which he identifies as “a regular orientation to the achievement of profit through [nominally peaceful] economic exchange.” Pointing out that there were mercantile operations—very successful and of considerable size—in Babylonia, Egypt, India, China, and medieval Europe, he insists it is only in Europe since the Reformation that capitalist activity has become associated with the rational organization of formally free labor.42

  Weber was also fascinated by what he thought to begin with was a puzzling paradox. In many cases, men—and a few women—evinced a drive toward the accumulation of wealth but at the same time showed a “ferocious asceticism.” Many successful entrepreneurs actually pursued a lifestyle that was “decidedly frugal.” Why work hard for so little reward? After much consideration, Weber thought he had found an answer in what he called the “this-worldly asceticism” of Puritanism, a notion that he expanded by reference to the concept of “the calling,” a form of economic Bildung.43 Such an idea did not exist in antiquity and, according to Weber, it does not exist in Catholicism either. It dates only from the Reformation, and behind it lies the (Pietist) idea that the highest form of moral obligation of the individual, the best way to fulfill his duty to God, is to help his fellow men, now, in this world. Whereas for Catholics the highest ideal was the purification of one’s own soul through withdrawal from the world (as with monks in a retreat), for Protestants the virtual opposite was true.

  Weber backed up these assertions by pointing out that the accumulation of wealth, in the early stages of capitalism and in Calvinist countries in particular, was morally sanctioned only if it was combined with “a sober, industrious career.” Idle wealth that did not contribute to the spread of well-being, capital that did not work, was condemned as a sin. For Weber, capitalism, whatever it has become, was originally sparked by religious fervor, and without that fervor the organization of labor that made capitalism so different from what had gone before would not have been possible.

  Weber also focused on bureaucracy and on science. There were two faces to bureaucracy, he said. Modern societies couldn’t do without bureaucrats and he thought that Germans have displayed a better talent for rational administration than other nationalities, this having something to do with the idea of Bildung, which he thought was in decline in his day. Necessary as they were, bureaucrats, he thought, always risked stifling innovation, as had happened in China in medieval times, and that was one reason why Bildung was so important.

  In his famous address, “Wissenschaft als Beruf” (Science as a Vocation), delivered in 1917, he found science hoist by its own petard, in that he thought originality could only come from increased specialization that, important as it was, was also a form of impoverishment, both for the individual scientist, who could never cultivate his “whole soul” in this way, and for the rest of us, in that through science we would become progressively disenchanted, magic would be removed from the world, as would meaning. Weber thought that scientific concepts, even when they weren’t scientific pseudoconcepts, were bloodless abstractions incapable of capturing the reality of life. Science could not offer meaning, he said; it could offer nothing we can base our values on. We are therefore left to create our own values without ever being able, even in principle, to know that they are right. This is our predicament. His analysis is almost as bleak as Nietzsche’s.

  Weber wasn’t as angered by modernity as some of his colleagues were. He wasn’t an unmitigated admirer, but he knew he had to be involved.44 Perhaps that is why he has in general been more influential and is better remembered.

  These last two chapters have marked the emergence of “Kulturkritik,” a new philosophical and literary genre and an early indication of a pattern that would flourish in the twentieth century—the idea of cultural crisis and cultural pessimism. Involving warnings about the imminent cultural collapse of German Kultur, this was one of the ideas that helped propel the Conservative Revolution in Weimar Germany in the 1920s and made the rise of National Socialism possible.45

  24.

  Dissonance and the Most-Discussed Man in Music

  The progression—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner, which had occupied the century from 1780 to 1880—might seem an unparalleled peak in musical history. But in the run-up to World War I there was another burst of creative energy in the German-speaking lands, which produced Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Johann Strauss I, Johann Strauss II, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Anton Bruckner, Max Reger, and Arnold Schoenberg. The well of musical genius seemed inexhaustible.

  The career of Johannes Brahms (1833–97) overlapped that of Wagner and, while Wagner was alive, Brahms was the only composer who could stand comparison. But how different they were. Wagner changed everything, but Brahms in a strange way looked back. With him, the symphony as evolved by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schumann achieved a splendid finale. “Brahms, like Bach, summed up an epoch.” At the same time, many of the musical afficionados of Vienna were bitterly divided about his achievement. Mahler described Brahms as “a manikin with a somewhat narrow heart,�
� while Hans von Bülow, showing the influence of the revolution in physics, put it this way: “Brahms ist latente Wärme”—Brahms is latent warmth.1

  It is undeniable, however, that Brahms is still very much with us. His works have become—and remain—a lively part of the repertoire. The four symphonies, the four concertos (two piano, one violin, one double concerto) are now classics, together with the Haydn Variations and the German Requiem.2 These have a greater appeal today than many of the more innovative works of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Liszt.

  Perhaps what most appeals is Brahms’s sheer seriousness. From the word go, he set himself the task to write music that would be beautiful but would at the same time counter the self-centered flamboyance of Liszt and Wagner. This meant he became known as a “difficult” composer, even “a philosopher in sound.” And how much did that reflect the fact that he was himself uncompromising and “difficult”? Prickly, oversensitive, cynical, and bad-tempered, he was as much feared and disliked as Hans von Bülow, who was notorious for his tempers and antagonisms. At one party in Vienna, it is said, Brahms left in a huff, grumbling, “If there is anyone here that I have not insulted, I apologise.”3

  Handsome in his youth, Brahms was slight, with fair hair and vivid blue eyes. He became much heavier as he grew older, his face framed with a beard “of biblical proportions.”4 The one extravagance he allowed himself was a collection of original music manuscripts, the jewel of which was Mozart’s G Minor Symphony.

  Born in Hamburg in 1833, Brahms was the son of a professional double bass player and was only six when it was discovered he had perfect pitch and a precocious musical ability. By ten he was giving piano recitals in public. Strangely, however, given that his father was a double bass player, Brahms was set to playing in waterfront bars and bordellos in the red-light district of what was, after all, a port city. This may have helped the family finances, but it left its psychological scars. Throughout his life Brahms seems to have been sexually comfortable only with prostitutes, and this almost certainly got in the way of his marrying.

  By the time he was twenty, Brahms had written several works for the piano. They were monumental, with deep-sounding basses in the background, but they hardly let up—there was no spark to draw people in.5 However, at this time his career as a pianist was going from strength to strength, and in 1853, on tour, he encountered Joseph Joachim (1831–1907), a young violinist already famous who was very much taken with Brahms’s piano playing.6 Joachim introduced Brahms to Liszt and, more consequentially, to Schumann, the latter making an entry in his diary for September 30, 1853: “Brahms to see me (a genius).” Schumann was in fact so impressed by the young man that, generous as ever, he wrote a lengthy piece about Brahms in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, referring to him as “a young eagle.” The article would be the last Schumann wrote for the publication he had founded, but so intense was the attraction between the two men that Schumann insisted Brahms move in with him. (Brahms almost certainly fell in love with Clara, though for her part, when Schumann died, “she became a professional widow who wore mourning clothes all her life.”) 7

  In 1862 Brahms traveled to Vienna, liked it, went back the following year—and stayed for the rest of his life. His decision was helped by his appointment as conductor at the Academy of Singing though he remained there for just two years, afterward concentrating on composing, with short breaks for concert tours.

  Brahms’s first truly famous work was not a piano piece, as might have been expected, but the Deutsches Requiem, and here there was a paradox. He himself was a freethinker, from Protestant Hamburg, writing in Catholic Vienna. The text of the Requiem is in German (not Latin) and is taken from the Lutheran Bible but bears no relation to any known liturgy; it is his own language and there is nothing nationalistic or political about it.8 There is no mention of Christ. Yet when it was performed in 1868, first in Dresden (incomplete), then in Leipzig—the full version—it was a great success, the right blend of reflection and stirring choral harmonies. Brahms all but gave up touring as a pianist as music poured from his pen.

  All composers in the nineteenth century were confronted—or felt they were confronted—with the monumental presence of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, “a vast wall of invention and sound.” (Even Wagner had been daunted.) Brahms’s Symphony no. 1 in 1876 was several years in the making, and the composer was all too aware that Beethoven, at the age of forty-three, which Brahms then was, had produced eight of his nine symphonies. Brahms, who some people in Vienna were calling Beethoven’s successor, had to be sure of his ground.

  Harold Schonberg says that the C Minor Symphony—and perhaps its reception—seemed to “unlock” something in Brahms. He now entered upon a period of great creativity, producing masterpiece after masterpiece—the Violin Concerto in 1879, the B-flat Piano Concerto in 1881, the Third Symphony in 1883, the Fourth Symphony in 1885, the Concerto for Violin and Cello in 1887.9 Between 1891 and 1894 he produced a raft of remarkable works for the clarinet—the Clarinet Trio and Clarinet Quintet (both in 1891), and two clarinet sonatas (1894)—written for another of his friends, Richard Mühlfeld, the first clarinetist of the Meiningen Orchestra, which played an important role in Brahms’s career. Hans von Bülow, the conductor who had taken over in 1880, had turned it into “the precision instrument of European orchestras” and he now used it to become the greatest interpreter of Brahms.10

  Not that this adulation seems to have had much effect on the composer himself. Brahms aged badly, growing more irascible, more sarcastic, more cynical, falling out with his erstwhile friends, with both von Bülow and Joachim. Yet toward the end, Brahms’s music became very tender and relaxed. The D Minor Violin Sonata, the Clarinet Quintet, and his very last work, eleven choral preludes for organ, “have a kind of serenity unique in the work of any composer.” At a time when the formidable operas of Wagner and the alarming modernist dissonances of Richard Strauss were the talk of Europe, the music of Brahms, the sound of the old, premodern, pre–World War I era, serenely slipped away. 11

  THE GREATEST LIEDER COMPOSER OF ALL TIME?

  The year of Brahms’s death, 1897, was a year of tragedy for Hugo Wolf (1860–1903). In that year, the man who many think was the greatest song composer of all time, was consigned to a lunatic asylum. We shall never know whether the cause was the syphilis he had contracted as a teenager or whether he was in any case temperamentally and constitutionally weak. A slim, aristocratic-looking man, often photographed in an elegant velvet jacket and flamboyant artist’s tie, his dark eyes were always burning, always troubled. Yet within the space of a few years “this tortured creature left the world a legacy that carried the German art song to its highest point.”12

  A bohemian and a malcontent, he was yet able for a short time to achieve an intensity of feeling in his music unmatched by any of his contemporaries.13 He wrote nearly 250 songs that, although they show a great affinity for the poetry on which they are based and are more original and more advanced harmonically even than Schubert, have an equilibrium belied by Wolf’s own stormy life.

  He started writing songs when he was in his teens, but his best work was done about a decade later. In the four years between 1888 and 1891 he produced more than 200 songs, two or three a day at times, using a variety of (often comic) poems by Eduard Mörike, Joseph von Eichendorff, Goethe, of course, and Gottfried Keller.14 In 1897 Wolf collapsed into insanity and the last four years of his short life were spent, on and off, in an asylum—his song-writing career lasted just seven years.15

  Despite the speed of their composition, the quality of Wolf’s songs was immediately recognized. Leading singers took them up straightaway with Wolf, a good pianist if not in Brahms’s class, accompanying them. The difference Wolf introduced lay in his use of melody. For him melody could contribute to the meaning of a poem, a good example being “Wer rief dich denn,” in which the singer sings one thing while the accompaniment suggests that the words he is mouthing are false.16

  In the first instanc
e, Wolf’s madness took the form of delusions that he had been appointed director of the Vienna Opera. From the asylum he wrote detailed plans for what he wanted to do now that he had succeeded Mahler.17 He died in the asylum in 1903, his life never achieving the equilibrium of his best work.

  “THE LAUGHING GENIUS OF VIENNA”

  Brahms and Wolf, though rivals (at least in the latter’s eyes), were united in being serious composers. Harold Schonberg points out that in the nineteenth century three composers of “light” music have survived time and fashion “so triumphantly that they legitimately can be called immortals.” The waltzes and Viennese operettas of Johann Strauss II, the opéra bouffe of Jacques Offenbach, not to mention the operettas of Arthur Sullivan, remain with us, as charming, pert, and inventive as ever.

  The German form of light music, the waltz, originated in the 1770s from the Ländler, an Austro-German dance in three-quarter time. It took all Europe by storm, even though Vienna was always its “headquarters.” Michael Kelly, the Irish tenor who performed at the world premiere of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, wrote in his memoirs (in 1826) that women “regularly waltzed from ten in the evening until seven in the morning,” and that special rooms were prepared near the dance floor “for heavily pregnant ladies to give birth should the need arise.” Schubert, Weber, Brahms, and Richard Strauss all wrote waltzes (there is even a waltz in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck). But of course the waltz is forever associated with the name of Johann Strauss, father and son.18

  Johann Strauss I was born in Vienna in 1804. By the age of fifteen he was a professional violinist, playing in a number of orchestras. In 1826, when he was still in his early twenties, he and one of his fellow violinists, a sensitive young man called Josef Lanner, formed their own dance group.19 All went well until Strauss turned his hand to composing, when the two men fell out badly; Strauss stormed off to form his own orchestra, soon employing 200 musicians, servicing six balls a night. His compositions were also a success and he wrote one “hit” after another—the Donaulieder (op. 127), the “Radetzky-Marsch,” and so on.