CHAPTER 10
The history of German classical music is generally explained as a line of influence and progress. Music history—the scholarly pursuit known as musicology—was invented by the Germans in the late nineteenth century. How could this new field of study “make sense” of 2,000 years of music? Was there a process—evolutionary or a series of revolutions—or was it just a lot of music that seemed to change every now and then? Was there a “reason” for those changes? Is there a story in this history?
It makes sense that the German intellectuals who created a structure for music history were seemingly inspired by two contemporary models to “explain” it in terms of a process. One is what is called the Hegelian dialectic. It refers to the work of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), and in its simplest form it means that something (called thesis) meets its opposite (antithesis) and combines or argues/fights to create something new and better (synthesis). This is thought to be a reasonable tool in understanding the history of music.
The other model is loosely based on the work of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), the English naturalist and geologist, and his theory of evolution, which by the 1870s had been generally accepted as a reasonable explanation of how carbon-based life forms developed. Like Hegel’s cosmology, social Darwinism (a phrase proposed by one of his followers, Herbert Spencer) was used in music history as a way of describing, justifying, and eliminating data so as to demonstrate not only the “survival of the fittest” but also the triumph of more complex (life) forms. In other words, like comparing an ape to a human, more complicated is “better.”
Thus, according to this model, new and interesting music developed through a process of ever-increasing harmonic—and to a lesser degree, rhythmic—complexity, with extremely rare periods of simplification. That is to say, new and important music is more complicated than the music of a previous time period.
This historic progression also assumes a line of direct influence. It is important for the younger composer to know the older composer’s work, understand and support it, and then move onward, having absorbed all that the master had to say. The student then creates new music that accepts some of the master’s teaching, rejects other aspects of it, and adds new elements of his own. Thus: a combination of Hegel’s philosophy of the dialectic achieving a new synthesis, and Darwin’s theory of evolution in which a more complex life form supersedes a simpler one and is deemed “the fittest.”
We can use Beethoven (1770–1827) as an example. He knew the music of Haydn (1732–1809)—the man who developed what we call “a symphony” and composed 108 of them. Beethoven took a few lessons from Haydn in 1792 and then wrote music that was bigger and more complex than anything Haydn ever dreamed of. Those facts neatly explain the process and demonstrate the efficacy of the model.
In describing this process in the twentieth century, the paradigm became more confrontational and emotional, so that the younger composer was depicted as embracing and then overtly rejecting the older one—sometimes with words and deeds. This might be an aesthetic application of Sigmund Freud’s early twentieth-century theories of the unconscious projected onto the relationship between the apprentice and the sorcerer: a kind of Oedipal Necessity.
Whereas Mahler revered and never overtly rejected Wagner, the younger Debussy found it necessary to openly reject and make fun of Wagner, whom he had previously worshipped. (He referred to Wagner’s use of the leitmotif as a “carte de visite,” or visiting card, for his operatic characters.) Stravinsky at first embraced Debussy as a mentor and then violently rejected his aesthetic. Stravinsky then attempted to outrun the youngsters by changing his style throughout the rest of his long career—and thereby subvert the historical model. This resulted in the young Pierre Boulez and his fellow students disrupting concerts in Paris of the neoclassical music of Stravinsky, who was once a hero but was now a traitor because his music had become simpler. (The ever-changing Stravinsky then turned the whole process on its head by embracing the theories of his arch-nemesis, Schoenberg, and his twelve-tone/serial system late in life, satisfying both the all-powerful serialists and the shade of Freud, since he waited until Schoenberg, his Los Angeles neighbor, had died.)
The young Elliott Carter was taken under the wing of Charles Ives, but subsequently attacked Ives’s reputation by suggesting in 1987 that Ives had doctored his scores to make them more modern than they originally were. Chronology—an essential component of the futurist model—trumped any intrinsic or timeless value of Ives’s music.
The concept of a linear progression of influence—and supersessionism—worked well for understanding how the music of Haydn and Mozart (which seemingly got more and more complicated as they grew older) led to the musical language of Beethoven, and from Beethoven to both Brahms and Wagner, after which the line splits as we enter the twentieth century. It also works with Italian opera: from the simpler harmonic style of Rossini to the more complex music of Bellini and Donizetti, to the even more complex operas of Verdi and then Puccini. In Verdi’s case, when musicologists finally cast their eyes on non-German music (and on opera), each of his operas was generally judged as being better than the one preceding it. Aida (1871), Otello (1887), and Falstaff (1893) were far more interesting than, say, Rigoletto (1851) and La Traviata (1853). Thus, we can travel comfortably from the 1820s to the 1920s and have it all explained neatly, with only Verdi’s Les Vêpres siciliennes (1855) and Puccini’s La Rondine (1916) dismissed as old-fashioned throwbacks—which they are not—in the otherwise inexorable march of progress.
As this general teaching model goes, the early twentieth century began with Wagner’s profound influence on Strauss and Mahler, leaving Brahms behind as a conservative dead end. He did not represent the future, or even modernity, and did not influence anyone of importance except perhaps Dvořák and Elgar. Strauss, also seen as a conservative who came to reject complexity, was subsequently left behind, but Mahler, with his genre-breaking pictorial/autobiographical symphonies of unprecedented length and his daring use of intimate chamber music sections within enormous orchestrations, was seen to lead directly to Schoenberg—who then attempted to rescue Brahms by calling him a “progressive.” It also helped that Mahler died in 1911, whereas Strauss lived until 1949, making his late music inconvenient since it did not fulfill the requirements of the model.
After World War II, when, as already stated, Schoenberg did not consistently write ever more complex music, he—like Stravinsky—was summarily discarded by the European avant-garde, with Boulez leading the Darwinian excommunication ceremony. Schoenberg had regressed and disappointed, living among Hollywood stars (the child actress Shirley Temple lived across the street). As already stated, Schoenberg’s recently deceased (September 15, 1945) and ascetic student, Anton Webern, who composed remarkably short and highly structured music, replaced Schoenberg to become the inspiration for all subsequent serial and non-tonal composers. A relatively obscure composer, Webern became the godfather of a half-century of serious classical music, which, if you did not experience those years, seems hard to believe.
Since twelve-tone serialism was the only music admitted into the field of “contemporary music,” the Darwin-Hegel model was employed to evaluate music up to the last years of the twentieth century, admitting only ever more complex music, much of which was generated by mathematical formulae and computer-generated manipulations of pitch, dynamics, rhythm, and timbres.
Somewhere in the last quarter of the twentieth century, another experimental music started to be heard that upended the historical model that had previously functioned so well in describing the two centuries that preceded it. It was music that felt totally fresh, rejecting the chromatic juggernaut that had dominated every aspect of classical music throughout the century. This new movement, which had a spiritual antecedent in the experimental works of Cage, replaced complex harmonies with a style of utter surface simplicity and repetition. It made use of a few, consonant harmonies—like those chords on a child’s first keyboard instrument—divorced from the rules of tonal function, repeated endlessly in subtly morphing rhythmic patterns over incredibly long spans of time.
This new style also seemed to relate to certain minimalist artists of the period, such as Richard Serra and Frank Stella, as well as steady-state music of non-European cultures. For some, it was just endless patterns that went nowhere and was somewhat akin to wallpaper. For others it was the cleansing balm that music desperately needed. This musical style is known as minimalism, and the Greek gods Orpheus and Morpheus duked it out with the classical music public, since some adored it and others thought it to be the most insufferably boring music ever composed.
The historical model, however, was now inoperative to “explain” this new music, assuming it was considered to be music. Predictably, many of the aging avant-garde rejected it. By that point in the twentieth century, the old and trusted futurist paradigm had already thrown out so much music that there seemed little reason not to drag the annoying “doodle-doodle” of minimalism into the trash. Carter went on record to liken minimalism to Hitler’s speeches, and Boulez, who was never without an opinion, referred to it (as quoted in the Chicago Tribune) as “kiwi fruit.”
By the twenty-first century, minimalists such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams had become famous and popular enough to challenge the model that had justified the serial/twelve-tone avant-garde as being the inevitable flowering of a direct line of so-called revolutionaries: Beethoven and Wagner:
Haydn—Mozart—Beethoven—Wagner—Mahler—Schoenberg/Webern—Boulez (followed by all the serial composers of the era).
An alternative model crosses the Rhine, replaces Mahler with Debussy, and carries forward with:
Wagner—Debussy—(early) Stravinsky—Messiaen—Boulez (and all the serial composers of the era).
However, it can be argued that, if there is indeed a “line” of influence, one that accounts for the most heard symphonic music in history, that line would look something like: Wagner—Strauss/Mahler—Korngold/Steiner (Waxman, Tiomkin, Rózsa)—John Williams (Elmer Bernstein, Alex North, Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith)—Howard Shore, Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, Alexandre Desplat, Nobuo Uematsu, Ramin Djawadi, and so on. More simply put:
Wagner—Strauss/Mahler—refugees in Hollywood—their living successors (meaning music for films, television, and video games).
The avant-garde and its experiments are left as influences on the model, along with jazz, Soviet socialist realism, and the absorption of “world music” in the last century.
Another logical question should follow. If the music that was removed from the repertory of opera houses and concert halls is so important and was so beloved, how could it have been removed for so many years without a trace? If Rózsa was so good that his concert music was being played by the greatest orchestras in the world and conducted by such maestros as Bruno Walter, Georg Solti, and Leonard Bernstein (on his debut concert with the New York Philharmonic in 1944), why has his concert music disappeared from the active repertory? After all, the New York Philharmonic did not play another note of his music for half a century (until 1995)—and has not done so since. Why did Korngold’s 1927 opera Das Wunder der Heliane wait until 2019 to be performed in the United States, and not by a major opera company? Why did it take until 1990—forty years after his death—for the first complete recording of any of Kurt Weill’s American works to be made (the 1947 Street Scene on Decca)? Why has the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which commissioned Schoenberg to write his Suite for String Orchestra in 1934, not played the work since 1935—not once?
Given the turbulent emotions of the post–World War II era, European music professors, classical music presenters, and writers found a way to maintain a consistent point of view that also supported the public’s need to erase the reminders of the tragedy that had just befallen them. A methodology emerged to “prove” the collectively held point—that of not performing the music that was entwined with World War II. That methodology centered upon creating aesthetic criteria to justify the expulsion of the offending legacy from performance.
Music is uniquely vulnerable because of its lack of corporeality. Unlike the hunt for art looted by the Nazis, the music stolen from our repertory cannot be “returned” to us unless it is played. The manuscript of Mahler’s Second Symphony in the composer’s hand sold at Sotheby’s in 2016 for £4.5 million. But, as the symphony is in the public domain, what is a performance worth? It has little or no commercial value. And when it comes to the artistic value of any piece of music, we simply cannot have an opinion about it unless we hear it.
We often read or hear that certain composers or certain musical works are no longer performed because of a natural process of selection that has gone on for centuries. They have been forgotten “for a reason,” as the ambiguous condemnation goes. And when a writer negatively reviews a work that has been reborn in a modern performance, the above theory seems to be proven.
At the same time, we know about the rediscovery of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose music was unknown to most music lovers for more than a half-century after his death in 1750. In 1829, the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn fulfilled a dream he had had five years prior, when his grandmother gifted him with a copyist’s complete score of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, considered now to be one of the greatest compositions in the history of music. It is safe to say that no living person had heard it in 1829. The performance Mendelssohn conducted in Berlin led to a re-establishment of Bach, who is now considered a founding father of classical music. In my lifetime, the symphonies of Mahler have gone from the fringes of the standard repertory to its very heart, due principally to the championing of this repertory—in concerts, recordings, and broadcasts—by Leonard Bernstein beginning in the 1960s, and its overwhelming acceptance by the public.
If restoring repertory is dependent on playing it, removing it is not particularly difficult, especially if the public is inadvertently complicit and decades pass without younger generations to hear and re-evaluate it. Here are some of the ways to achieve this goal:
• Create criteria that support the preferred music; define any category of music to be dismissed as being out of the field; describe the smaller field as if it were a general field.
• Use concepts and modifiers such as “new,” “modern,” “modernist,” “challenging,” “contemporary,” “bracing,” and “uncompromising” as if they were generally held positive characteristics and apply them to the music to be admitted. Note: In the case of contemporary, the meaning of the word is redefined to mean music of a certain style, not music of our (or its) time. Also, the use of value-neutral words can be given powerfully negative connotations when combined with the above-mentioned criteria, such as “Hollywood.”1
• In certain cases, write or speak in a way that intimidates people and makes them think they might not know enough to disagree. This aligns itself with the concept that popular music is intrinsically simplistic and a sign of lowered artistic standards.2
• Unlike sports, where you win by crossing the finish line first or by having the highest score—unless you are a golfer—music is susceptible to personal, general, and persuasive opinion. If you were not present at a performance or cannot access what the music actually sounds like, you can only trust (or question) the printed opinions of commentators who describe a piece of music or its performance by using similes and metaphors to support the criteria mentioned above.
• With the creation of a group that is “the Other,” people will assume that its constituent elements—the composers and performing artists—all shared a neutral commonality. Using their animosities toward each other is a powerful rhetorical device to demolish the outsider group you created in the first place.3
• Regarding the music that has anything to do with the period of World War II, the field of study and opinion is best supervised by Europeans who, in the words of the late German conductor Kurt Masur, “experienced the war,” and not by Americans “who have merely read about it.”
THE CRITERION GAME
As Neal Gabler pointed out in his 1988 book An Empire of Their Own, “Hollywood was founded . . . by Eastern European Jews, . . . was supervised by a second generation of Jews, . . . and when sound movies commandeered the industry, Hollywood was invaded by a battalion of Jewish writers, . . . talent agencies [run] by Jews, Jewish lawyers and doctors. Above all, Jews produced the movies.”
Gabler persuasively argues that it was the founding fathers of Hollywood, who had escaped the pogroms and shtetls of eastern Europe, who not only believed in the American dream, but created it for all the world to see on the silver screen. This fundamental starting point of a global art and entertainment phenomenon is mostly forgotten, but it is important to our story, as are the attitudes toward Hollywood and anything touched by it—such as its music.
The denigration of Hollywood became an international free-for-all in the decades after World War II. Hollywood began to be accused of stealing from and corrupting high culture, one of the main points made previously by the Third Reich toward its Jewish artists.
King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Wagner’s patron, employed a theatrical designer to create the famous “fairytale castle,” Neuschwanstein (1869–86), which is a make-believe version of a castle built many centuries before. Its function was fantasy. Today it is the architectural symbol of Bavaria and is used in marketing Germany itself. It is, of course, one of thousands of nineteenth-century Romantic fakes that evoke the same imaginary world as Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty’s Castle (which is based on Neuschwanstein), and surely those lovable Romantic counterfeits are not seen as corrupting European culture. They are, as already noted, a major component of European culture, and 1.4 million people visit the castle every year.
As for Hollywood’s misusing and simplifying the classics, here’s what the New York Albion of April 24, 1850, said regarding the New York premiere of Verdi’s version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “We felt certain that the subject was too grand for Verdi’s mental capacity, and we soon found out that he was floundering about helplessly in his endeavors to reach its level.” The Tribune echoed this with, “We cannot see without prejudice a softened and sentimental Macbeth.”
One hundred and forty-six years later, Paul Goldberger wrote in the New York Times regarding Disney’s version of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame: “It pretends to a level of profundity while corrupting the very aspects of high culture it claims kinship with.”4 It is fundamentally the same review but with different names. And it should be asked: Who among us has actually read Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo? Perhaps it is also worth knowing that one of the reasons Hugo wrote the novel was to encourage the people of Paris to stop defacing and destroying their old buildings, replacing them with modern architecture (the stained-glass windows of Notre-Dame were annoyingly dark and were being replaced with clear glass).
The impact of Disney’s 1994 film The Lion King alone has surely been tremendous, with a score of pop songs composed by two Englishmen, Elton John and Tim Rice, presented comfortably next to symphonic underscoring by the German Hans Zimmer and the African Lebo M. The 1997 Broadway version, originally playing in a derelict theater that was renovated and restored by the same excoriated Disney organization, has undoubtedly changed theatrical expectations throughout the world because millions of children, dazzled by the assimilation of world theatrics and puppetry, under the direction of a woman, Julie Taymor, and at the service of a story told mostly by people of color, are already growing up and will always remember their first brilliant live theatrical experience.
The sustainability of this musical theater work was once again redoubled in 2019 with yet another film version, with its songs and voices performed by some of the most beloved and famous actors and singers of the era. What will the children create who attend each of these versions, carrying on a human tradition of telling great stories with music, art, and movement—the very thing the Greeks celebrated? Italians re-invented it when they called it “opera,” and then Broadway and Hollywood brought musical storytelling into yet another century and to a global audience, translating the text and lyrics of The Lion King into six indigenous African languages, and producing complete stage productions in Japanese, German, Korean, French, Dutch, Mandarin, and Spanish.
Like the classical music of other refugee and non-avant-garde composers, a set of requirements emerged that removed all Hollywood music from consideration as viable art. However, if we apply the criteria used against the refugee and tonal composers of the last century—both Hollywood and non-Hollywood—to the legacy all music lovers agree to be the core classical music repertory, something illuminating emerges. Today, it may feel like we are over the aesthetic battles of the twentieth century, but wars may be said to end, and yet hostilities linger for generations after the last bullet is fired. For someone who lived through the second half of the last century, as I did, it is important perhaps to review how certain ideas crept into how we were meant to evaluate classical music.
Tonal music said all there was to say and ran out of ideas ca. 1910.
This idea was ever-present in the second half of the twentieth century and was a powerful “tool” in music criticism. Invoking this criterion across the board would eliminate the symphonic scores of Sibelius, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Vaughan Williams, Copland, Rachmaninoff, Rózsa, Gershwin, Britten, and late Schoenberg; the operas of Puccini, Strauss, and Korngold; thousands of hours of orchestral music, much of it for films; a great deal of chamber music; and thousands of brilliant new songs composed after 1910. Then Hamlet would have indeed been right: the rest is silence.
The general public does not understand atonal, minimalist, and electronic music.
While this, too, is no longer overtly used as an explanation for a personal response to complex contemporary music, many people frankly feel intimidated by the next “world premiere.” It is therefore useful to be reminded of the complex scores to Planet of the Apes, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, A.I., Rebel without a Cause, Psycho, Forbidden Planet, The Hours, and other films. Electronic music, for instance, is ever-present in television soundtracks. “Sound design” refers to the creation of aural environments in plays, motion pictures, and television, and it uses electronic music as a basic tool in dramatic music’s lexicon. Minimalist music is one of the most prevalent styles in film scores when action is being underscored, and it has become a default sound in energetic television commercials. Non-tonal music has been part of film music’s lexicon of meaning since underscoring first emerged in the 1930s, and heavy metal and contemporary jazz will frequently travel into non-tonal sequences. The public—both individually and collectively—absolutely understands all of these styles of music, but also chooses what to listen to and for how long.
Refugee composers (such as Hindemith, Schoenberg, Bartók, and Weill) lost their connection to their homelands and, as a result, could not find artistic footing in their adopted country.
Composers have always traveled and resettled. Georg Friedrich Händel became George Frideric Handel in London, where the German-born composer successfully wrote commercial and successful Italian operas, tailored for his British audience. Weill, Hindemith, and Schoenberg were no longer writing for Germanic audiences in America. What do we make of the famous (and quintessentially French) can-can of Jacques Offenbach, who was born Jacob Offenbach in Cologne, Prussia (now Germany), and whose heritage was anything but Parisian? Wagner composed much music in exile. Mozart toured just about everywhere to compose and perform his own music. Prokofiev lived in Paris, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Rachmaninoff died in Beverly Hills.
Some composers never found their footing outside of their native land, and that will always remain a tragedy of the last century. That said, others wrote a great amount of music in various styles. Whether the music composed in America is “good” music can only be determined by hearing it.
Film music (Hollywood music) is not real music because it must be composed to strict timings.
There are unique requirements for scoring a film, of course, but it is worth remembering that Tchaikovsky wrote The Sleeping Beauty to a specific matrix of measures and beats created by the choreographer, Marius Petipa. (See also The Nutcracker.) When ballet music did not have a pre-existing matrix, the scores were routinely changed by the choreographers and administrators in significant ways. (See Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, and Leonard Bernstein’s Dybbuk.) Also, note that all serial music is written to follow many self-imposed rules, which sometimes involve a pre-arranged matrix.
Film composers “write music by the yard.”
There is nothing wrong with having the facility to compose quickly, provided a composer writes music people want to hear. Vivaldi, Telemann, Mozart, and Bach all wrote hundreds of compositions. Haydn composed over 100 symphonies, and Palestrina 105 masses. The image of Hollywood composers providing music on a conveyor belt is another way of saying they have deadlines that cannot be postponed. Also note that Charles Dickens was paid by the word, and he wrote lots of them.
Kurt Weill sold out to Broadway (that is, commercial theater).
This was an omnipresent attack on Weill and his brilliant American career, which has mercifully been quelled. Verdi, Rossini, and Handel all composed for the commercial theater, and depended on popularity (ticket sales) for their income. Weill was writing for the Broadway theater, not the Theater am Nollendorfplatz. All composers write to make a living unless they are wealthy or have another job (see Charles Ives and Elliott Carter). Many highly praised composers in the second half of the twentieth century were tenured professors, who had job security and pensions and felt no responsibility to cater to an audience. Theirs, too, can be seen as form of commercial music. Bach’s letters are almost entirely about wanting more money. Another way of looking at Weill is to admire his courage in eschewing the protection of a university position in America and casting his lot with the popular success or failure of his new musical theater works written in a foreign country and in a foreign language.
Hollywood composers “Mickey-Mouse” their music to fit gestures, rather than write natural music.
Wagner, as has already been pointed out, composed his operas with the staging written into the scores, and required his singers’ gestures to be synchronized with the music. Puccini and Menotti did much the same thing. During his last American tour in 1938, Prokofiev spent time with Walt Disney to discuss how music was synchronized to film in Hollywood so he could take that technology back to the Soviet Union, where he and Shostakovich composed film scores. Ballet music is also composed for visual synchronization and the requirements of choreographers. Regarding composing music to specific movements of a character (represented in the compound verb “to Mickey-Mouse” music): it would be more appropriate to say that Hollywood “Wagnerized” its characters (Mickey Mouse included), since Wagner had demonstrated the effectiveness of this technique in the nineteenth century. “Mickey-Mousing” is a musical technique that has always existed but has been accorded a belittling name for a craft that takes imagination and skill.
Hollywood composers stole their music from the classical masters of the past.
“Stealing from” is a pejorative way of saying “being influenced by” or “inspired by.” For decades after World War II, it was a common practice to insult film composers as hacks, thereby separating film music from the “real thing.” Today’s violinists all learn Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto and are not thinking of an either-or world of movie music versus classical music. This logic might profitably be followed by eliminating exclusively “film music” concerts and playing concert music alongside music composed for films, thereby creating a vital musical conversation. On July 28, 1995, the New York Times published a five-and-a-half-inch obituary for Miklós Rózsa under the headline “Composer of Classically Tinged Film Scores,” implying that Rózsa sprinkled classical fairy dust on his scores. That same edition of the paper devoted two pages to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s brand-new Helicopter String Quartet, including multiple photographs. Movie music comes in every possible style, size, and shape. It is not a style. It is a delivery system.
Within the core repertory of classical music, it is worth noting that Johann Sebastian Bach was accused by his detractors of stealing music from Dieterich Buxtehude; Rachmaninoff, of stealing from Tchaikovsky; Verdi of stealing from himself; and Puccini of stealing from just about everyone.5
Schoenberg suffered in America because Americans did not understand, nor did they play, his music the way Europeans did.
Actually, data show that Americans treated Schoenberg very similarly to the way Europeans did. Schoenberg had to make a living in Berlin as a teacher (he complained about it there, too) and certainly there were, as already noted, noisy demonstrations that greeted his music in Vienna and Berlin, even though he had become famous there.
Schoenberg was known and performed in the United States before he emigrated in 1933, and he was treated with enormous respect—with the University of California Los Angeles breaking its own rules to grant him an extra five years of employment after he had passed the mandatory retirement age.
Germans have written that none of Schoenberg’s American students ever became famous composers, as a way of showing how frustrating his life must have been in the United States. John Cage, among many “classical” composers who studied with him in America, was as influential as any composer in the twentieth century, along with many more who went on to teach and share their experiences within American society.
In fact, many of Hollywood’s composers and arrangers studied privately with Schoenberg, as among them George Gershwin, Alfred Newman (head of the music department of Twentieth Century Fox), David Raksin (Laura and The Bad and the Beautiful), master orchestrator Edward Powell (over 100 film scores, including The Robe, Carousel, and The King and I), Franz Waxman (master composer who was also a conductor and brought premieres of new works by Britten, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich to the West Coast), and Leonard Rosenman (Rebel without a Cause, East of Eden, Star Trek IV). Moreover, his classes also included many young women whose influence has yet to be properly evaluated.
Schoenberg lived, raised his family, and wrote music in Los Angeles until his death in 1951. He owned a house in Brentwood and had enough money to donate to various charities, including regular CARE packages to Europe.6 He developed a complex and beautiful late style of tonal music along with composing a number of twelve-tone works, and became interested in many things other than composing music—his Jewish identity and matters pertaining to it, pottery, painting, tennis, and even table tennis.
While in America, Schoenberg wrote a fairy tale called Die Prinzessin (The Princess) and would entertain his children with stories of “Little Arnold.” His daughter Nuria wrote in 2018 that Little Arnold’s adventures (when his mother left him home alone) included “going to China on his tricycle.” He made up stories of resistance fighters who saluted each other with “Unheil, Hitler!” Who has the right to decide how Schoenberg should have lived? “We lived a very happy life,” his youngest son, Lawrence, said in 2015.
Film music is not meant to be heard.
In its prime function—to underscore dramatic scenes and comment on them to forward the drama—film music can exist within the spectrum of overt perception and covert functionality. However, like any music that is good enough to transcend its original purpose, much good film music can be played and appreciated as concert music. While it is true that not all film music is meant to be heard, it is always meant to be perceived. Within the context of carrying the narrative forward, this music is no less important than recitatives in Mozart operas.
Suggest the above cliché—that film music is not meant to be heard—to any record company that releases soundtrack albums and compare the sales figures to those of contemporary classical music that is “meant to be heard.” Also, check the playlists of classical music radio stations for music composed between 1930 and today, and see what shows up. Classical concert programming still excludes scores composed for Hollywood films from live performance without a film being screened, but curiously includes film music by Soviet (Prokofiev) and British (Walton) composers.
Hollywood producers and studio executives are/were culturally illiterate.
See, for example, Serge Diaghilev‘s self-description as “a charlatan.” While it is true that most of the founding studio heads would not have known a quarter note from a trombone, they did know what they wanted from their music departments and they were instinctively right—which is not to say that every movie they produced was great. The assumption that only someone who has been thoroughly instructed into the jargon of music can “understand” it is comforting to some, but untrue.
The Paris Opéra, under the leadership of the now-forgotten Alphonse Royer, a playwright turned impresario, required both Verdi and Wagner to rewrite their operas to appeal to Parisian tastes—and they did. This is the same meddling with so-called artistic freedom that is an indictment of Hollywood. Verdi turned Il Trovatore into Le Trouvère, adding the requisite ballet, a longer ending, and many other required changes. Wagner rewrote his Tannhaüser, adding a required ballet for the Parisians. Wagner called Royer “ridiculous.” Sam Goldwyn was also ridiculous, and we enjoy making fun of his phrases such as “Include me out” and “I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they are dead.” And yet, both men were right about their audiences. They each ran successful commercial businesses—the Paris Opéra and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. See also Prince Anton Esterházy, whose father had set up Haydn as his court composer, and who disbanded the music division of the house. In 1717, the duke of Saxe-Weimar, Wilhelm Ernst, had Bach incarcerated for insubordination. These powerful men did not live in Hollywood. Brilliant people make mistakes. Stupid people are sometimes in charge and make the right decisions. Geniuses tend to survive.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Performing music that was deemed to be unworthy was something most serious musicians avoided. During the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, any artist guilty of this transgression might suffer mightily for lowering his/her standards by playing to the mob. It took a certain amount of courage for Riccardo Muti to record an album of film music by his former teacher, Nino Rota. Simon Rattle is another rare example of an internationally admired maestro who brought film music—on special occasions—to the Berlin Philharmonic, as has his successor, Kirill Petrenko.
However, if one looks at the conductors who grew up in Los Angeles, some of whom worked in the film industry (André Previn), others whose families played in studio orchestras (Leonard Slatkin), and others such as Zubin Mehta, Lawrence Foster, and Michael Tilson Thomas, there was little championing of their local heritage at the podium. (Previn made an exception with Korngold, but clearly wanted little to do with Hollywood once he left it with his four Academy Awards.) An article from the 1990s in Los Angeles once wrote about my work in restoring and performing film music as “career suicide.”
After I conducted a program of extended symphonic poems from classic films with the Detroit Symphony, its then music director, Neeme Järvi, said, “You must come back and conduct some real music next time.” Kurt Masur was thoughtful at a New York restaurant shortly after my debut with his New York Philharmonic: “Oh yes, you’re the conductor of film music.” And at the Atlanta Symphony, a patron asked to borrow my wife’s program. When she saw its contents, she angrily handed the program back and said, “We just came back from a strike and I didn’t come here to be entertained!”
Finally, we must leave room for the made-up criterion, as musicologist Malcolm Gillies did with his impressive concept of “American guilt” for America’s supposed failure to support the great composers who came to the United States fleeing the Holocaust. In addition, we can read in academic journals that Hindemith wrote too many (therefore meaningless and repetitive) works while living in New Haven and that Schoenberg did not write enough music in Los Angeles (in other words, that living in America made him unhappy). Ernst Krenek, who seems to have been a fairly dyspeptic man judging from what he said and wrote, felt his music was not played enough in America. What composer, we might ask, has ever been content with the number of performances he or she has gotten? (When Tchaikovsky came to New York, he complained that his music was played less in Moscow than in New York City. “I am much more of a big shot here than in Europe,” he wrote on May 2, 1891.)7
INTERPRETING THE REVIEWERS, NOT THE REVIEWS
Oscar Wilde wrote that criticism “is the only civilized form of autobiography,” and indeed one of the ways we can understand what a critic is saying is to read their words in terms of Wilde’s perception. The late Pierre Boulez is of central importance in this text for a number of reasons, and perhaps more than anything, it was his function as an outspoken and exclusionist music critic in the second half of the twentieth century. Though he did not write for a newspaper, what he wrote in journals and said in public, and his unquestioned Olympian position as an adjudicator and inspiration to many students as well as arts administrators, made him the most important voice in twentieth-century classical music. Even as many readers may wonder who Boulez was and why his name keeps returning in this book, it is not merely that he and his opinions were quoted as fact, but that his students and devout advocates—now in their late middle age—are held up as living models of the exciting, the new, and the authoritative.
When he was young, Boulez called for the destruction of opera houses—though late in his life, his supporters described his words as symbolic and not “real.” In 2001, the Swiss police arrested him and “dragged him from his bed and informed him he was on their list of terrorist suspects [because] in the 1960s Mr. Boulez said opera houses should be blown up, comments which the Swiss felt made him a potential security threat.”8 He and his fellow students had caused disruptions during other composers’ concerts (something the Nazis also did before Boulez was attending concerts) and accused his colleagues whose music he did not like of being “stuck in a pit of liquid manure.” He once wrote an angry letter to Nicolas Nabokov, after the 1954 Festival of Contemporary Music in Rome, suggesting that the next event be a conference “on the role of the condom in the twentieth century,” which would be in “better taste.”9
When Boulez was invited to speak at American universities in the early 1960s, he was quoted by composer Mel Powell as saying, “You have no composers here in America.” He then smiled and added with Gallic wit, while referring to a rival: “Not even a Henze.”10 And much to Powell’s amazement, we accepted that assessment. “Pierre never invited any of us to bring our music to France.”
As an aging man, Boulez became ever more charming, less vulgar, and equally effective in his opinions. In spite of conducting music he officially had scorned—Brahms, Mendelssohn, and others—his obituaries referred to him as “uncompromising,” which is patently absurd. As any musician who has partnered with a soloist knows, the very act of making music is a compromise. For all Boulez’s talk of structures and objectivity, an open-minded listener will probably find his music to be complex, sensual, and distant. It, like all criticism, is autobiographical. You might like it or be fascinated by it—and still reject Boulez’s opinions of other composers.
PLEASE DO NOT LIKE MY RECORD
As the twentieth century dissolves further into the past, it is perhaps useful to focus on one example of the kind of critical writing that appeared rather consistently in magazines, journals, and newspapers during the Cold War period. None is more telling than the program notes that accompanied one of the most important record series of that era.
When the great record producer and president of Columbia Records, Goddard Lieberson—who gave us original-cast albums of My Fair Lady and West Side Story, as well as everything Igor Stravinsky had written and was writing—released Volume VII in a series called The Music of Arnold Schoenberg, it was an essential purchase for those who loved classical music and could, for the first time, hear newly recorded music of this twentieth-century master.
The liner notes that accompanied LP sets always helped to inspire and educate the person who purchased them. Pianist Glenn Gould’s notes in Volume VII for his performance, with the Juilliard Quartet and actor John Horton, of the Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte (one of Schoenberg’s “American” works) ends with:
But, overall, one has the impression of an advocate willing to rest his case solely upon that most tangential of motives—the twelve-tone row—and a row which, in this case, is neither particularly interesting in itself nor manipulated with an invention sufficient to link the revelation of its motivic secrets with the spontaneous growth and unification of the structure.
Those words seemed to be aimed at me, who in 1968 was a Ph.D. candidate in music theory and had just paid $7.38 of my hard-earned scholarship stipend for this recording. But, as if this were not enough, George Rochberg, chairman of the music department of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote about Schoenberg’s American Variations on a Recitative:
It is not really important whether this is a “tonal” work or not. Nevertheless, since it is often assigned the key of D-minor, let us examine this for a moment. If making constant reference to a given pitch locus, D in this case, makes a work “tonal,” then Op. 40 is unquestionably tonal and in D. But if it takes more than constant reiteration of a pitch, melodically and harmonically, and more than chromatic motion to that pitch and away from it, then Op. 40 is not “tonal.” What, then, is it? The answer for the present is: I do not know. . . . However this music is taken, it is undeniably a work by Arnold Schoenberg—and like the String Trio it is music of “cruelty.”
By this point, it seemed unclear if I had just made a terrible mistake. Then came the final note (also by Rochberg) on Schoenberg’s magnificent Theme and Variations, Op. 43b, a work that is hated more than any of his by the writers who wanted Schoenberg to be someone else.
The Theme and Variations, Op. 43b, for orchestra, need not occupy too much of our attention here. Where the musical impulses of Op. 40 and Op. 45 appear to be deeply personal, the same does not appear to be true of Op. 43b. In fact, there is a curious awkwardness to the work, suggestive of a strong degree of self-consciousness in the building of the theme itself and in the carrying out of the variation plan. Perhaps this was the result of a limited personal commitment to the writing of a work intended, as was the original version of Op. 43b, for the ubiquitous American school band. The electric charge, which crackles in the best Schoenberg, is missing here.
This came from the company that released the recording, not a critic reviewing it. Were customers being dared to like that last piece or being encouraged to take an axe to the vinyl? One notes the deep problem both Gould and Rochberg had with a composer who had not done what they wanted him to do. He did not get more and more complex, non-tonal, non-developmental, anti-emotional, or use structures that controlled more than a series of pitches, the way Webern and his followers had done. What were these two experts, hired by Columbia Records, to do with the Schoenberg “problem”?
They both fell in line with what Boulez wrote, in a breathtaking act of cruelty, just months after Schoenberg died in 1951: “ARNOLD SCHOENBERG EST MORT” (yes, in capital letters). And the reason Arnold Schoenberg was “dead” to Boulez, and therefore dead to all those with an understanding of the inexorable march of ever more controlled, unemotional, and non-tonal music, was that the Father of Atonality did not follow through on the implications of the twelve-tone system he had invented in 1921 and unveiled in 1923. (“Any musician who has not felt the necessity of the twelve-tone language is of no use,” Boulez wrote—and that includes the man who invented it.) Schoenberg and his life in America, as opposed to Vienna and Berlin, with all its achievements were to be erased from the concert hall and history, much to our loss.
VOICES FROM THE YOUNGER GENERATION
By the dawn of the twenty-first century, after much work had been done to bring back some of the “degenerate” music through recordings, articles, and performances, younger critics still felt empowered to continue the attack on composers who did not adhere to the tenets of modernism. However, this does not prepare one for the level of hate engendered by some of the music outlawed by Hitler.
The 2007 British premiere of Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Vladimir Jurowski was described by Rupert Christiansen in London’s Daily Telegraph as “unmitigated codswallop.” “Dreadfully overheated and over-loud, the prolix first act has a slavering and maudlin sensuality that gave me the creeps. . . . I felt slightly sick when it was all over and had to lie down in a darkened room.”
That same morning (November 28, 2007), Michael Tanner’s review in the Spectator stated that the performance was “an evening of disgust and revulsion” and “fully merit[ed] the description ‘degenerate,’ which has had to be abandoned since the Nazis used it as a category. But they weren’t wrong that there is such a thing as degenerate art, and there is no more blatant example of it than Heliane.” Later on, the critic described the score as “unrelieved musical inflammation, with frequent burstings of the boil and deluges of musical pus before the next one starts accumulating.”
In 2007. Two of London’s serious music critics. Not a blog. Not a Tweet.
In 1935, the Times of London reviewed the British premiere of Kurt Weill’s musical satire A Kingdom for a Cow.11 The unidentified critic wrote, “It is not stated whether [Weill’s] recent departure from Germany was occasioned by his partiality for politically tendentious satirical texts like this one or for the kind of music he writes, but the music would be the German authorities’ most valid justification.” That same year, the American composer and esteemed critic Virgil Thomson wrote a review of the world premiere of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, stating, “At best it is a piquant but highly unsavory stirring-up together of Israel, Africa and the Gaelic Isles. . . . I do not like fake folklore, nor bittersweet harmony, nor six-part choruses, nor fidgety accompaniments, nor gefilte fish orchestration.” Neither review came from Nazi Germany.
Sixty years later, a twenty-five-year-old guest critic reviewed a number of Korngold releases in the New York Times. He wrote of the “well-fed mediocrity” of Korngold’s American music. “The serenade is charming on first hearing, less so when one realizes that the main theme is lifted from Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours.”
The critic, perhaps repeating the received wisdom of his professors, wants his readers to believe that an overweight Korngold stole the one thing he finds charming. (Would he have said that Brahms was “well fed,” or did the writer mean Korngold was “well paid” for his music?) It should also be said that the two melodies in question, one by Korngold and one by Ponchielli, share only one commonality—an ascending minor third followed by a major second. After that, these two tunes go in entirely different directions and have entirely different rhythms and affects. There seems to be a larger point: Korngold, like all Hollywood composers, stole his music. But worse was in store for Korngold.
A good way to put Korngold in perspective is to imagine what might have happened if he had died not in 1957 but in 1920, after completing “Die Tote Stadt.” The twenty-three-year-old composer would have left behind him two sensational operas and several compelling instrumental works. He might now be extolled as a genius who died with far greater things ahead of him. A magical aura would attach to his name, comparable to that of Keats or Rimbaud.
Korngold lived longer, and his reputation plunged. His few masterpieces, early and late, are flickering visions of what might have been. There is a vague, incoherent greatness here: a composer who lived after his time had passed, or died before his time had returned, or lived and died in the wrong time altogether. A love for Korngold will always be a guilty pleasure. But who can fault music for giving pleasure?12
A very good question. Thus, we find ourselves with major music critics feeling safe in suggesting that Korngold’s music gives them the vapors, that Hitler was correct in condemning it, that his music is “pus,” and that perhaps it would have been better had he died at age twenty-three, rather than sixty. Even Hitler did not come to that radical solution for another thirteen years.
With one critic passed out on his cot and another vomiting in the washroom, one of them at least finds “pleasure” somewhere in the morass of his responses to Korngold’s music. Why it is a guilty pleasure, however, should be a source of sober reflection. When one major New York critic recently referred to Hindemith’s first major American work, his heroic Symphony in E-flat (1940), as containing “industrial strength counterpoint”13 and another in London stated, with astonishing insensitivity, that “in general, it was a bad thing for Schoenberg to go to America,”14 we have to consider the prospect that these younger voices profoundly disdain this music—or feel they ought to.
Another possibility is that they have not freed themselves from the imprinting of their education and do not have the tools—or feel they have permission—to assess the greatness of the music they are reviewing. Composers do not go from being geniuses one year to incompetence the next when they move to another country to find work, or indeed to survive.
It may seem obvious to say this, but composers, like audiences, are people. Before the World War II exodus of the great Austro-German composers, other composers led traumatic and passionate lives. Composers fell in and out of love. They got sad and they worried. They were jealous and insecure. They lived in times of war and political upheaval. And when they needed money, they got it from donors: a king who fell in love with you (Wagner), a director whose politics you did not agree with (Bernstein), a repressive and threatening government (Strauss, Prokofiev, Shostakovich). The ones who needed money were naturally preoccupied with this condition, but they wrote music (Debussy, Mozart, Bach). The ones who got rich and famous could get ensnarled in scandal (Verdi, Puccini). Some went deaf (Beethoven, Smetana), some were homosexuals (Blitzstein, Tchaikovsky) and others might have been (Chopin, Ravel). Some were Jews who converted to Christianity (Mahler, Schoenberg, Rózsa) and some converted back (Schoenberg). What all of these composers did was write music, and no one excuses or dismisses the music of any of them because of these human conditions. Yet we continually hear a litany of these “explanations” as a way of dismissing or patronizing the music of the World War II refugee composers—whether or not they wrote for the movies.
There is no single appropriate response to trauma. Great composers tend to be survivors and transcend the conditions in which they find themselves—personal and artistic—and always have.