CHAPTER 4
The attraction of throwing out 1,000 years of tradition—the rules of counterpoint, the voice leading of tonal harmony, the conservatory exams in writing fugues, the consistency of rhythmic downbeats and upbeats, everything except the notes on the page (there were still twelve of them)—was a profoundly revolutionary idea, eliciting a kind of ecstasy akin to being let out of school. It was, for some, impossible to resist.
In the summer of 1914, Germany, which was allied to Austria, invaded France. Paris had been given an artistic jolt provided by wild and creative Russian designers, dancers, and composers, whereas Austro-Germany, the towering center of classical music, was home to the most avant of the avant-garde composers, Arnold Schoenberg. What had been unlikely to some soon became a reality—the Great War that took most of the world into a war “to end all wars.” Part of the warriors’ response was to ban the music of their enemies. The significance of this gesture should not be underestimated.
The forty-one-year-old Schoenberg joined the Austrian army and imagined that an Austro-German victory would somehow “teach the kitschmongers to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God.” The kitschmongers included Maurice Ravel and, as already mentioned, Schoenberg’s rival in modernity, Igor Stravinsky.
The thirty-nine-year-old Ravel was too tiny in stature and weight to join the army and be outfitted in a military uniform. Instead, he tended the wounded and learned to drive, spending much of the war with his truck, which he named Adélaïde, delivering supplies under incredibly dangerous conditions for the French. He developed a heart condition, contracted dysentery, had to be operated on for a hernia, and developed insomnia, a condition from which he suffered until his death in 1937.
The fifty-two-year-old Claude Debussy, who was dying of cancer, was frustrated at not being able to join the fight: “My age and fitness allow me at most to guard a fence. . . . But, if, to assure victory, they are absolutely in need of another face to be bashed in, I’ll offer mine without question.” The Germans had developed an enormous siege cannon that could hurl gigantic shells from seventy-five miles outside of Paris for their spring offensive of March 1918. Debussy, too weak to be carried down to the basement, died hearing the explosions and the violence he so dreaded in life and art.
Ralph Vaughan Williams was forty-one when the war broke out, and he enlisted in the British army, serving as a stretcher bearer in France and Salonika. His exposure to gunfire caused permanent hearing damage and ultimately total deafness.
The thirty-two-year-old Stravinsky, who so favored the possibility of war, did not volunteer to fight for either Russia or France, and made a hasty retreat to wait out the war in Switzerland with his children and wife—who bore another two—on the shores of Lake Geneva.
When the fighting was over near the end of 1918, four years after it started, some 20 million people had been killed, and another 21 million wounded according to the Centre Européen Robert Schuman.
Consider what you just read, even as you proceed to the next sentence. The once supremely confident Europe that had created and developed a profound musical legacy would never be the same. One of the results of the war was that each surviving country reaffirmed its various cultural institutions and used them to bolster a sense of worth and identity—somehow trying to make sense of something as senseless as the Great War. The ubiquitous post-war watchword, “self-determination,” was applied to art and music as a representation of the national self. In earlier centuries, musical style could represent a country and a people—but now, perhaps for the first time, it could also represent a political philosophy.
The empires of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans were gone, and Russia, the site of what became known as “the Great Revolution,” was bent on a worldwide revolution of workers demanding equal rights to access the fruits of their labor—an idea that would attract millions throughout the world. Equally important to our understanding of this period is that when the war was over, it was hardly over. As Margaret MacMillan noted in The War That Ended Peace:
Europe paid a terrible price in many ways for its Great War: in the veterans who never recovered psychologically or physically, the widows and orphans, the young women who would never find a husband because so many men had died. In the first years of peace, fresh afflictions fell on European society: the influenza epidemic . . . which carried off twenty million people around the world; starvation because there were no longer the men to farm or the transportation networks to get food to the markets; or the political turmoil as extremists on the right and the left used force to gain their ends. In Vienna, once one of the richest cities in Europe, Red Cross workers saw typhoid, cholera, rickets and scurvy, all scourges they thought had disappeared from Europe.1
To some extent, classical music and its avant-garde component confronted its relationship with the war, while the public sought to embrace the new world created by various treaties, the most famous being the Treaty of Versailles. Among many other results, American power and American art were injected into European culture. Where there had been a glittering multicultural Austro-Hungarian Empire with its waltzes, polkas, and csárdáses, there was now a group of separate nations, each with its own cultural past, but little political power. Germany, blamed for the war, was crippled with reparations that were immense, made all the more impractical because of tariffs placed on German goods.
American musical culture was, however, omnipresent with its ragtime and jazz. Not unlike Bryan Magee’s explanation of the vast cultural impact resulting from the opening of Europe’s Jewish ghettos, the emancipation of African-American slaves in the nineteenth century brought with it an equal explosion of musical creativity—beginning with the ragtime of Scott Joplin and others in the 1890s. One could argue that owning slaves and necessarily controlling their living quarters, whether Egyptian slaves, Hebrew slaves, or Roman slaves, meant that the concentration of their culture would inevitably seep into the culture of the enslaving regimes. By 1918, the music of Black America had entered popular (white) culture and soon conquered the world.
Classical composers at first played with this new popular music with ragtime-inspired works by Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and, later, Shostakovich. From 1927 on, Germany was opening one “jazz opera” after another, beginning with Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Strikes Up), Max Brand’s Maschinist Hopkins (Hopkins the Engineer; 1929), Ernst Toch’s Der Fächer (The Fan; 1930), and jazz bands appeared in Erwin Schulhoff’s Flammen (Flames; 1932) and Alban Berg’s Lulu (left incomplete in 1935). After this brief flirtation, however—and under pressure from Hitler’s arts policies—most classical music composers turned away, leaving only George Gershwin to remind us of a time when ragtime and jazz’s long-form potential could fuel piano concertos (Rhapsody in Blue, his Second Rhapsody—Rhapsody in Rivets, the Concerto in F), a tone poem (An American in Paris), and the opera Porgy and Bess.2
Although music was a plaything of politics in World War I, the only practical way to control it was not to play it—as New York’s Metropolitan Opera did with German music in 1917. If New Yorkers did not hear Wagner and Beethoven, perhaps they would not be seduced by it. The invisible art form can easily sneak past borders without a passport. The proof of that is obvious enough with the triumph of the music invented by former African slaves in the United States, Cuba and South America. The non-Black public overwhelmingly found this infectious, visceral, and free music both intoxicating and liberating—and still does.
Black American music developed out of its “negro spiritual” period, which both Antonín Dvořák and Frederick Delius found deeply moving, into ragtime, gospel, jazz, rock and roll, and, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, hip-hop—in spite of being ignored or shunned by classical snobberies. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, hip-hop culture and rap music—created out of Black and Latino urban rage—found its way into music created under the most repressive regimes in the world. There is Syrian rap and Arabic rap, and recently, with the support of the U.S. State Department, hip hop has emerged in Uzbekistan.3
It is therefore not surprising that with the arrival of the Americans to end the Great War, a weary and despondent public entered a wild period in which the new in popular music was American music—it was escapist, and it was naughty fun. As Philipp Blom says in his book Fracture,
After the Great War, the once vigorous cubist movement had abruptly faltered, as if the artists had lost both nerve and appetite for presenting splintered bodies and disintegrated selves. Picasso, both reflector and initiator of artistic currents, had begun to paint in a neoclassical manner as early as 1918, and others were soon to follow. In Russia, the young Sergey Prokofiev premiered his Classical Symphony in the same year; in Paris, Jean Cocteau was using a similarly simplified neoclassical idiom for his drawings and stage designs; and Igor Stravinsky turned from the extravagant modernity of his Sacre du Printemps to tame variations on eighteenth-century Italian musical forms. A pall had fallen over the seemingly boundless experiments of the art world, and many artists joined the great Western project of making humans whole again, rescuing the New Man from the shell-shocked ruins of the old.4
Ravel composed works that continued to echo his wartime experiences for the twenty years that remained in his life, including his Le Tombeau de Couperin (The Tomb of Couperin), a series of short pieces dedicated to his colleagues who had been killed; a piano concerto for a wealthy pianist who had lost his right arm during the war (Concerto for the Left Hand) that is a devastating portrait of the war; a tone poem originally called Vienna but renamed La Valse, which ends with the Viennese waltz turned into a nightmare of cacophony; and the endlessly repetitive sound of a factory—Boléro.
Giacomo Puccini, who was in his mid-fifties when war broke out, could not escape the politics of the war, even as he attempted to compose operas to follow the enormous successes of La Bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly. This was not to be. The Metropolitan Opera commissioned his next work, La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West), which premiered in New York in 1910 and was considered to be his masterpiece at that time, showing that the composer was well aware of the latest developments in French and Russian music.
However, a commission from Vienna to compose an operetta (La Rondine [The Swallow]) caught Puccini in the middle of the acrimony of the war, with accusations that he was supporting German-Austrian aggression. The work had to be refashioned for a premiere in Monte Carlo and is the least successful of the composer’s later works. One month after the armistice, Puccini unveiled a triptych of one-act operas at the Metropolitan Opera. Il Trittico contains a highly emotional drama of murder and adultery, a religious melodrama of revenge, suicide, and redemption, and a comedy about greed. There is one common denominator in the three stories: death.
Stravinsky composed a number of small works, some of which made use of Russian themes, and one particularly war-themed piece called L’Histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale). Composed for narrator, three actors, a dancer, and a small instrumental ensemble, it is perhaps a response to his Sacre as well as the vest-pocket portability of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. The world premiere of Histoire in Switzerland took place six weeks before the end of the war, on September 28, 1918.
It was on this date, according to various sources, that a British soldier, Private Henry Tandey, encountered a wounded German soldier in France who was in retreat during the Fourth Battle of Ypres. Tandey felt he could not kill a wounded soldier and decided to let him go. The German soldier was Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler.
L’Histoire du soldat tells a story of an exhausted soldier marching home from the war. He is seduced by the Devil with promises of wealth in return for giving up his most precious possession: his violin. Obviously, the work is a response to the war, but it can also be seen as expressing Stravinsky’s conflicted emotions regarding his pre-war beliefs and his own non-participation in it. Composed for only seven instrumentalists (rather than the nearly 100 required by his Sacre), it nonetheless keeps rhythmic complexity at the forefront of the piece, and, as with Sacre, there is no comment or uplift at the end. The Devil wins.
Schoenberg, having served in the army that lost the war, returned to a Vienna that was no longer the capital of an empire. He founded a private society to present complex and challenging contemporary music under ideal rehearsal and performance conditions—free of any dependence on popular appeal—and then went on to create a compositional technique known as the twelve-tone method (also called a “system”), thereby ensuring his fame and his infamy forevermore.
Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Mel Powell (1923–1998) suggested that the twelve-tone system was Schoenberg’s attempt to control the wild beast he had unleashed before the war, when non-tonal music was “freely” atonal, that is, it was composed without rules or systems. Without going into too much detail about tonal music, there are really two important focal points in any key. The first is the home note (by which we name the key, like C—and the chord based on it—and which is the lowest note on the scale built from that note). The second most powerful note and the chord built on it is a fifth above it in the scale (G in the key of C). You can simply count up, if C=1, D=2, E=3, F=4 and G=5. All the other notes in the key have subsidiary functions and power. If the home key is G, then the second most important note is the fifth note in the scale built on G, which is in this case D.5
Throughout the centuries of Western music, returning to the home key remained a fundamental part of music and its comprehensibility. Schoenberg, having traveled into a musical world where there was no home, decided to go even further. He created a way in which all twelve notes within an octave would be absolutely equal, with no one note having more “pull” than any other. And here is what he proposed:
1.Take all twelve notes inside the octave and give them a unique order. C could be 1, F could be 2, A-flat could be 3, and so on, until all twelve are in a unique sequence. This is the tone row for your new piece, and from it all the notes in your composition are selected, but only in the row’s order or series.
2.The complete row can be sounded in four basic ways: the row (1 through 12), the reverse (12 through 1), upside down (so that one plays it in a mirror image of the row) and upside down and backwards. (“Upside down” means you are basing the third and fourth version of the row in terms of their intervals—the distances between the notes rather their names. If two pitches in the original row go upward a half-step, then the mirror image version goes down a half-step.)
3.The notes can be played at the same time, like a chord, or can be heard as the melody, or a mixture of both.
4.Notes can be played in any octave, but they must adhere to the order determined at the beginning.
Because a composition is making use of a specific series of notes, this technique is often called serial music.
Even if you haven’t quite understood these rules, you probably can imagine the response from those who had been dubious about freely atonal music in the first place. It was a mixture of total horror, amusement, dismissal, in contrast to the passionate support the twelve-tone system elicited from those who saw a Promised Land for music, especially German music. It was pure. It was strictly controlled. It did not sound like all that Romantic music of the past, and for Schoenberg and his students, principally Berg and Webern, it was still deeply expressive. In its own way, it was as Romantic as Wagner and Mahler, only it did not sound like them at all. And in this sense, it was new.
Astonishingly, it is unlikely that a listener can actually perceive the difference between music composed using the twelve-tone system and freely non-tonal music. Using this system, however, ensures harmonic consistency. It also inherently creates compositional structures from which to build a piece of music. Because it is a method, it does not and should not determine if a work that uses it is good or bad. We might be interested in how Beethoven composed each day and how long it took him to compose the first movement of his Fifth Symphony (a long time!), and how he threw out various versions of it and tinkered over it until it felt organic, memorable, and inevitable, but it is the work itself that either speaks to you or not. If you find the music attractive, you may want to know more about the composer and how it was composed, but only if you are attracted to the piece in the first place. It usually does not work the other way around.
Another equally brilliant Viennese composer, however, was blithely continuing the language of German classical music of Wagner, Mahler, and his mentor, Richard Strauss. He offered an alternative to the new dissonant music being played to Schoenberg’s private society. His name was Erich Wolfgang Korngold. His music was enormously complex but, unlike the compositions of Schoenberg and Berg, mysteriously uplifting. Unafraid of soaring melodies, this young man wrote in a language that emerged out of Tristan and Parsifal, as well as the unabashed sentiment of Viennese operetta, much as Strauss did in his 1910 opera Der Rosenkavalier. Korngold’s chromatic wanderings always led to enormously satisfying harmonic consonances.
A rare meeting of the two antithetical Viennese composers—Schoenberg and Korngold—included a lesson by Schoenberg on how his twelve-tone system worked, in an oft-told story still repeated by the Korngold family today. Holding a pencil pointing downward, Schoenberg said to Korngold, “If this is the row,” and then pointed the pencil upward, toward the ceiling, “this is its inversion.” Korngold did not wait for the rest of the lesson before interjecting, “Ja, but Schoenberg, you can’t write with it!” And then, without saying another word, Korngold went to the piano and played Schoenberg’s Op. 19, his Six Little Piano Pieces from 1913, from memory. “You could never overestimate Papa’s memory,” his ninety-five-year-old daughter-in-law said in 2019. “It was an almost supernatural gift.”
Ultimately, the public, and not the critics or the experts, judged the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg. They also judged Stravinsky’s post-Sacre music. They judged it on how it sounded and not on how it was written—and, it should be said, whether they wanted to hear it again.
As it turns out, the greatest beneficiaries of Stravinsky’s music and Schoenberg’s most famous students were not French, Russian, or Viennese, and were mere children at the time of the twelve-tone system’s creation (1921–23). They had no idea how they would ultimately meet, study, and be inspired by the “Father of Modernism,” Stravinsky, and the “Father of Atonality,” Schoenberg, thousands of miles west of Paris, Berlin, and Vienna in as unlikely a place as anyone could have imagined.
THE NECESSITY FOR CONTROL
In 1922, other developments would lead to that irony, and lead to a monumental tragedy for humanity and European culture. In that year, the thirty-nine-year-old Benito Mussolini—appointed by Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III—became the youngest prime minister in Italian history, and within three years turned Italy into a totalitarian state. Fascist Italy would be the first Western country to officially recognize the Bolshevik leadership in Russia. Seeking a common denominator of Italian culture, Mussolini imposed the Roman salute—the outstretched arm—in Italy’s schools. America at first welcomed Mussolini as someone who would bring order and stability to his country. Hitler saw Mussolini as a role model—thus, the Nazi appropriation of Mussolini’s appropriation of the Roman salute, which is now known as the “Nazi salute.”
The German mark had dropped to one-trillionth of its pre-war value by 1923, and Hitler added “National Socialist” to the name of his political party. He would at first fail in his attempt to take control of Germany, be jailed for it, and not become its chancellor until 1933—eleven years after Mussolini’s regime began in Italy.
Also in 1922, Lenin made Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili the general secretary of the Soviet Communist party. The personality of this tough enforcer led to a simpler name: “Man of Steel”—Joseph Stalin. Lenin soon grew to distrust Stalin and wished, upon his death, for the Communists to be ruled by a collective leadership. He died in 1924 and within three years Stalin had taken control of the government, which he ruled until his death in 1953.6
All three of these dictators came to control music. Two of them, Hitler and Mussolini, admired many aspects of America, and all three loved Hollywood movies—which they would show in their residences. Imagining Stalin watching Tarzan films after state dinners, or Hitler viewing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, makes one ponder their need for fantasy and their admiration for America’s often derided entertainment industry. Mussolini built a cinema city in Rome, Cinecittà, so Italy could join other countries in making movies. Mussolini’s 1937 motto was “Movies are the greatest weapon.” Cinecittà would become a detention camp in 1945. Then, in peacetime, it was where Federico Fellini filmed La Dolce vita and Hollywood made Ben-Hur and Cleopatra.
The myth of control, however, in which the three dictators so firmly believed, is constantly exposed by the reality of what was achieved—and irretrievably destroyed—in the decades after their regimes fell. Tragedy and loss of incalculable proportions are commingled with persistence and triumph. None, however, is more ironic than Hitler’s attempt at murdering the Jews and their music, which inadvertently contributed to the worldwide proliferation of music composed by Jews, and through the medium he so enjoyed after dinner—the movies.
At the center of this part of musical history is the man who seems to be omnipresent—Richard Wagner. That his reprehensible anti-Semitic articles inspired Hitler is well known. That Wagner’s family curried favor with the Führer to keep their Bayreuth Festival alive before and during World War II is also known to opera lovers. What is less known is how Wagner’s music and his immense achievements in creating a method by which one could compose endless melodies in an ever-developing orchestral framework became the lingua franca of Western music—delivered to the world during the war and into the next century by Jewish composers who openly carried on those musical traditions, never commenting on the master’s hateful personal thoughts on race and religion. For those composers and their families, there was enough anti-Semitism in Los Angeles to cope with without delving into several articles written by one of the greatest geniuses in German music—and who had died years before they were born.
But before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to understand what Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin actually did to control music and who were the winners and the losers. For Hitler, it all seems to have centered around Wagner.