Authors: Michael Haas
This observation gives Korngold the perfect lead into a discussion of the Third Symphony:
Mahler rejoices in nature awakening. The sun caresses the composer's hyper-receptive sensitivity, he bends over to smell the gentle scent of the flowers and to listen to the tales told by the animals of the forest: ‘like a sound from Nature’, writes Mahler again and again in his score; a natural sound is sought also in his reflections, his extravagancies, his search for the exceptional that he manages to wrestle out of his music. It would appear that with Mahler's arrival, ‘Modern Music’ attempts to free itself from the entanglements of debased compositional techniques, high-flown artiness and overladen sound-fixations. And the most telling element is to be found in his 5th and latest symphony: Mahler jettisons the very principals of ‘new music’ by discarding the poetic programme. Premonitions of this development could be noted even earlier. Yet if Mahler employed symphonic programmes before, it was so that he could dispense with them later. And so it is with his Third Symphony. Goodness! He virtually immerses himself in all that drips out of these leaking symphonic riddles; indeed, we find ourselves playing the equivalent of Symphony Charades. There are secretive mysterious entries everywhere for which we have no keys; sound-painting and horrifyingly realistic passages that can only make sense if they
mean
[my italics] something
as music. And then we have the unexpected appearances of vocal movements, which clear paths that allow the purely symphonic movements to stumble along behind. For example, in the Fourth Symphony we have the final movement's folksong of ‘Heavenly Joy’. In a manner of speaking, one was led through three dark rooms towards the flicker of a tiny candle. If we are to set the Hamlet of programme music across from a compliant Polonius, then at least he should tell us if he wishes the fog of music to be understood as a weasel or an elephant. Mahler doesn't wish to tell us in his Third Symphony, though especially in the third movement there is no shortage of weasels and any number of other creatures. At one point it was once called ‘What the animals of the Forest tell me’ and had, along with the rest of the symphony, a poetic concept. Indeed, the entire symphony was once called ‘A Summer Morning's Dream’. The first movement would have been entitled ‘The Arrival of Pan'; the second, ‘What the Flowers tell me’. In the third, we're able to hear what the animals have to say. The rounds of Zarathustra from the ‘Drunken Song’ offer ‘What Man tells me’. The fifth movement enters with the chorus singing a text taken from the
Knaben Wunderhorn
: ‘Three tiny angels sang’. This movement once carried the heading ‘What the angels tell me’, and finally the last movement which was formerly headed ‘What love tells me’. Yet, what does the music of the Symphony tell us? Perhaps at first it's worth noting that the composer Mahler is not able to be understood completely without also understanding the characters of the brilliant conductor and ingenious opera director who inhabit the same person. [With the Third Symphony] we are confronted with an extraordinary apparatus: in addition to the huge orchestra which is augmented by every kind of percussion, glockenspiel, tuned bells, we have Flugelhorn and a side drum off-stage along with solo voices, women's chorus, and a boys’ choir up in the gallery. And in addition, the score abounds with performance instructions which do not solely apply to dynamic and meter, but also expression and even how one should play the instruments. And all of this interacts ceaselessly at just the right time, right spot, usually upon an invisible set: it offers the appearance of being expressive even if this is not immediately apparent from the musical notes themselves. Thus it is the creative conductor, the modern, expressive conductor who speaks out of his own conception of the music; in point of fact, certain sequences and musical gestures seem to come from the very indications he makes when conducting. All of this is bound up inextricably with the musician as a master of stagecraft.
Julius embarks in a more detailed breakdown of the symphony and at the end of his article returns to Berlioz's influence, concluding with the pronouncement that the Third Symphony,
pace
Berlioz, should be entitled, ‘Episodes from the Musical Life of a Composing Fabulist’.
37
There is much here that speaks from the time and process of assimilation. Quite apart from the association of the German soul with nature and the forest, the most telling sentence refers to Mahler's preference for the use of folk material having been a feature for too long to be taken as 'mere affectation’. The philosopher Hannah Arendt makes the point that Jews often saw nature and art as being socially and politically neutral, impervious to the obstacles they encountered elsewhere and thereby offering an easier path to assimilation.
38
Korngold's observation is to be understood in this context, but Mahler's love of nature was genuine and innate, not an attempt to ‘fit in’.
Max Brod and Theodor Adorno, among others, have written about the ‘Jewishness’ of Mahler's music. How ‘Jewish’ it might be is less important than how liberating it was for the following generation. Nevertheless, the inner fights of Mahler with his Jewish destiny are illuminated by Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Mahler's
confidante
from 1890 to 1902. She gives an account in her unedited journals of Mahler relating a nightmare he had as an eight-year-old, in which Ahasver, the ‘Wandering Jew’, tries to force his walking stick into the hands of the terrified young Gustav. The symbolism speaks for itself.
39
Mahler's nervousness about his Jewishness has been much debated. In addition to rejecting Leo Blech for fear of taking on a second Jew at the opera, we have the instances in which he told Bruno Walter at various times to change his surname from Schlesinger, to convert and to serve in the military as a means of deflecting the mendacity of anti-Semites. Far from accentuating his Jewishness, as Alma claimed, he was well aware of having to keep it under wraps when necessary. He shuddered at the sight of kaftan-wearing, bearded Jews from Eastern Europe and refused to identify with them. Yet as Korngold rhetorically asked regarding the Third Symphony: ‘What does the music tell us?’
Richard Taruskin is of the opinion that after Mahler, Germany and Austria handed the symphony as a musical ideal to the Slavs, Anglo-Americans and Scandinavians.
40
As we shall see, exiled Austro-German composers did return to the symphony, but mostly with limited success. Mahler, however, had cleared a path that was wide enough for the next generation of Jewish composers to explore. Having the way opened to follow him, it was no longer necessary to imitate him.
If Mahler, like Heine before him, saw conversion as his
billet d'entrée
to opportunity, Schoenberg would, with his reconversion to the religion of his birth, declare the opposite. Though Hitler provided Schoenberg with an immediate motivation, Mahler provided an inheritance of such undeniably great and original music that reconversion to Judaism could be understood as an act of defiance. This was one of Mahler's most remarkable, and as yet unsung, accomplishments.
Art is individualism and individualism is a destructive and corrupting power. It is in this fact that we discover its monstrous significance. What it's attempting to destroy and corrupt is the pathetic monotony of conventionality, the enslavement of habit, the tyranny of decorum and the degradation of man to ‘machine’. … Ideas about art are understandably taken from what we have known of art up to the present, whereas a new work is beautiful specifically because it represents something never witnessed before….
Die Kunst ist Individualismus und der Individualismus ist eine zerstörende, zersetzende Kraft. Darin liegt seine ungeheure Bedeutung. Denn was er zerstören, zu zersetzen sucht, ist die armselige Eintönigkeit des Typus, die Sklaverei der Gewohnheit, die Tyrannei der Sitte und die Erniedrigung der Menschen auf ‘Maschine’. … Denn die Ideen über die Kunst sind doch naturgemäß aus dem genommen, was die Kunst eben bis zu diesem Augenblick gewesen ist, während das neue Kunstwerk eben dadurch schön ist, daß es ist, was die Kunst bis dahin nie gewesen ist….
Peter Altenberg, unpublished manuscript
Fin de siècle
According to Bertha Zuckerkandl, the popular cultural philosopher and historian Egon Friedell ‘had both the misfortune and good luck to be an Austrian. Misfortune because Austrian genius has rarely, if ever, succeeded in obtaining domestic recognition, and good luck because Austria, as no other place, provided a unique hotbed of creativity that allowed uninhibited growth of vision, originality and individuality.‘
1
Zuckerkandl could have been referring to
any of the Viennese composers in the title of this chapter, particularly Arnold Schoenberg.
Describing the Vienna of 1901, the year in which Schoenberg left the city to work at Ernst von Wohlzogen's
Überbrettl
cabaret in Berlin, William Johnston, in
The Austrian Mind
, mentioned the prevalent atmosphere as one of ‘therapeutic nihilism’,
2
a medical term that refers to a state in which the patient retained a debilitating condition out of fear of applying any treatment. Fear of change was so traumatising that it was preferable to dwell on the inevitably fatal outcome if change did not take place; stagnation, however, was not a survival option. The music critic Paul Stefan, the artist Oskar Kokoschka and the poet Peter Altenberg were just a few of the chroniclers of the period who despaired of Vienna's inability to accept the change that they and many other Viennese were busy trying to bring about.
3
Glimpses of ‘therapeutic nihilism’ can be found in the Viennese press at the turn of the century. On 6 May 1890, in a feuilleton (signed by a triangle of asterisks), we encounter an early mention of the term ‘fin de siècle’ in the
Neue Freie Presse
:
The nineteenth century is old and tired and draws towards its end. Some may note a certain lightness of the old lady and claim that despite the gravity of the war budget and the eternal issues surrounding the problems of the working classes, she's dancing merrily into her grave. Whether celebrating or complaining, the final foot-steps of the approaching end can be clearly heard; the last decade is upon us and soon even this will have flowed past unnoticed with only the pages of the calendar left in a heap on the floor. Inevitably such a transition from one age to another is anticipated as a major world-changing event, though in fact, it isn't that at all. The hands of the clock move at a hardly perceptible rate. Time won't stop for even a second until reaching midnight 1899 with the mighty voice of Actus dropping the curtain at the end of the play, only to draw it up again offering us a new scene. […] Among the feelings of remorse for the dying century, we also sense the anticipation of the century to come. When the year 1900 is finally upon us […] a suspended harmony resonates inside our being, mixing the tones of impending death along with those of a heightened urge to live.
To define this spiritual state, the Parisians have come up with a term that appeared several years ago and now […] can be heard in every street and by-way. There is no paper, no novel, no play, in which one thing or another is not praised or condemned as ‘fin de siècle’. This new concept, cobbled together by three words, can be used for either gracing or disgracing its
object. It's not possible to translate and nobody is prepared to venture what it actually means. If someone were to mention that a person or a thing was thoroughly ‘fin de siècle’, then it apparently implies that said person or thing is capable of sensing the end of the century, or already senses what is to come afterwards. One thinks of the bloom of fresh life shining from beneath the pallor of death. But can't one find a single word for this concept? The best way to understand what is meant by the expression ‘fin de siècle’ is to examine how the Parisians themselves use it: Whatever is more modern than modern, whatever is taller than tall and whatever trumps the very newest, the most inconspicuous along with the biggest – all of these various things are referred to as ‘fin de siècle’.
4
Subsequent articles in the
Neue Freie Presse
published in 1899
5
and 1900 deal with both of these aspects: the decadence of the dying century and the invigorating dynamism of the new. Indeed, the (anonymous) article from 30 December 1900 was meant to be an obituary for the very phrase ‘fin de siècle’, which had been so over-used since 1890, that the feuilletonist couldn't wait for the emergence of the new century when it would no longer be applied.
6
Contemporary discussions and debates on modernism from this period provide scant preparation for what went into creating Schoenberg's musical world. An example of what was understood by the concept of ‘modern’ comes in an article from the
Neue Freie Presse
for 19 and 20 November 1900 in which the former director of Vienna's Burgtheater, Max Burckhard, writes on modern art. He introduces Darwinian elements and attempts to show that modern art is an organic and logical progression that fits neatly into the laws of natural selection. He pits artistic realism – which offered unvarnished portrayals of life among the lower orders – against the art of the aesthetes appreciated solely for its innate loveliness. He sees modern developments moving towards something he calls ‘neo-idealistic’, a movement that maintains the portrayal of brutal realism while remaining sensitive to aesthetic beauty.
7
If this is a description of the emerging cultural landscape at the turn of the century, it hardly encompasses the spirit that would erupt in a work such as Schoenberg's 1909 melodrama
Erwartung
.
In 1896, the
Neue Freie Presse
continues its examination of ‘modern’ art with an extensive survey of the concept of ‘Socialist art’.
8
By the turn of the century, we have articles entitled, variously, ‘Insanity on the stage‘
9
and ‘Sick Art‘
10
, yet in none do we have the slightest premonition of the abandonment of accepted artistic conventions that characterised the Schoenbergian revolution. Indeed, ‘modern’ art meant reacting against the Aestheticism that had
gone before, by showing sometimes awful and repugnant visions of real life. Yet these visions continued to be expressed – whether in painting, drama or music – in language that was familiar to all. An example of the sort of musical ‘modernism’ debated in feuilletons during the early years of the century can be found in Eugen d'Albert's opera
Tiefland
(first performed in 1903). This offered a level of sexual frisson and social realism that was very different from, say, the Pre-Raphaelite beauty of Debussy's
Pelléas et Mélisande
of 1902, though Debussy's score was far more daring than d'Albert's re-working of
verismo
for the German public. Even Stravinsky, eight years younger than Schoenberg, was not yet composing music that gave any indication of where Schoenberg was leading: compare Stravinsky's
Fireworks
with Schoenberg's
Erwartung
, both first performed in 1909. Arguably Richard Strauss's
Elektra
, also given its premiere in 1909, comes close – more so than anything by Debussy, Reger, Mahler, or even Bartók and Stravinsky at the time. Nothing up to this point had prepared the world for Schoenberg's violent rejection of traditional tonality.