Authors: Michael Haas
Ethics and the End of Time
Only from Berta Zuckerkandl in 1902, when she states in a casual reference to the Flemish painter George Minne that ‘artists are builders of our ethical properties’,
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do we get a hint of the thinking behind the impending musical upheaval and begin to sense a Schoenbergian view of art as something that must reflect as disturbing, an inner truth, whatever the consequences.
This ethical element emerging in the arts would take hold and resonate clearly in Vienna at the time. The notorious
Sex and Character
, published in 1903 by the Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger, followed by his spectacular suicide at the age of 23, was a demonstration of ethical perversion, though much admired at the time for its sheer audacity. Both the young Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hitler admired Weininger for taking the ‘ethical’ consequences of the spectacularly nihilistic conclusions of his dissertation: Hitler because of Weiniger's unbridled anti-Semitism and Wittgenstein because suicide seemed the only ethical response to an imperfect world.
A more realistic representation of Weininger's hold on early twentieth-century thinking can be found in the autobiographical novel
Die Flucht ins Mittelmäßige
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by the Bavarian political exile Oskar Maria Graf, in which he reproduces a fictional exchange on the subject of Weininger among a group of middle-aged exiles in a 1950s New York cocktail party. A former Austrian refugee comments:
When I was a student at the University in Vienna, Otto Weininger was en vogue. […] It followed therefore that every seriously intellectual Jew must also be an anti-Semite, since Weininger's own anti-Semitism was absolutely iron-clad! Reading him today, one wonders how the Nazis never chanced upon him. I even heard that he was also homosexual, which explains his hatred of women: in fact, by and large, his book gives us nothing more than a gruesome mix of varying degrees and types of hatred. To Weininger, Jews and women were simply less than human. […] Yet in the middle of this pseudoscientific nonsense one finds amazing shafts of blazing truth.
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Needless to say, Karl Kraus, the quintessential anti-Semitic Jewish intellectual, found much to admire in
Sex and Character
; both Weininger and Kraus were perfect embodiments of Johnston's ‘therapeutic nihilism’.
Another important example of the overpowering ethical force that drove creative thinking in Vienna's fin de siècle was the 1908 essay
Ornament and Crime
by the architect Adolf Loos. It was to become a manifesto against the inorganic and non-functional use of the merely decorative in design prevalent in Habsburg Vienna. Propulsion of these ethical forces was provided by Karl Kraus's satirical periodical
Die Fackel
– launched in 1899 – which attacked the hypocrisy of the day in all of its numerous and often contradictory manifestations.
Ultimately, the position of ethics within the intellectual and artistic dialogue of the day was hammered home by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
, conceived during his time at the Front during World War One and completed in 1918. In Sentence No. 6,421 of the
Tractatus
we read that ‘Ethics and aesthetics are the same’. Schoenberg's
Harmonielehre
from 1911 grows out of the unyielding ethical positions already taken by Kraus, Loos and even Weininger. The inner truth it demands went far beyond the outer truths represented by the Naturalists or social realists. The nature of this particular ethical element being applied to art was a relatively new dimension. With Kraus, Schoenberg and Wittgenstein coming from families representing varying degrees of Jewish assimilation, it can be argued that ethics was part of their intellectual baggage. An inner sensibility attuned to a deep awareness of justice, combined with a clear understanding of right and wrong, is hardly a surprising attribute to be found among people who were marginalised for so many centuries. Even Wittgenstein, though brought up a Christian, gives us the much quoted dictum ‘whereof one cannot speak, therefore one must remain silent’,
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an apparent resonance with the Jewish prohibition on naming God. This ethical fortitude also had a profound Talmudic, and thus cultural echo for Austro-German Jews. It would inevitably shape much
of the work of even non-religious artists, musicians and writers who came from Jewish backgrounds, and it would also influence many who did not.
The need to create art that could tell an inner and inevitably unsettling truth, and serve as a warning against the consequences of ‘therapeutic nihilism’, began to churn beneath the subsoil of Austria and Germany in the early years of the twentieth century. In the run-up to the First World War, progressive artists began to resemble mad prophets shouting in the desert about the complacency of a society that only craved easy, immediately appealing and affirming music, literature and art. This ethical conviction went well beyond the empathy with the underprivileged that was the hallmark of ‘Socialist’, Naturalist or ‘Veristic’ art. Artistic ethical judgments were not to be understood as acts of kindness, but as brutal wake-up calls.
Egon Wellesz relates in his memoirs how his musicology professor Guido Adler was fascinated by the younger generation of his students who stated that they composed music which was moving away from tonality not because they wanted to, but because they felt compelled to.
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The apocalyptic premonitions of the age were felt by many, Jew and non-Jew, but it was Schoenberg who gave them their most coherent and powerful voice.
The Old Testament tone regarding ethical duty can be sensed in Schoenberg's 1911
Harmonielehre
:
The view that today, one ‘can write any- and everything’ is depressing as it keeps young people from learning the essentials, understanding the great masters and acquiring broader cultivation. In fact it was always possible to write ‘any- and everything’ even in earlier times as well, but it simply wasn't any good. Only the truly great are not allowed to write ‘any- and everything’. Instead, they do what they must in order to carry out their work. They prepare for this duty with industriousness, labouring under a thousand doubts wondering if a thousand scruples suffice – questioning if one truly understands what is being assigned by a higher power. This is reserved only for those who have the courage and the passion to bear the consequences as well as the strength to carry that which has been bestowed upon them, even if it is against their will. This is quite different from striking wantonly out on one's own – and it's also much braver.
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Further on, Schoenberg grows almost messianic:
Once one is cured of the insane delusion that artists are only in the service of beauty, and is aware of the fact that it is the compulsion to create that results in what in the future will perhaps be found beautiful, only then does
it start to become clear that the artist has no need of bringing conventional coherency to his work – rather he must feel compelled to offer those elements for which his listener is hungering. […] It is especially those who have a heightened sense of aesthetic beauty who shield themselves with what they find appealing against that which is new and aspires to beauty. […] Who is right, the aesthete or the artist? History leaves us in no doubt that right resides with the creator – even if it isn't beautiful. […] Music has, in addition to its central message, […] one further element that it can call upon: it is the simultaneous sounding of the imperative. Perhaps this is why music communicates more widely than other art forms. Nevertheless, thus viewed, the value of this accomplishment gives today's music something that distinguishes it and makes it quite independent of conventional trends and tastes. […] I value originality without overvaluing it – primarily a fault amongst those who lack it entirely. Originality is a symptom always present in the greatest works but also occurring in lesser ones: as such, it can never be used as a unit with which to pass judgement. Having said this, I believe in the new and believe that it is good and beautiful. I believe that we aspire to it as we aspire to the future. It is a future that contains an as yet hidden, yet glorious fulfilment, towards which all of our hopes are aimed. Perhaps it is the future that promises a higher level of our development that makes us long for that which gives us no peace during the present. Perhaps it's only a longing for death: or perhaps it's the certainty of a more elevated life afterwards. With the Future comes the new and perhaps it is for this reason that the future is rightly seen as being identical with beauty and goodness. … The laws of nature that determine genius are the laws of future mankind.
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If Mahler had provided the portal through which younger Jewish composers could walk, embracing their uniqueness as artists, it comes as no surprise to discover that much of this uniqueness stemmed from their ethical projections onto music – by no means a uniquely Jewish prerogative. Beethoven's
Fidelio
and his setting of Schiller's
An die Freude
in the Ninth Symphony are unambiguous in their ethical, humanist views. But, as the conductor Leon Botstein points out, Schoenberg was also attempting to move away from irrational nineteenth-century Romanticism and return to the values of the Enlightenment.
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Projecting an innate purity in music on the one hand, while expressing an inner ethical voice on the other, was for Schoenberg a musical
Haskalah
, a point of artistic departure that finds few equivalents among his non-Jewish contemporaries such as Stravinsky but is found among his non-Jewish disciples.
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Schoenberg opens his
Harmonielehre
by declaring
that it could only have been written thanks to what he has learned from his pupils. Wellesz believed that it was Schoenberg's pupil Webern who encouraged him to ever greater artistic audacity, with Schoenberg's relationship with Webern such that ideas flowed in both directions.
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In 1920 Wellesz published the first biography of Schoenberg, just preceding the period of dodecaphonic (twelve tone) composition. Wellesz deals specifically with Schoenberg's motivation to explore beyond the confines of traditional tonality and quotes from a programme note by Schoenberg on the
Book of the Hanging Gardens
Op. 15 in which we learn that Schoenberg considered this to be the first of his works that fulfilled the musical vision that he had been attempting to realise for a long time. He admits that this is likely to provoke possible rejection, even from sympathetic listeners (thus anticipating his words in the
Harmonielehre
). Wellesz goes on to cite the important influence of painting in Schoenberg's quest to give expression to this inner voice.
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He tactfully ignores the affair between Schoenberg's wife Mathilde and the painter Richard Gerstl. Nor could Wellesz have known that Gerstl would be one of the first painters to define Expressionism as an artistic movement, a development in Gerstl's work documented by his few surviving paintings, which move abruptly from figurative to jagged lines and slashes of colour, often obscuring everything but the most basic form.
That Gerstl, as a painter and friend, then a rival in love, would also be an important artistic influence was not something Wellesz felt able to discuss following the painter's suicide in 1908. Coincidentally this was the year in which Schoenberg ‘found’ his inner voice. Wellesz explains in his own memoirs how Schoenberg demonstrated in the
Harmonielehre
that on each degree of the scale, chords could be constructed which were constrained to maintain a relationship to the tonic-root. Using this as his starting point, Schoenberg began expanding harmonic relationships until arriving at a style that had departed from tonality as previously understood, allowing each tone in effect to become its own tonic. Wellesz also tells us that Schoenberg rejected the term ‘a-tonal’ in favour of ‘a-tonic’.
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What remains most redolent of an Old Testament prophet is Schoenberg's view that beauty and truth are not the same. The ‘inner’ truth that he was compelled to reveal was meant to be destabilising. Viewed in retrospect, this was not the futuristic music of a distant utopia, but a chilling prophecy of horrors to come. Over the next ten years, less talented composers and apostles would solemnly believe that they were playing a part in bringing about a Schoenbergian visionary future of a world still to come, while others, such as Alban Berg with his
Three Orchestral Pieces
, written just before 1914, found
resonance with Schoenberg's sense of the impending apocalypse. Adorno's comment that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz is unintentionally clarified by Schoenberg's pupil, Hanns Eisler, speaking at the International Congress of Composers and Music Critics in Prague in May 1948: ‘Long before airplanes were invented he anticipated the horror of bombing attacks on people taking refuge in air raid shelters. He is the lyric composer of Auschwitz's gas chambers, of the concentration camp Dachau, of the total despair of the common man crushed under the heel of fascism. That is his humanity. It is proof of Schoenberg's genius and nature that he expressed all these emotions at a time when the world seemed safe. Whatever is said against him, he never lied.‘
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Eisler continues his argument that Schoenberg anticipated the horrors of Hitler and even acknowledged this in his
Five Orchestral Pieces
Op. 16 from 1909, the first of which is called ‘Vorgefühl’ – ‘Premonition’.
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Schoenberg's musical revelations – true, alarming, not beautiful – provided the poetry that warned of Auschwitz. Eisler goes on to mention that one of the most important things he learned from Schoenberg was
Redlichkeit in der Musik
– a term that can be translated as ‘musical integrity’ or simply ‘ethics’.
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It is a paradox that Schoenberg's best-known followers were by and large not Jewish. Indeed, Schoenberg remains the ultimate paradox: he rejected the talk of ‘soul’ that characterised Romanticism, while insisting that he was responding to an ‘inner voice'; he was a modernist who set great store by the new and unknown, while remaining unconvinced by what was merely ‘modern’. Eisler wrote an entire essay on this apparent contradiction, concluding with the observation that Schoenberg ‘unleashed a revolution in order to become a reactionary’.
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