Authors: Michael Haas
The German composer James Simon also wrote on ‘Expressionism in Music’ in
Musikblätter des Anbruch
. He starts by explaining how ‘Impressionists compress the world into the concept of “I”, whereas Expressionists explode the concept of “I” into the outer universe.‘
19
Essentially, he agrees with many of
Auernheimer's points, though he views the movement more sympathetically. Simon points out that, with
Verklärte Nacht
(1899), Schoenberg started as an Impressionist before moving into Expressionism. The potential inference from reading Auernheimer and Simon (who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944) is that Jewish intellectuals had good reason to be wary of Expressionism. With its relationship to Wagnerian Romanticism merely up-dated and drilled through with
angst
, it was moving away from the clear vision of rationality; Jewish intellectuals were instinctively uneasy with the irrational, a point that even comes across implicitly in the ‘Expressionism Debate’ of 1937–8.
Schoenberg's correspondence with Kandinsky is revealing for exactly this reason. Kandinsky had started to paint his first abstract works during 1908–9 at exactly the same time that Schoenberg felt he had broken through to achieve his own musical vision. In 1911 Kandinsky wrote an unsolicited but admiring letter to Schoenberg after hearing a performance of his music in Munich:
You have achieved in your compositions what I long for in less concrete form than music: the independence to walk towards one's own destiny. Your entire life is heard in the individual sounds of your music and reflects what I wish to show in my painting. Currently within the fine arts, there is a strong move towards construction as a means of finding a new ‘harmony’. […] My comprehension and efforts can subsequently only limp one step behind. Construction is exactly what the fine arts have so hopelessly lacked and it's marvellous that it's now being sought. Only, I think about the
way
things should be constructed.
Then, in a sentence that echoes Schoenberg's view from his
Harmonielehre
that composers needed to liberate themselves from merely providing conventional beauty or coherency, Kandinsky adds: ‘I find that contemporary harmony shouldn't follow set geometrical pattern but rather strike out on an anti-geometrical, illogical path and this path is the equivalent of musical dissonance.‘
20
Kandinsky made Schoenberg a member of
Der Blaue Reiter
, included some of his paintings in the group's first exhibition, and organised a performance in St Petersburg of
Pelleas und Melisande
, which the composer conducted.
21
There followed a break in correspondence with Kandinsky returning to Russia and Schoenberg joining the Austrian army in 1914. After the war, just as Kandinsky became involved with the constructivist Bauhaus movement, Schoenberg developed his own constructivist system using the twelve-note method. Both artists had independently sought to restore order from the
chaos of Expressionism. Kandinsky was keen for Schoenberg to come to Weimar, where he believed it would be possible to establish a musical branch of Bauhaus. Unfortunately, allegedly anti-Semitic remarks made by Kandinsky were reported to Schoenberg just as he was smarting from the racist indignities of Mattsee, an Alpine resort where he generally spent his summer vacation and which had begun to advertise the fact that it no longer welcomed Jewish holidaymakers. This combination of unhappy events initiated a break by Schoenberg in 1923, despite protestations of innocence by a mystified Kandinsky. There was only sporadic contact afterwards. Expressionism was thus a movement that by claiming to represent inner truth based on anarchic emotion was essentially nihilistic Romanticism. After Schoenberg, it had limited appeal to Jewish avant-garde composers.
Schreker, Expressionism and His Composition Pupils
One notable exception was Franz Schreker, whose music from the pyromaniac opera
Irrelohe
(1919–22) onwards began to develop beyond the sensually woven ‘Jugendstil’ textures of his earlier operas and became more abrasively dissonant. The title
Irrelohe
was taken from a railway station near Regensburg called Irrenlohe, which Schreker adapted for the name of his opera, roughly translated as ‘Flames of Madness’. It was a transitional work that reflected his departure from Vienna and his arrival in Berlin. As such, it contains much that is redolent of his former musical world while exploring turbulent sounds and effects encouraged by the new.
Der Singende Teufel
,
22
composed between 1924 and 1928, is also readily classifiable as musical Expressionism, with a subject similar to Kleist's
Die Heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik
,
23
in which music stuns hordes of pagan Huns into submission. The more experimental
Christophorus, oder die Vision einer Oper
, composed between 1925 and 1929, brings to mind subjects as diverse
as The Sorcerer's Apprentice
and Thomas Mann's as yet unwritten
Dr Faustus. Christophorus
is dedicated to Schoenberg and, according to Schreker's biographer Christopher Hailey, owes much to Schoenberg's influence, with a musical language that pushes through the borders of conventional tonality.
24
It was rejected for publication by the usually supportive Universal Edition and remained unperformed during Schreker's lifetime.
Yet if Wellesz saw much in Berg's
Lulu
that reminded him of Schreker's
Der ferne Klang
, there is even more in
Christophorus
with its abrasive dissonances as orchestral colour and cinematic links between scenes that seem unthinkable without Berg's
Wozzeck
(though, intriguingly, that was not premiered until 1925). Schreker began composing
Christophorus
straight after
Irrelohe
, but
only completed it much later, following a return to more familiar territory in
Der singende Teufel
.
25
By the time of his last opera,
Der Schmied von Gent
,
26
completed in 1932, Schreker had become a participant in the anti-Romantic Zeitgeist that defined much of the work of his students. Ernst Krenek's
Jonny spielt auf
, for example, had been given its premiere in Leipzig in 1927, then toured the world, launching an avalanche of similar
Zeitopern
, a genre of musical theatre that offered an ultra-contemporary setting and used an apparatus of modern acoustical artifices such as car-horns, radios, jazz bands, telephones, police sirens and so on. Many of the most successful Zeitopern were composed by Schreker's students, such as Max Brand's
Maschinist Hopkins
and Karol Rathaus's
Fremde Erde
,
27
both from 1930, and Mark Lothar's
Lord Spleen
in 1931. In February 1932, an opera by one of his brightest pupils,
Der gewaltige Hahnrei
28
by Berthold Goldschmidt, admittedly more erotic-grotesque than Zeitoper, was first performed to great acclaim in Mannheim. Wilhelm Grosz, viewed by Julius Korngold as one of the most promising of potential Mahler successors
29
and whose
Sgarnarelle
(based on Molière) was given at the Vienna Opera in 1925, moved away from ‘serious’ music altogether to compose jazzy ballads, hit songs and dance numbers, including the theme-song for the film
The Santa Fe Trail
, starring Ronald Reagan.
Schreker's pupils from Vienna and Berlin are startling in their diversity. He instinctively took on individualists who would go their own way rather than follow his example. He treated pupils on individual merit, including several talented women such as Lotte Schlesinger, Zdenka von Ticharich, and Grete von Zieritz. His pupils, even more than Schoenberg's, are a roll-call of music in Weimar Germany. It is tantalising to speculate how such a group would have influenced future developments in German music had many of Schreker's most capable pupils not been forced into exile by the Nazis or, in some cases, openly collaborated with them, thus hindering their reception after 1945. As a result of the inevitable parricide that is common between gifted pupil and teacher, many of his most prominent students would distance themselves from Schreker as old-fashioned. With so much posthumous disparagement of Schreker, we can only surmise what he was like as a teacher on the basis of his remarkable class: unlike Schoenberg, he left no books or manuals behind.
Following Schoenberg's arrival as Busoni's successor at the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1925, thanks in part to Schreker's recommendation, Schreker's pupils took the conscious decision not to go down the twelve-tone route. Only Paul Pisk and Rudolf Kolisch – Schoenberg's future brother-in-law – studied with both. By choosing to study with Schreker, they showed an inclination to the trends within musical modernism represented by Stravinsky and the emerging voices of composers such as Hindemith and
Toch. Schoenberg, though seen as brilliant, was considered too doctrinaire for many independent, younger spirits of the age.
Apart from Schreker, who is finally starting to regain recognition, it appears the most memorable examples of musical Expressionism were by two non-Jewish composers: Alban Berg's operatic settings of Büchner's
Wozzeck
and Wedekind's
Lulu
, and Paul Hindemith's three short operas,
Das Nusch-Nuschi
, with a libretto by Franz Blei,
Sancta Susanna
and its libretto by August Stramm, and
Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen
30
written to a text by Expressionism's favourite wild-child, the artist Oskar Kokoschka. Jewish composers were showing a marked preference for an avant-garde that either adhered to well-defined laws, such as Schoenberg's twelve-note method, or, more frequently, the emerging
Neue Sachlichkeit
(‘New Objectivity’), which represented developments that, though still broadly tonal, were anti-Romantic.
Ernst Krenek makes an interesting observation regarding Expressionist Jewish composers and atonality in his memoirs
Im Atem der Zeit
. In 1934, he founded a concert series called ‘The Austrian Studio’, the purpose of which was to show that modern music was something ‘intrinsically Austrian’ and not an affair relegated to (as he put it) ‘subversive lefties and Jews’.
31
In a conversation regarding the programming of a liturgical concert with Dr Josef Lechthaler, the head of music within Austria's Catholic Church, Krenek is shocked by an observation which seemed at the time to enjoy wide currency: ‘Alarmingly’, according to Krenek, ‘Lechthaler mentioned that it is no wonder the public is sceptical of new music in Austria, as it was atonal music “exclusively composed by Jews for Jews and therefore only purposeful in diverting ‘an exotic minority’”.’ Krenek, despite the overtly anti-Semitic founding principles of the Austrian Studio, is taken aback and answers that if this is the case, ‘one should try to encourage non-Jews to listen to new music rather than disparage it. It's not right to blame the composer if only Jews attend performances of his works. In addition, it would be very simple to prove that concerts of modern music were attended by at least as many non-Jews as Jews.‘
32
With regard to the other point, Krenek admits that he can only think of a single Jewish composer ‘of the more dubious variety of atonal music: Arnold Schoenberg’. Lechthaler is surprised and tries to strengthen his argument by listing one atonal or twelve-tone composer after another, only to be informed by Krenek that they all come from generations of good Austrian Catholics.
Krenek was the son of a Czech army officer and a conservative Austrian Catholic monarchist. His implicit view that Jews could not be considered the same as ‘Austrians’ or ‘Germans’ confirms that even enlightened non-Jewish intellectuals sported casually anti-Semitic opinions at the time. Since 1933, he
had been frequently and erroneously attacked as a Jew in the Nazi press. He subsequently expressed remorse for what he called his ‘disgraceful’ public protestations at these charges.
33
Indeed, his first two wives, Mahler's daughter Anna and the actress Bertha Haas, were both Jewish enough to fall foul of the Nuremberg laws.
By January 1931, there was no clear delineation of how modern music theatre was progressing. The following highlight some of the most important work chosen by the
Anbruch
editor Hans Heinsheimer for treatment:
34
Walter Braunfels speaks about his opera based on E. T. A. Hoffmann's
Prinzessin Brambilla
; Berthold Goldschmidt writes about his ‘tragic-comedy’ grotesque
Der gewaltige Hahnrei
; Hans Krasa (who would be murdered in Auschwitz in 1944) writes about his opera
Verlobung im Traum
, based on an amusing short-story by Dostoyevsky.
35
There are further articles by Alois Hába on his Moravian nationalist quarter-tone opera
Matka
(
The Mother
);
36
reviews of Manfred Gurlitt's reworking of the tale of girls from good families falling for soldiers and becoming prostitutes, based on Lenz's 1776 play
Soldaten
;
37
Karol Rathaus's contemporary opera
Fremde Erde
about the exploitation of financial refugees;
38
Janáček's
From the House of the Dead
, also based on Dostoyevsky;
39
Kurt Weill's opera for school-children
Der Jasager
;
40
Krenek's updating of the Orestes story in
Das Leben des Orest
;
41
Schreker writing on
Der Schmied von Gent
, which in January 1931 he was still calling
Smee und die sieben Jahre
,
42
and a revealing article by Herbert Windt – who became Leni Riefenstahl's composer of choice during the Third Reich – on the nationalist political nature of his opera
Andromache
.
43
By 1930, the fad for Zeitoper had already peaked and was starting to give way to operas based on folktales and parables mixed with antiquity, often referred to in the press and elsewhere as the ‘Bekenntnisoper’ or ‘operas of avowal’. As Windt unintentionally makes clear in his article on
Andromache
, this was the perfect cultural run-up to National Socialism with its Germanic chauvinism mixed with Hellenophilia. Prior to the premiere of Schreker's own ‘Bekenntnisoper’,
Der Schmied von Gent
, there was Wellesz's
Alkestis
, first performed at Mannheim in 1924, Pfitzner's
Das Herz
(1931), Herbert Windt's
Andromache
(1932), Weinberger's
Schwanda der Dudelsackpfeifer
(1928), Weill's
Die Bürgschaft
(1932), and Paul Graener's
Friedemann Bach
(1932). Though a number of these works were by Jewish composers, the move away from Zeitoper towards the simple rustic parable or warmed-over Hellenism was unmistakable. Schreker, in an attempt to combine what he had always done best with an appeal to contemporary tastes, seemed to critics to have cooked up a mixture of current modernism, re-packaged as a German
religious morality play. Viktor Zuckerkandl's review of the new work did not make for pleasant reading: