Forbidden Music (27 page)

Felix Salten reviewed its Viennese premiere at the Raimund Theatre in November 1927 and, perhaps compelled by local loyalties, mentions that in many respects, this production was superior to its Berlin run. He then proceeds to explain various key moments:

‘It's a revue, but without the girls’, explains Salten, who adds that Piscator and Toller haven't created a piece of theatre so much as wedged their weltanschauung onto the stage. Revolutionary use is made of montage, film, music, transparencies and agitprop. ‘Toller's work is as current as the editorial commentary that's read in the daily paper: full of harangue in the manner of someone addressing a mass-meeting, there is the aggression and gesticulation of the cockiest of political posters.‘
²³

Composing for films

The music for
Hoppla, Wir leben!
was written by the Viennese-born composer Edmund Meisel, and in his review Salten mentions that one of the cinematic sequences used in the work reminded him of
Battleship Potemkin
. This should not have come as a surprise since Meisel had composed its music. The director of the film, Sergei Eisenstein, had more or less come to the conclusion that he did not want a single score as musical underlay, but preferred each country, region, territory, indeed even each generation, in which the film was shown, to have its own musical soundtrack. Meisel therefore arrived in Moscow to view a screening in preparation for the film's German distribution. Eisenstein mentions in his autobiography that the screening was shown with an accompanying cacophony as work was being carried out on the central heating system in the cinema. Eisenstein suspected that Meisel had later incorporated these sounds into his score.
²⁴
He was very taken with Meisel's music and later mentioned that the perfect combination of sound and vision that he achieved in
Alexander Nevsky
in 1938 (with music by Prokofiev) would never have been possible without Meisel's pioneering work on
Potemkin
.
²⁵
Unfortunately, a year before Meisel's untimely death in 1930 at the age of 36, Eisenstein and Meisel fell out: Meisel had instructed the projectionist at the London premiere of the film to show it at a slightly slower speed in order to accommodate certain rhythmic elements of the music, a request that did not go down well with the director.

Film composition was a fairly new art form in 1927. The large number of Viennese Jewish composers drawn to the medium is well documented, but it is an extraordinary coincidence that Edmund Meisel should be yet another, given that he was born in Vienna but raised in Berlin, and writing the music for one of that city's most iconic cinematic representations, Walter Ruttmann's 1927 film,
Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt
(
Berlin, the Symphony of a Metropolis
).

Eisenstein's thoughts on the marriage of film and music were developed later by Hanns Eisler, who started working in Soviet cinema in 1932 with the Dutch director Joris Ivens. The techniques Eisler acquired during this period informed his 1947 book
Composing for Films
, co-authored with Adorno.

Meisel and Eisler had similar backgrounds. Meisel was born in Vienna, but moved as a small child to Germany; Eisler was born in Germany and moved to Vienna. Both came from secular Jewish backgrounds and were political activists. Meisel composed songs for Ernst Toller's
Hoppla, Wir leben!
and Eisler joined him at Piscator's Theatre in 1927 with a production of the play
Heimweh
(
Homesickness
), by Franz Jung. Meisel scored Ruttmann's
Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt
in 1927, predating Eisler as a film composer, but Eisler soon caught up, providing music in 1932 for
Kuhle Wampe, oder wem gehört die Welt?
(
Kuhle Wampe, or To whom does this World Belong?
), starring Ernst Busch with a screenplay by Brecht and directed by Slatan Dudow. Although both young composers were curious about the juxtaposition of image and sound, Meisel's score for
Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt
employs acoustical effects and often rushes forward with a musical sweep that anticipates Hollywood. Kurt Weill found these characteristics in conflict with the aesthetics of the age and clearly did not approve:

Eisler's film music takes these ideas even further by presenting a counter-illustrative score that often draws stark contrasts between the visual and the aural. During his work with Ivens, Eisler's scores moved beyond the purely illustrative to create a parallel emotional dialectic that draws out greater depth from the film by contrasting images against unexpected musical effects. By 1941, when he set his
Fourteen Ways of Describing the Rain
to Ivens's short experimental silent film
Rain
from 1929, we are confronted with any number of dislocating moments between viewer and listener. With the 1955 Auschwitz documentary
Nuit et brouillard
, directed by Alain Resnais, Eisler employs the starkest of music-to-visual counterpoint, anticipating Hannah Arendt's concept of ‘the banality of evil’: he underscores the gas-chambers with music of unapologetic banality, leaving the viewer with a deeply unsettled impression.

Music for the Masses or Mass Appeal

The age of Aestheticism, vigorously defended by Hanslick during the mid-nineteenth century and which had continued to enjoy wide currency, was now seen as elitist. Even the age of post-Wagnerian Romanticism that superseded it (as represented by Zemlinsky, Schreker and latterly, Korngold) was resoundingly discredited by Weill in his 1926 essay on ‘The New Opera’. What was required, he argued, was a shedding of pretentiousness and the need to find the most immediate contact with a broad public. Radio thus facilitated Weill's ‘immediate contact’ aspirations, though the technical limitations of its early days made satisfactory broadcasts of complex and finely differentiated music nearly impossibly and seemed thereby to confirm the fundamental redundancies of post-Romanticism. Music now had to be brief, instantaneous and memorable. It had to escape from the bourgeois prisons of the concert hall and opera house, and feed the culture-hungry masses. Jazz, dance music and light entertainment were not only genuinely appreciated by a wider population, but also provided Jewish composers and writers with an entrée that earlier generations could not have dreamed of. Why battle to be counted among the elite, when so much more could be achieved by sticking with the masses? Ralph Benatzky, the popular (non-Jewish) composer of
Im Weißen
Rößl
(
The White Horse Inn
),
²⁷
may have been over-generous in his diary entry for 1 January 1928, but it contains more than an element of truth:

Benatzky's enthusiasm leads him to make numerous factual errors, but he throws a positive light on what would be turned just a few years later into Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and confirms the popular perception of Jewish prominence in light music.

Operetta by Jewish composers and librettists suffered a particularly iniquitous post-Hitler legacy. The Third Reich's guardians of public morality removed popular works and replaced them with alternatives from which all social satire and sauciness had been removed. With post-1945 revivals of previously banned works, the puritanical policies of the Nazis continued with the fastidious removal of sexual innuendo and the employment of actors and actresses who represented a harmless winsomeness far removed from their predecessors, leaving operetta with a saccharine reputation that it absolutely did not deserve.
²⁹

New Objectivity was the determining aesthetic of the serious artistic movements in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, representing not just a rejection of Romanticism, but a resolute Counter-Romanticism. Accelerated by the hot-house atmosphere of various new music festivals such as those in
Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden, along with further events organised by the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (ADMV) and the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM), bright young composers began a process that turned music into a commodity, or at the very least, put it to ‘practical’ use. With music's application for stage and screen, it became a function or indeed, a utility. Brecht said to Eisler that music captured his verse like ‘a fly in amber’, implying that music was the means rather than the end.
³⁰
Rejecting music's implied ability to communicate on an abstract ‘spiritual’ level meant that it was neither more nor less intrinsically valuable than graphics or carpentry. Indeed, Eisler's agitprop songs were considered by Piscator's avant-garde circle as the musical equivalent of John Heartfield's striking political posters. New Objectivity was aimed at the masses for them to use as they felt best. The spirit of the Weimar Republic meant that music had lost its position as an aristocratic accompaniment to balls and banquets or even as a bourgeois pretension to cultivation.

Eisler, however, did not feel that this should compel composers to pitch their work down market. As early as 1935, he was stating clearly that the avant-garde had a responsibility not to isolate itself from the masses.
³¹
But in 1950, he elaborated these earlier thoughts in another essay that strikes us, in retrospect, as a clear-sighted prophecy of where the emerging avant-garde in postwar Europe was heading: ‘If modern – that is serious – art distances itself continuously from the broader masses, then it becomes continuously more cynical, decadent, nihilistic and formalistically isolated; monopoly-capitalism's cultural industry has always understood the masses: for them, “true” art is merely merchandised art.‘
³²
Just as Ernst Toch would ultimately distance himself from the steely-eyed gaze of New Objectivity in American exile, Eisler, living in the Communist East, would clarify his earlier stance: appealing to the masses did not mean composing music with mass appeal.