The Devil's Pleasure Palace (19 page)

Today, the West takes the news of the latest Islamic beheading video in stride—that's just what those Muslims do, people seem to think—but would never think of reciprocating in kind should the need arise. Indeed, the American way of warfare is to do nothing to “insult” the enemy except, perhaps, under exigent circumstances, kill him. Wars are no longer run by generals in the field but by lawyers; in Afghanistan, the decision to kill even a midlevel Taliban commander had to go through layers of sign-offs before a drone or sniper could take a shot. What wonders what Kitchener, who mowed down the Mahdi's men without compunction, would have made of this moral cowardice disguised as morality. As Hilaire Belloc's famous couplet has it: “Whatever happens, we have got / the Maxim gun and they have not.” But now we won't use it, lest it be deemed “disproportionate,” “unmeasured,” or simply “unfair.”

The loss of cultural confidence was precisely what the Frankfurt School and its descendants sought and still seek to engender. It is their only path to victory, which is why—even as they have seized the high ground of the academy and the media—they continue to roll over and expose their bellies like whipped curs whenever they are directly confronted. Pleas for “tolerance,” a weakness masquerading as a virtue, still serve them well. It is long past time to give them a taste of their own “repressive tolerance,” à la Marcuse, to mark the boundary clearly between dissent and sedition, between advocacy and treason. By consistently claiming that some solutions are “off-limits” to “civilized” peoples, they undermine the very principles of civilization they pretend to advocate—the first of which is the right to civilizational and personal self-defense. They are a suicide cult enticing the rest of us to join them.

But the moral high ground is not yet theirs, as much as they would wish it so. Constantly forced into a strategy of subterfuge, dissimulation, misdirection, and open deception—I have dubbed it “American
taqiyya,
” a counterpart to the Muslim concept of religiously acceptable dissimulation—there is no lie the Left will not tell in the furtherance of its sociopolitical goals. To maintain the martial metaphor, they are essentially double agents, operating behind the lines of Western civilization. That they are not called out and dealt with aggressively in the court of
public onion and, when necessary, in courts of law, is one of the shames of our age. The only weapon they have is words—but we can hear the music behind them.

CHAPTER EIGHT

OF WORDS AND MUSIC

A
free society is one marked by what you
can
say, which is and should be just about everything. We thought we had enshrined this principle in the First Amendment, which applies primarily to government censorship of speech, both at the federal and, latterly via the doctrine of incorporation, among the several states. In a free society of free citizens, speech is the medium and proof of freedom itself.

An unfree society, on the other hand, is noteworthy for what you
cannot
say, which is just about anything that might disturb the overall leftist narrative or that might be at variance with an ever-changing series of politically expedient norms. In an unfree society, people keep their heads down and their mouths shut, fearful of exposing themselves in any way to such treatments as one might find in Room 101 of Orwell's Ministry of Love.

This is the central conundrum of our time. We live in a free society that cannot speak its mind, and we have created an unfree society that cannot admit that fact to itself. Talk about cognitive dissonance. And yet, as in an opera, what is
said
and what is
sung
may often be very different things.

To approach an opera as if it were a play is wrong, because there is an additional and very important level of meaning going on beneath the surface of the words, one that can either reinforce it or completely
contradict it. We give creative primacy to the composer in opera and not to the librettist, because it is just this layer of added meaning that distinguishes opera from nearly every other art form except perhaps the cinema at its highest levels. Wagner's leitmotifs in the
Ring—
short phrases that stand for particular things (Siegfried's sword, Wotan's spear) or concepts (the redemption-by-love motif)—are perhaps the most evident example, and yet composers going back to Mozart employ similar techniques in different ways.

At the end of the Stone Guest scene in Mozart's
Don Giovanni
, in which the rakehell is finally dragged down to perdition, the orchestra triumphantly thunders out the final chords in the “light” key of D major—not the spooky “dark” of D minor that has attended the Don throughout the opera, from the Overture on. Thus, musically, the triumph is society's, not the anti-hero's. For the later Romantics,
Don Giovanni
was the most important opera of the eighteenth century and the starting point for their efforts in the otherworldly genre. Similarly, Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G Minor was highly prized as a passionate excursion into the dark side of tonality.

In an early scene from the relatively sunnier
Così fan tutte
, the two men, Ferrando and Guglielmo, declare their love for their fair lady friends, and the orchestration positively vibrates with sexual passion—making their later betrayal of the sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella that much more painful and ironic. Lorenzo da Ponte's perfectly crafted libretto exudes the rakish cynicism about love we expect from the late eighteenth century, but Mozart's music transforms it with the warm humanity of the Enlightenment.
Così
, conceived as a harmless game by its librettist, is transformed by the composer's music into something deeply, affectingly human—so much so that to this day, stage directors debate whether to return the initial pairs of lovers to each other, or let them stay with the person we've watched them falling in love with throughout the show.

Sometimes no words are needed at all, as in the famous intermezzo from
Cavalleria rusticana
, by Mascagni—a very strong candidate for the greatest three minutes of dramatic instrumental music ever written—the calm before the fatal storm of passion that will take Turridu's life in a fight over a woman. The music is so potent that it has been used to great dramatic effect by filmmakers: Martin Scorsese chose it to accompany the
opening titles of
Raging Bull
, and Francis Ford Coppola used it to underscore the lonely death of Michael Corleone at the end of
The Godfather
trilogy. It is music that guides the doomed hero of each of these sagas to an end that he not only knows is coming, but that he also in some sense has willed for himself as the only possible outcome.

In other words, what is unsaid is nonetheless communicated in music and is far more important than what is said. The context and subtext contain the real message. This is true on both sides of today's political battles. On the one side, we have the remnants—scratched and bleeding, but still partially cohesive—of the old American Christian culture, largely Protestant but with a strong admixture of Catholics; on the other is the far less numerous but culturally potent Unholy Left, adhering to its own secular religion, although it professes atheism. As with the battle between radical Islam and the West, one side has explicitly avowed war on the other, while the other, more powerful, refuses to acknowledge it or even conceive of it. Which side, under these circumstances, is more likely to be successful?

In retrospect, it is instructive, upon reviewing the works of the Frankfurt School scholars, to see how poorly they argue, even in the areas of their putative specialties. Rhetoric directed against their enemies can just as fittingly be applied to them. When Adorno denounces “a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members,” he thinks he is talking about Nazi Germany, but he could just as easily and accurately be talking about Soviet Russia, ruled for nearly a century by the extremely dead hands of Karl Marx and the Devil's disciple, Lenin. Or, alternatively, he could be speaking of the culture of abortion today in the United States, with its horrific death toll and a population inured against equating “choice” with death.

Theodor Adorno (born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; he later adopted the surname of his Corsican Catholic mother) presents an especially interesting case. They say of newspapers that a reader tends to believe most of what he reads until he comes to a story that concerns his own area of professional or personal experience, and then he laughs and tosses the paper in the trash. I spent a quarter-century as a music critic for three American publications, the
Rochester Democrat & Chronicle,
the
San Francisco Examiner,
and
Time
magazine, and to say that my own work was never in the slightest influenced by Adorno would be
an understatement. Nor did he influence any of my colleagues, as far as I could tell. Who could possibly be impressed by such a pedestrian, quotidian observation as this parade of clichés and banal wordplay, from Adorno's essay “Music and Language: A Fragment” (1992):

Music resembles a language. Expressions such as musical idiom, musical intonation are not simply metaphors. But music is not identical with language. The resemblance points to something essential, but vague. Anyone who takes it literally will be seriously misled.

In the world of practical, as opposed to theoretical, music criticism, Adorno is a non-entity, a far lesser figure than, say, Wagner's nemesis, Eduard Hanslick; the erudite Americans James Huneker, Harold C. Schonberg, and Joseph Kerman; and one of the earliest and best music critics, the great composer Robert Schumann. Like every other member of the Frankfurt School, Adorno lies in his grave largely unread.

My own mentor, Schonberg—for many years the chief music critic of the
New York Times
—used to say that critics ought to be remembered for their hits, not their misses, the talents they discovered, not the talents they overrated. In my case, I am proud to have championed the works of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams at a time when they were scorned by others as “needle-stuck-in-groove” minimalists. Schumann's famous hailing of the young Chopin—“hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”—remains the classic of the genre, written in Schumann's very first published review:

It seems to me, moreover, that every composer has his own particular way of arranging the notes on paper; Beethoven looks different to the eye than Mozart, just as the prose of Jean Paul differs from that of Goethe. But now I felt as I were being watched by strange, wondering eyes, the eyes of flowers, of basilisks, peacock-eyes, young girls' eyes. In a few places the light became clearer—I thought I could discern Mozart's
Là ci darem la mano
wrapped in a hundred chords. I saw Leporello blinking at me and Don Giovanni flying past in a white cloak.

The piece in question, Chopin's Op. 2, was the Variations on “
Là ci darem la mano
” from
Don Giovanni
, for piano and orchestra, with which the young French-Polish composer announced his arrival on the
European musical scene in 1831. Chopin and Schumann were both born in 1810, a few months apart, with Schumann the younger. And yet, as the music critic of the
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
and a budding composer himself, he was keenly sensitive to, and appreciative of, contemporary musical trends. Schumann and Chopin had little stylistically in common, especially pianistically, but Schumann knew genius when he heard it, perhaps because he was one himself.

Contrast Schumann's poetic description of Chopin's gloss on Mozart with these plodding and flatly wrong observations from Adorno (one of Alban Berg's composition pupils and an Arnold Schoenberg devotee, one should remember) when discussing the contemporary music of his time. Apologies in advance for the mind-numbing prose (ably translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor) of Adorno's
Philosophy of New Music
(1949):

The best works of Béla Bartók, who in many respects sought to reconcile Schoenberg and Stravinsky, are probably superior to Stravinsky's in density and ampleness. And the second neoclassical generation—names such as Paul Hindemith and Darius Milhaud—has adjusted to the general tendency of the age with less scruple and thus, at least to all appearances, reflects it with greater fidelity than does the movement's own leader, with his cloaked and therefore absurdly exaggerated conformism. This is not, however, because historical priority is their due and the others are derivative of them but because they alone, by virtue of their uncompromising rigor, drove the impulses that inhere in their works so far that these works become legible as ideas of the thing itself.

It is difficult to take this gibberish (like the meaningless but emphatically Marxist phrase “false musical consciousness”) seriously, either as musical criticism or philosophy, despite the whiff of Kant. Bartók has little or nothing to do either with Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the two great rival expatriates in Southern California when Adorno also was living in Los Angeles. The German Schoenberg, the father of the twelve-tone system (and the unhappy model for the mad, syphilitic serialist composer Adrian Leverkühn in Mann's last novel,
Doctor Faustus
), and the Russian Stravinsky were rival leaders of two camps: one adhering to the new “comprehensive” system of egalitarian twelve-tone composition, and the other representing an older wing of the avant-garde, now tamed
and transmogrified into neoclassicism. Stravinsky would later turn to the twelve-tone system himself in such later works as
Agon,
signaling a surrender to the “arc of history.”