The Devil's Pleasure Palace (20 page)

Bartók, by contrast, was a stubbornly Hungarian composer and musicological researcher, making liberal use of Magyar—not Romany—folk elements in his compositions. Outside of Hungary, he established no “school of” and left few acolytes. Neither was he as formally innovative as either Schoenberg or Stravinsky, although his music is every bit the equal of theirs technically and a good deal superior to Schoenberg's, expressively. About the only relationship between Bartók and Stravinsky might be their shared interest in folk music (much greater on Bartók's part) and that both wrote early ballets. It's also hard to see how either Milhaud or Hindemith figures into the argument, since those two composers have little or nothing do with each other.

But then Adorno wasn't very much interested in the
musical
side of music criticism; rather, it was the larger philosophical issues that obsessed him. Music just happened to be the vehicle for his musings, “new music” in particular (specifically the so-called Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern). Proving to a largely uninterested world the value of the dodecaphonic (twelve-tone) method of composition became Adorno's particular axe to grind, and he concludes his essay on “Schoenberg and Progress” in this way:

The world is the Sphinx and the artist is the blinded Oedipus, and the artworks resemble his wise answer, which topples the Sphinx into the abyss. Thus, all art stands opposed to mythology. Its natural “material” contains the “answer,” the one possible and correct answer, always already contained, though indistinctly. . . . New music sacrifices itself to this. It has taken all the darkness and the guilt of the world on itself. All its happiness is in the knowledge of unhappiness; all its beauty is in denial of the semblance of the beautiful. No one, neither individuals nor groups, wants to have anything to do with it. It dies away unheard, without an echo. Around music as it is heard, time springs together in a radiant crystal, while unheard it tumbles perniciously through empty time. Toward this latter experience, which mechanical music undergoes hour by hour, new music is spontaneously aimed: toward absolute oblivion. It is the true message in the bottle.

And “absolute oblivion” is about where the “new music” has ended up. Theoretically dominant in my student days at the Eastman School of Music, in Rochester, New York, the works of the Second Viennese School are rarely played in concert today. Berg, Adorno's teacher, remains in the repertory, especially via his operas
Wozzeck
(not twelve-tone, except in one section) and
Lulu
, but Schoenberg's influence as a teacher has waned almost to the vanishing point, his “comprehensive” method of composing with all twelve tones now all but abandoned by twenty-first-century composers.

From a distance, one hears the echoes of a degenerate Wagnerism in Adorno's simultaneously overwrought and stultifying writings—a Wagnerism evident in the only major work of Schoenberg still performed with any regularity today, the early tone poem
Verklärte Nacht
(Transfigured Night). “Absolute oblivion” is nothing if not Wagnerian; the desire for death is never very far from the same Central European ethos that gave us both the Frankfurt School and Hitler's Reich, however much they might appear to otherwise oppose each other. The modern suicide cult of the Left owes a great deal to these leftist movements: a desire to sink slowly, lifeless, to the ground in the manner of a Wagnerian heroine.

But when you look closely at Adorno's writing, as in these all-too-representative excerpts, you see a hollowness at the core: fire from ice, amounting to nothing. Adorno's effect on the musical life of his time was negligible: special pleading for a “system” that had found only theoretical favor and that has now lost even that. Its pretensions to “comprehensitivity” destroyed, we can now see this “system” as a form of intellectual charlatanism, a studied fascination with process and minutiae that bespeaks the true soul of the born bureaucrat—the man who does nothing in particular, and to no societal good, but who by his own lights does it very well.

In Adorno's music criticism, there is plenty of criticism but precious little about music, all Faust and no Heinrich. It is as if the art existed purely for his exegetical pleasure, an opportunity to torment the “awful German language” (in Mark Twain's famous phrase) the way Mephisto tormented poor Faust. (Mr. Morgan, in Twain's
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
: “Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”)

Complexity comes with the language, the territory, and the mind-set. Germany is a land in which a pianist cannot properly probe the depths of the late Beethoven piano sonatas until he is a decade or so past the age that Beethoven was when he died (fifty-seven); Liszt, somehow, managed to play the thorniest of them all, the “
Hammerklavier,
” in Paris in 1836, when he was about twenty-five, and he ran through most of the rest of the cycle in the 1840s. Today, an eighty-year-old conductor might barely, just barely, be able to plumb the depths of
The Magic Flute
, written when Mozart was thirty-five.

Adorno is very much a child of his time and of his native language, his sentences crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic like a steamship line with no home port. The facile twist, which he learned from Marx, is one of his stocks-in-trade, as if he were a cheeky
New York Times
op-ed columnist: “All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire” (
Minima Moralia
). Defending his beloved new music, he is so caught up in the majesty of his own analysis that he inadvertently makes the case for the opposition: “Among the reproaches that they obstinately repeat, the most prevalent is the charge of intellectualism, the claim that new music springs from the head, not from the heart or the ear; or likewise, that the music is not sonorously imagined but only worked out on paper. The poverty of these clichés is manifest.” This is a near-perfect description of the bulk of Schoenberg's output and most of what followed him: music worked out on paper.

Adorno seems to have learned nothing from his teacher, Berg, who showed in works such as his
Lyric Suite
and Violin Concerto to what magnificent use some of Schoenberg's theories and methods could be put in the hands of a proper musician. “They are put forward as if the tonal idiom of the past 350 years were itself given by nature,” Adorno complained in
Philosophy of New Music
, “and as if it were an attack on nature to go beyond what has been habitually ground in, whereas, on the contrary, what has been ground in bears witness to social pressure.” On the contrary!

Black is white, up is down, war is peace. What is, isn't; and what isn't, is. Who are you going to believe? Adorno, or your lying ears? Like Faust, we have rejected the familiar for the unknown and then, belatedly, found out we didn't much care for it after all. But, just as it was when I
was a music student, what was
good for us
had to be plainly better than not only what we liked but also what we
felt in our hearts
. A System had arrived, express delivery from Darmstadt (one of the postwar centers of “new music” after the war). Like all systems, it purported to solve all the problems of the earlier systems, to supersede them. Like Islam, it would be the seal of revelation, after which nothing further would be necessary. Thereafter, it would just be a matter of study and mastery, with an infinite world of expressivity lying just beyond the horizon, once everyone had completely rejected the old way of thinking and composing and adopted the new.

The irony was, as many of us noticed at the time, that there was little difference aurally between rigorously serialized music (in which no note could be repeated before the other eleven in the “tone row” had been heard) and what was called aleatoric, or “chance,” music (in which many of the musical lines were simply improvised in an often random and haphazard fashion). That is to say, complete control of the material and a near-complete lack of control curiously produced more or less the same aural results. Audiences couldn't really tell the difference, so why bother?

The answer from the serialists was: because. Because a great deal of intellectual work had gone into the structure of the dodecaphonic piece, worked out on paper; it could not be compared with chance music, even if there was a resemblance in performance. One was “deep,” the other was not. And both were superior to the tonal idiom of the past 350 years because . . . they were new.

This circular reasoning is, I believe, one of the attractions of Critical Theory and progressivism in general. It appears to require thought, but in fact all it requires is faith—faith in the ritual and the dogma and in the trappings of thought, but always in the service of novelty for its own sake, masquerading as “dissent” or “revolution.” As Orwell predicted in
1984,
sloganeering eventually must replace free inquiry if the System is to survive and prosper; there can be not even a single ray of light in the darkness, lest the people glimpse the truth.

CHAPTER NINE

THE VENUSBERG OF DEATH

I
t is the thesis of this book that the heroic narrative is not simply our way of telling ourselves comforting fairy tales about the ultimate triumph of Good over Evil, but an implanted moral compass that guides even the least religious among us. Note here that the Left constantly invokes morality—indeed, often quotes from scripture—while refusing to identify the source of its morality. If “social justice” morally demands equality of outcome, obtained by stealing property and selling it to someone else in exchange for his vote, then what is to stop “social justice” proponents from arbitrarily announcing at a future date that it also morally demands the death of its opponents? What, after all, is the material difference between “thou shalt not steal” and “thou shalt not kill?”

To the Left, there is no material difference; for them, effectively, both Commandments have been repealed, one by the legislative process (the welfare state) and the other by judicial fiat (
Roe v. Wade
).

No issue motivates them more than the demographic self-destruction known as abortion; as has often been noted, “a woman's right to choose” (their favored euphemism) is for them a secular sacrament, and the more babies killed in the womb, the better. Never mind that a rational person would think that a woman's right to choose might be better and less lethally exercised at the moment when she considers whether to have unprotected sex with any given man; if you are going to stop conception,
why not start at the beginning? It's not as if condoms and other prophylactics are not readily available. But there is no logic to their malevolence. It is not enough, in the leftist scheme of things, to be able to have as much sex as one wants; no, it must be
consequence-free
sex. The wages of libertinism might be death, but death only for the unwanted by-product of libertinism itself. According to their lights, no female participant in the sex act should ever be held responsible for anything. She should have absolute right to the Pill, to an abortifacient, to an abortion, even a partial-birth abortion. Or—should she finally invoke her “right to choose” upon childbirth, and choose life, she should have the unquestioned right to financial support from the father, whoever he may be. The chant of Thanatos as the prescription for Eros is never very far from their lips.

In a larger sense, however, that would be death for thee but not for me. Despite their cultish fascination with the deaths of others—whether babies in utero or the millions who have died under National Socialism and international Communism—leftists generally try to live as long as possible themselves; cowards to a man, there is literally nothing they would die for, not even their own alleged principles. Largely deficient in the self-sacrifice gene, and with the word “altruism” essentially foreign to them, they are obsessed with their health, with medical care and coercive government schemes to “provide” such services at someone else's expense. Always cloaking their demand for larger, more intrusive, and more punitive government in the guise of “compassion,” the only thing they are willing to fight for (other than “the Fight” itself) is their own survival, even as they declare it to be utterly meaningless.

And yet Death fascinates them. Whether it is the death of society (think of Lukács's constant invocations of “destruction” and “annihilation”) or the deaths of millions of innocents in the purges and atrocities of National Socialism and Soviet-style Communism (can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs), death is a constant feature both of their philosophy and their political prescriptions, which include not only abortion but, increasingly, euthanasia. Wearing their customary mask of solicitous compassion, they can't wait for you to die to steal your stuff.

There's a remarkable passage in the second act of Wagner's
Siegfried
in which Mime—the brother of the evil master dwarf Alberich, who has raised the orphan foundling Siegfried to young manhood—tries to tell Siegfried how much he cares for him and loves him. But Siegfried has
just slain the dragon Fafner and tasted its blood, which has given him the power to understand the speech of animals and penetrate human lies and illusions. So he understands all too well that Mime simply wants to kill him and take the hoard of gold—as well as the magic
Tarnhelm
and the powerful Ring—for himself. After hearing his stepfather out, Siegfried dispatches him with a snickersnack of his vorpal blade,
Nothung
(his father Siegmund's sword, handed down from Siegmund's father, Wotan). Then he tosses Mime's corpse on the golden hoard and blocks the entrance to Fafner's lair with the dragon's own dead body.