The Ellington Century (8 page)

In January 1912 Albertine Zehme, a onetime Wagnerian soprano who had become a
diseuse
, asked Schoenberg to write music to accompany her recitation of poems from
Pierrot Lunaire
, a collection of fifty poems by the Belgian Parnassian Albert Giraud in the German translation of Otto Erich Hartleben. Zehme promised twenty to thirty performances and Schoenberg at first viewed the commission mainly as a business opportunity, but he soon found himself engaged in his most original composition to date.

Usually discussed in term of its
sprechstimme
performance style midway between speech and song, its contrapuntal structures (including passacaglia and fugue), and its brilliant instrumental writing,
Pierrot
owes much of its sound and structure to Kandinsky. Schoenberg constructed it systematically from colors and numbers, the “inner values” behind external appearance, as Kandinsky had written in his introduction to
Der gelbe Klang:
“The means belonging to the different arts are externally quite different. Sound, color, words!…In the last essentials, these means are wholly alike: the final goal extinguishes the external dissimilarities and reveals the inner identity.”
⁵¹

On
Sesame Street
they might say that
Pierrot Lunaire
is brought to you by the (Blavatskian) numbers three and seven and the colors white, black, and red. Schoenberg, who chose and arranged the text from Giraud's volume, subtitled the cycle “Three Times Seven Poems”; there are three parts, with seven poems in each. It opens with a seven-note motive, a rhythmic idea that returns in various guises throughout, most dramatically at the close of “Die Kreuzen” (The Crosses), which ends part II.

There are four explicit “color” movements: “4. Eine blasse Wäscherin” (white), “8. Nacht” (black), “11. Rote Messe” (red), and “18. Der Mondfleck” (white again). The movements share numerology as well. Number 4 begins with seven three-note chords, scored for flute, clarinet, and violin. Number 8 is a passacaglia built on a repeated three-note theme. In number 11 each line of the poem has seven syllables. To evoke the colors, Schoenberg mixed instrumental timbres just
as Ellington would do in “Mood Indigo,” but with his own tricks. He revoiced the trio of instruments in number 4 from chord to chord, so, for instance, in the first chord the clarinet plays the top note, the flute the bottom, and the violin the middle, while in the next chord the flute is on top, clarinet is on the bottom, and in the next, violin is on top, and so on. In the score he asked that the three instruments “play at completely equal volume and without expression” to produce a composite, disembodied sonority, a “white” sound.

In “Nacht” Schoenberg combined the sounds of the bass clarinet, cello, and the piano in its low register to represent “giant black moth wings killing off the sun's radiance” as night descends. The middle section of this movement, as vapors begin to rise, counterpoints flutter-tongued clarinet, the cello playing tremolos on the bridge, more squeaks than pitches, and staccato notes on the piano, a swirl of shadows. For “Rote Messe” Schoenberg contrasted high squeaks (piccolo and the upper register of the piano) and low mutters (bass clarinet, viola, and cello), a comic effect, almost like cartoon music, to paint a gruesome scene: Pierrot reveals the dripping red Host to the congregation by dipping his fingers in his heart's blood.

“Rote Messe,” like much of
Pierrot Lunaire
, feels at once lurid and funny, qualities not much evident in Schoenberg's earlier work. By employing Kandinsky's mystical symbolism in place of the attempts at direct expression found in
Erwartung
, Schoenberg took his music to new and unexpected (and not particularly Kandinskian) places: objectivity and satire, with expression itself, the coin of the realm of romantic music, exposed (as it is in Kafka's “Hunger Artist”) as an addictive codependency between the artist (up on the cross) and the audience who get their kicks watching the bloody spectacle, then crawl back to their humdrum everyday lives.

To replace the
weltschmerz
that died on the cross at the end of part II, Schoenberg ratcheted up the colors and the comedy in part III. Here Pierrot returns to the daylight world (lit by a green sun) in a kind of sadomasochistic vaudeville. In number 18, “Der Mondspeck,” the color white, earlier a benign image of the imagination, returns as a symptom of obsessive compulsion as Pierrot vainly attempts to remove a speck of moonlight from the back of his coat. The instruments parody his pointless attempts to wipe the speck (genius? guilt? both?) away,
“Wischt und wischt,”
with a five-part double fugue scored mostly in the upper register; its twin subjects might be called Itchy and Scratchy. The song
reduces the esoteric “devices” of fugal writing, imitation, stretto, canon, augmentation, retrograde, to so many nervous tics, deconstructing pedantry with pedantry. What remains, though, dazzles. All the counterpoint just turns into brilliant glitter, white like a diamond.

There is no indication that Kandinsky ever heard
Pierrot Lunaire.
In a letter to Kandinsky on August 19, 1912, Schoenberg referred to
Pierrot
semi-apologetically as “perhaps no heartfelt necessity as regards its theme, its content [Giraud's
Pierrot Lunaire
], but certainly as regards its form” and mentions his next project based on Balzac's Swedenborgian novel
Seraphita.
That project resulted in two works that mark the terminus of Schoenberg's colorized spiritualism. First came the orchestral song “Seraphita,” op. 22, no. 1, to a poem of Ernest Dowson, scored for an unusual ensemble of voice, twenty-four violins, twelve cellos, nine basses, six clarinets, one trumpet, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, xylophone (of course), and tam-tam. Whether its precise instrumental proportions reflect acoustical concerns or numerological symbolism, the song has a unique otherworldly but sensuous timbre.

Schoenberg spent most of the war years working on a huge oratorio,
Die Jakobsleiter
, that might have fulfilled Kandinsky's prophecy of a higher art form. Like the contemporary visionary compositions, Scriabin's
Mysterium
and Ives's
Universe Symphony
, both intended for performances on mountaintops, Schoenberg's oratorio seems planned from the outset as a spiritual exercise whose dimensions would preclude actual performance. In the course of work on the oratorio, however, Schoenberg began to conceive a different way of relating the surface of music to an inner structure, the twelve-tone system, which would make its official debut in the unspiritual setting of a waltz, the last of Schoen-berg's Five Pieces for Piano, op. 23, written in 1921.

INTERMEZZO: A PALER SHADE OF WHITE

The occult spiritualism of Schoenberg and Kandinsky (and early Stravinsky) ended, musically, with the arrival of jazz, first heard in France as played by James Reese Europe's 369th Infantry Hellfighters Band. Within a few years most European composers abandoned expressionism for jazz-tinged “objective” styles such as neoclassicism or Neue Sachlichkeit.
⁵²
Although at first perceived as just another exotic fad, jazz confronted European music with a pertinent, persuasive rendering of contemporary experience that proved to be surprisingly tenacious and,
at first, seductive. Euro-jazz by Milhaud, Ravel, Hindemith, Krenek, and Weill dominated the new music scene of the 1920s.

The eruption of jazz in European music incited a series of backlashes, both musical and political. Tone color and skin color remained linked, as evidenced by the discourse surrounding the 1928 Stravinsky/Balanchine ballet
Apollon musagète
, conceived as an apotheosis of whiteness. Balanchine's choreography followed Stravinsky's description of his score as a
“ballet blanc,
”
⁵³
that is, with dancers in tutus. In his
Autobiography
Stravinsky wrote that he had “pictured it to myself as danced in short white ballet skirts in a severely conventionalized theatrical landscape devoid of all fantastic embellishment”.
⁵⁴
The music, which evinced its whiteness by using only strings, began with the tonal emblem of whiteness, a simple cadence in C major. The timbre and tonality bore a heavy ethical message, which Stravinsky made explicit in his
Poetics of Music
, delivered at Harvard in 1939 (just as Ellington was composing “Ko-Ko”): “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminished constraint diminished strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.”
⁵⁵
The music and choreography for
Apollon musagète
(a.k.a.
Apollo
) have become classics of high modernism, but it is edifying to view them as a statement of European essentialism (not without protofascist overtones). But don't take my word for it:

George Balanchine:
I myself think of Apollo as white music, in places as white-on-white.…For me the whiteness is something positive (it has in itself an essence) and at the same time abstract.
⁵⁶

Lincoln Kirstein:
In its grave sequence Balanchine carved four cameos in three dimensions: Calliope portrayed the metric and caesura of spoken verse; Polyhymnia described mimicry and spectacular gesture; Terpsichore, the activity, declaration, and inversion of academic dancing itself. These are all subservient to Apollo, animator and driver; they are his handmaidens, creatures, harem and household.
    With Lifar, Balanchine had been given a boy who might conceivably become a young man. In America, with Lew Christenson (who danced the role in New York in 1937), he found a young man who could be credited as a potential divinity. Praxitelean head and body, imperceptibly musculated but firmly and largely proportioned, blond hair and bland air recalled Greek marbles and a calm inhabitant of Nicolas Poussin's pastorals.
⁵⁷

Boris de Schloezer:
“Whatever may have been the circumstances which led to the birth of
Apollo
, the work reveals to us its author's secret, his thirst for renunciation, his need for purity and serenity.”
⁵⁸

It's not easy being white.

SOUNDS AND PERFUMES: SYMBOLISM IN WHITE AND BLACK

Kandinsky's theories about the relation of music, color, and words were a belated summation of the larger artistic movement, Symbolism, whose aesthetic ideology shaped the modernist literature of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Stefan George, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, among many others.
⁵⁹
Symbolist literature aspired to the condition of music. It often cloaked this goal, however, in a mask of obscurantism. In the compositions of Debussy and Ellington Symbolist aesthetic ideas became far more accessible to everyday life. Arcane modernism became “jazz modernism.”

Debussy's music is key to understanding the newly exalted role played by tone color as a means of representation. In his oeuvre Debussy gave musical form to the complex interplay of sensual perception and imaginary evocation that Baudelaire termed “correspondences”:

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers

Laissen parfois sortir de confuses paroles;

L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles

Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

 

Nature is a temple of living pillars

where often words emerge, confused and dim;

and man goes through this forest, with familiar

eyes of symbols always watching him.
⁶⁰

In this forest of symbols the human subject does not control meaning rationally but perceives it through sensory association as an endless chain of metaphors.

Debussy imbibed this Symbolist creed, further elaborated in Verlaine's “Art poétique,” Rimbaud's “Voyelles,” and J. K. Huysmans's novel
A Rebours
, and in the preface to Oscar Wilde's
Picture of Dorian Gray
, at the famous “Tuesdays” at Mallarmé's apartment and, on
Fridays at the Chat Noir.
⁶¹
In the 1880s Debussy set poems by Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Baudelaire, developing a richly allusive idiom of musical symbolism. Sounds became symbols.

In his songs Debussy often employed a symbolic sonority in the accompaniment to “read” the text. In “En Sourdine,” the first song in the Verlaine cycle
Fêtes galantes
, composed in 1891, a leitmotif beginning with three repeated notes sounds throughout the first section; it disappears and then returns at the end where the singer names its symbolic role: “Voix de notre désespoir, /Le rossignol chantera” (Voice of our despair, /the nightingale shall sing). In retrospect, we realize that the motive represents the nightingale's call, but as a symbol of despair, not a scenic effect. The repeated note itself is a double metaphor: the piano sounds like a flute that sounds like a nightingale. But the song has grander, even more esoteric echoes. The voice of despair springs from a forbidden love; the poem depicts Verlaine and Rimbaud hiding amorously in the bushes. The poem, mirroring a mirror, also replicates in a very condensed form the entire second act of
Tristan
, the lovers' tryst, in which Brangäne, the voice of despair, warns of the inevitable intrusion of the real world. The nightingale's motive frames the central intimacy just as Brangäne's admonitions form a kind of protective wall around the great love duet. In case we might miss this tone parallel, Debussy launched the song with the famous “Tristan chord,” the exact pitches heard at the opening of Wagner's opera but transposed an octave higher, one sound symbol evoking another.

Debussy tried his hand at writing Symbolist poetry, or rather prose, in his
Proses lyriques
, published in 1895. Here he pushed the piano-as–orchestra to an extreme, so that the second song, “De grève…” (Of the Shore…), forecasts the sound of
La Mer
composed a decade later. In terms of sound-as-symbol, however, the most interesting song is the last, “De soir…” (Of the Evening…). We might retitle it “Sunday in Paris with Claude,” for, like Seurat's contemporary “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” it is a painting of “modern life”—the earliest piece of music depicting the hustling “leisure” of the weekend city, including an excursion by train to the suburbs.
⁶²