Forbidden Music (11 page)
Authors: Michael Haas
Towards the end of this blistering appraisal, Hanslick outlines the dilemma of reviewing Viennese composers. Readers would certainly have been aware that Brüll was a friend of Brahms and therefore part of Hanslick's own musical circle:
The conscientious critic finds himself placed in a difficult position when dealing with local composers. He owes the talents of the city a certain consideration while at the same time needing to be forthright. He should not deflate the expectations that come with the enormous amount of work that has been invested, but neither should he lose the confidence of his public by heaping empty praise. In the case of Brüll, this dilemma is marvellously solved by the observation that we can be quite sure that in future, the composer will deliver us something far better than
Bianca
.
28
Another major figure that moved in orbits around Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms was the Jewish pianist and composer Ferdinand Hiller, largely forgotten today. Hanslick has enormous affection for Hiller and mentions him frequently in his autobiography, an endorsement not reciprocated by Hiller, who makes just one passing reference to Hanslick in his own memoirs. Despite respect bordering on reverence, Hanslick refuses to offer empty praise. In his memoirs, he recounts Hiller's jovial comment that Hanslick was inclined to review his writings more favourably than his compositions. Hanslick gleefully acknowledges this – he did not undervalue Hiller's gifts as a composer, but thought his books far better.
29
On 18 and 19 August 1885, only three months after Hiller's death, Hanslick devotes six pages to him, using the correspondence between Hiller's librettist and friend Moritz Hartmann as the basis for an extended obituary. This is all the more exceptional as Hanslick makes the point that Hiller wanted to make his mark as an opera composer, though this was a task for which he was unsuited (along with other unnamed German pianist-composers, presumably Brüll or Rubinstein). The correspondence between Hartmann and Hiller centres on finding an appropriate operatic subject to follow his successful oratorios
Saul
and
Die Zerstörung Jerusalems
.
30
The resulting opera,
Die Katakomben
,
31
was finally
produced in Wiesbaden (‘a place better known for curing gout rather than important operatic premieres’) and eventually made it to Hanover, Karlsruhe and Rotterdam. Hanslick mentions dryly that it was ‘the most successful’ of Hiller's many operas. Fundamentally, he finds Hiller's music lacking in originality, a trait Hanslick believes that Hiller recognised in himself when writing to Hartmann of his natural tendencies towards consensus, ‘perhaps a tendency that was also reflected in his music’. Schumann, who thought very highly of Hiller's compositions (as did Mendelssohn), eventually came to the conclusion that Hiller's music was like a basket of ripe und unripe fruit thrown together. It could produce no true pleasure, since alongside the inspired was the trivial and contrived. This was an opinion that Hanslick shared. The rest of the article is devoted to praising Hiller's gifts as a writer.
32
At no point does Hanslick consider the religion or cultural background of the composers whose works he reviews as pertinent. However, his feuilletons for the
Neue Freie Presse
provide a fascinating documentation of where Jewish composers were heading culturally, and although these were composers towards whom Hanslick may have been favourably disposed from a purely aesthetic point of view, most of them were fundamentally cautious and conventional. A hint of an exception is felt in Hanslick's review of Mahler's completion of Weber's opera
Die Drei Pintos
. He finds the work itself unexceptional, though it might have been better had Weber lived to complete it. Of Mahler, he writes that he is competent at matching Weber's instrumentation, though he grows weary of continuous passages of rushing semi-quavers, punctuated by trombones and bass drum: 'Mr Mahler is orchestrating for today's public not the public of the 1820s.’ Hanslick goes on to praise Mahler's composition of the entr'acte before the second act, which he says offers an anticipation of Richard Wagner's sound world.
33
Hanslick is equally impatient with the works of countless non-Jewish composers of the same period: for example, Josef Fuchs's 1889 opera
Die Königsbraut
(‘a composer who instinctively knows his limitations’),
34
Johannes Hager's
Marffa
, performed in 1886 (‘it would be nice if his melodies did not leave one feeling that they had passed through a number of other hands first’),
35
Victor Ernst Nessler's
Der Trompeter von Säkkingen
from 1884 (‘the most remarkable thing about this work is its success’),
36
Karl Gramman's
Andreasfest
from 1885 (‘his work is neither better nor worse than that which we regularly encounter within contemporary German opera; however, that standard itself is depressingly low at the moment’),
37
and Josef Hellmesberger's
Fata Morgana
from 1886 (‘I put the work's weaknesses down to the fact that he composed it in only 3 months’).
38
One Jewish composer who came in for favourable treatment from Hanslick was the British musician Frederic Hymen Cowen, whose
Scandinavian
Symphony he reviewed in January 1882:
It isn't often that the English compose symphonies and even less often that they do it with success. Such a rarity was presented by Hans Richter in his most recent Philharmonic concert: both the symphony and its accompanying English composer. […] His
Scandinavian
Symphony is large, and into the last detail a well-crafted work. Cowen has long ceased to be a beginner and has for some considerable time possessed the necessary skills of writing for all the techniques of the modern orchestra. In his newest work – the only one of his we know – he presents himself more as poet and landscape artist than an independent and inventive musician. For that reason, the thematic material and counterpoint come less to the fore than his pallet of colours.
39
With Cowen, who studied in Leipzig, we encounter the other centre around which newly assimilated Jewish composers could frequently be found. In some cases, they had direct, regular and friendly contact with Brahms, such as Friedrich Gernsheim. Cowen met Brahms during his Viennese sojourn, while others, such as Salomon Jadassohn (one of Cowen's professors at Leipzig), were obviously influenced by Brahms.
Hanslick's writings on Wagner and Liszt are far more nuanced than legend would have it. His moving obituary of Wagner published on 20 February 1883 opens with the line: ‘The news of Wagner's sudden death painfully shocked and stunned our musical circle.’ He can only acknowledge Wagner's importance within the stagnant pool of German opera. He goes on to say that Wagner had no enemies who were simply mean-spirited and partisan (presumably referring to himself), while restating his belief that Wagner set music on a destructive course. Hanslick feigns admiration for Wagner's ability to have done this single-handedly, and cites the enormous vacuum left by his passing: ‘He created a new art-form, for which we remove our hats, without for a moment dishonouring those practitioners of the “old” art such as Mozart, Beethoven and Weber.’ He then goes on to declare that he was never in opposition to Wagner himself, but rather to the Wagnerians. Following Wagner's death, Hanslick's doubts about Wagner's music have all but disappeared. He ends with a quotation from Grillparzer: ‘Death is like a bolt of lightning: it transfigures that which it has destroyed.‘
40
Yet it is revealing that with the death of Verdi 18 years later,
Die Neue Freie Presse
not only offers Hanslick's fulsome tribute, far longer than his Wagner obituary, but makes it
their lead story, according Verdi the celebrity status of departed royalty, prime-ministers and generals.
Most of the Jewish composers Hanslick reviews, with the obvious exceptions of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, are condemned as conventional. But his affectionate obituary of Offenbach from 10 October 1880 finds him praising another innovative voice: ‘Offenbach was a true original. His music was recognisable as Offenbach within a matter of only a few bars.’ He mentions that in Offenbach's style, the language of Auber and Adam dominates, but Mozart and Weber are also apparent. After two full pages of praise, and documenting Offenbach's many successes and fewer failures in Vienna, Hanslick goes on with a certain benevolent cattiness to mention that ‘less brilliant than his melodic and rhythmic genius was his harmonic artistry; and his contrapuntal skills came to zero. But his power to amuse has no musical equal […] and as a final point […] he was a master of form and structure. Whatever one may criticise him for, he was a musician of great brilliance and a genius of the theatre.‘
41
Karl Goldmark, Hanslick and Brahms: a Musical Triumvirate
Hanslick had praised Brahms as early as 1862 and he had been made aware of Goldmark's talent from as early as 1857, when Goldmark requested that Hanslick appraise a score in order to encourage support for his first concert. Hanslick's response was ‘talent, but not ready’.
42
Later, when Hanslick headed a scholarship committee initiated by the Ministry of Education in 1863, he noted that his fellow committee member, the poet and playwright Franz Grillparzer, lamented that there were no more composers like Schubert: ‘In those days, we had the talent, but no means of aiding it. Today we have the means, but no talent!’ Hanslick then goes on to say that despite Grillparzer's misgivings, they in fact managed to promote a large number of promising youngsters, including Eusebius Mandyczewski, Richard Heuberger […] and above all, Antonín Dvořák and Karl Goldmark. In due course, Goldmark and Brahms would both join Hanslick as scholarship adjudicators.
43
Goldmark relates his first encounter with Brahms as taking place around 1860 or 1861 when he was the viola player in a Viennese quartet which met at the Café Čech, just off of the Graben (Vienna's most central square) near St Stephen's Cathedral. Brahms eventually offered the ensemble ‘a string quintet in an early version which was latterly much reworked’.
44
Goldmark thought it was Brahms's self-belief that had initially so impressed Hanslick. In his memoirs, Goldmark notes that Brahms had admitted that Hanslick often turned to him for musical advice. He found Hanslick's deference to Brahms
tiresome and even went so far as to say that Hanslick probably didn't understand Brahms at all. Elaborating on the one anti-Semitic remark Brahms made to him, Goldmark tells how Brahms discovered that Goldmark had set a text of Luther's that he had wanted to use himself, and informed Hanslick that it was not by Luther, but by someone else. When the work was performed, he was amused to read that Hanslick had simply repeated this bit of misinformation, planted by Brahms. It was during a later encounter, when Brahms spotted Goldmark in a restaurant, that he bellowed in front of other diners that he couldn't understand why a Jew would even wish to set a text by Luther.
At his seventieth birthday celebration, hosted by the family of Viktor von Miller zu Aichholz, Hanslick remarked that nothing made him happier during all the years he had spent writing music criticism than ‘writing reviews that gave great joy to those who read of others being torn to shreds’. Brahms, according to Goldmark, was visibly unsettled by the comment, but went up to Hanslick afterwards and thanked him for his years of devoted support.
45
Goldmark and Brahms were on close terms and met frequently, but Goldmark admitted that Brahms thought only Goldmark's
Ländliche Hochzeit
46
any good. Brahms had apparently told Brüll that he didn't really find much in Goldmark's music to appreciate, but that he valued both him and Brüll 'for their proficiency’. Further, he didn't really get on with the theatre, so wouldn't wish to comment on opera. Despite this, he did write to Hanslick of his enthusiasm for Goldmark's opera
Merlin
.
Goldmark was often thought to be a Wagner epigone, thus resulting in some ambivalence when Hanslick came to review his works, particularly as the two men moved in the same circle. In writing a
Laudatio
in honour of Goldmark's seventieth birthday, Hanslick reviewed the extraordinary success of his operas – most especially
Die Königin von Saba
47
– and quoted extensively from a letter Goldmark had written, begging him to intercede with the powers at the Imperial Opera. Hanslick goes on to write, with some relief, that his intercession was unnecessary, as the work had already been accepted for performance. His reviews of Goldmark are carefully worded, but his views of
Königin von Saba
would today be construed as verging on the anti-Semitic, while giving us a strong indication of the sensibilities of the period – it was acceptable to be Jewish, but not to be too fulsome about it:
Goldmark's score offers us an impressive work, which often highlights a strong and individual talent. The strength is shown most in the passion, explosion of feeling, not to say the pure sheen of the musical colours which offer the distinctive peculiarities of the Jewish Orient. […] Occasionally
Goldmark drives the passion to its outer limits, with voice registers at the top of the range, the chromatic storm in the orchestra with its thundering timpani and trombones, and racing bolts of lightning in the violins. The most noticeable feature of Goldmark's individuality is the musical transliteration of Jewish Orientalism. [This] could be noted even in his earlier works such as his
Sakuntala Overture
, an interesting, rather strange yet artificial work. As the story of
the Königin von Saba
is so profoundly Jewish, he allows this particular attribute full reign. Perhaps it's my own blinkered view, but I can only tolerate this sort of music in small doses: as a stimulus, but not as regular nourishment. With brilliant determination, Goldmark has wrapped himself in a display of oriental exotica, with all of its plaintive melisma, its augmented 4ths and diminished 6ths, its shunting between major and minor, its heavy thudding basses above which one hears the flickering and darting of countless dissonant harmonies and slivers of tones. The abundant use, one could say
abuse
[my italics], of accidentals, syncopations and dissonance are recognisable features of the modern German school. But to be able to carry them through with such positive results is something that eludes most of Goldmark's colleagues. […] Where orientalist exoticism is called for, Goldmark gives everything he has. This works particularly well in the religious scenes and also in the ballet music and other dance scenes, which happen to be the highlights of the work. However, this tiresomely exotic manner grows wearisome after a while. It's even used when general human feelings are called for rather than anything specifically Jewish. How strange the ‘song without words’ sounds with which Astaroth tempts Assad to come to the queen. This is music that calls devout Jews to prayer, not lovers to a rendezvous! This is [Solomon] Sulzer written in the treble clef!
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