Forbidden Music (24 page)

Though this essay dates from 1945, it offers a reflection of the musical values that characterised New Objectivity and ultimately amounts to its rejection by one of its most high-profile protagonists. Reading both
Melos
and
Anbruch
in
the interwar years, the impression is that the musicians and thinkers who cleaved most firmly to New Objectivity felt the need to accord music a sense of scientific legitimacy so that it could be seen as a dynamic tool in the shaping of post-1919 society – a misappropriation that would be repeated with some variation by the post-1945 avant-garde. Toch was only one of many composers in the interwar years who tried to compensate for the lack of empirical scientific evidence that music had to offer. His
Melodielehre
is highly technical and it attempts to draw conclusions and extrapolate methods where, apart from counterpoint, hardly any had previously existed.

The postwar years of both 1919 and 1946 shared common objectives characterised by the belief that through alienating human responses to music, mankind and the human condition could be lifted out of the romantic and irrational stupor that had led to the follies of war. This is symbolised in an undated postcard from Hindemith to Toch regarding the preparation of a film music event (presumably Baden-Baden's film music festival in 1928): Hindemith asks if Toch's composition will be requiring ‘machines or musicians’, a juxtaposition of opposing concepts. My translation uses ‘musicians’ to illuminate some of the alliterative irony conveyed by Hindemith's ‘mechanisch oder menschlich’, which sums up the ethos of
neue Sachlichkeit
by offering the alternative, more general translation of: ‘will you be requiring mechanisation or humanity?‘
⁶¹

The Political Science of Music

‘Wissenschaft’ or ‘science’ as a suffix became a useful means of establishing academic credibility in disciplines far removed from the physical and natural sciences. With its mathematical permutations, much of the arcane fascination with dodecaphony arose because it appeared to bring music closer to ‘Wissenschaft’. A cursory glance down the index of ‘scientific’ articles found in
Melos
and
Anbruch
only confirms how involved Jewish critics, writers and musicians were in the process of making music rational and subject to empirical evaluation. Most of these writers would later be included in the notorious
Lexikon der Juden in der Musik
compiled by the eminent Nazi ‘Music Scientists’ Theo Stengel and Herbert Gerigk. Most of
Anbruch
’s Jewish ‘music scientists’ had left their religious beliefs behind in the drive towards assimilation, and having jettisoned one set of ‘irrational’ beliefs, were unwilling to take on another. Only a few of the major figures did so: Walter Braunfels and Egon Wellesz, for instance, both became devout Catholics and many of their works from the interwar years (and afterwards) reflect this. Viktor Ullmann became a follower of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy movement, which believed
in a quasi-pantheistic interaction between mankind and nature but also that spiritual experience could be subjected to the same objective criteria as physical and natural sciences. Much of Ullmann's work, notably his operas
Der Sturz des Antichrist
and
Der Kaiser von Atlantis
,
¹
attempts to convey these complex ideas. Other composers, such as Toch and Weill, simply put the devotional life they had acquired during childhood into a drawer, taking it out now and again for personal use and occasional reflection.

The vast majority of secular Jewish composers and writers, however, were resolutely anti-religion: Korngold and Schreker are examples of composers who did not actively practise religion but wrote music that was deeply spiritual within its own terms. Those who turned to ‘New Objectivity’, such as Hanns Eisler, could often be militantly anti-spiritual but profound believers when it came to Communism, the secular alternative to both Judaism and Christianity, and providing a belief system as dogmatic as any formal confession. Marxist terms such as ‘dialectical materialism’ offered young believers the twin advantages of religious mystery and satisfyingly ‘scientific’ weightiness. In a deliberate attempt to draw parallels with religion, Eisler's secular cantatas and
Lehrstücke
were consciously modelled on Bach's cantatas and passions. Eisler, along with Paul Dessau and others, wrote ‘secular hymns’, or ‘fight-songs’, for Communist pageants and rallies which challenged anything conventional religion could offer. It comes as no surprise that the other great secular cult of the age, National Socialism, hijacked some of Eisler's most trenchant melodies. Young believers who had previously struck out Leftwards towards the new dawn promised by Marx now set off in the opposite direction, singing the same heart-pounding tunes with different words.

The growth of these secular religions did not happen in a vacuum. Prewar middle-class prosperity had created an entrenched and resentful underclass of urban and rural poor. To this was added the casual racism towards different nationalities that were in practice accorded second- or even third-class citizen status. The dynastic houses of Europe, supported by their established churches, saw in these disenfranchised masses cheap labour and plentiful cannon-fodder.

The World as Viewed by Max Nordau

The Austrian Zionist philosopher Max Nordau, who gave us the term ‘degenerate’ to describe the condition of both society and culture, wrote lengthy end-of-year summaries of the political and social state of the world, which from 1897 until 1915 appeared annually in Vienna's
Neue Freie Presse
. Dipping into these, we see how events were unfolding in a way that neither nations nor
governments could be expected to control. Nordau's article from 1 January 1901 is remarkable in its casual racism as he cites the need for new markets in order to purchase the over-production of Europe. To this end he writes: ‘The Chinese, like other coloured races, must finally be forced into facing the subjugation of the rest of non-whites if the superiority of the European people is not to be proved an embarrassing, anthropological mistake.‘
²

By the following year (1 January 1902) we have a run-down of the social changes occurring thanks to the emergence of a financially powerful mercantile class that demands greater democratic returns. Nordau elaborates at length on the vested interests and hypocrisy of the land-owning aristocracy and the church, exposing their twisted arguments for maintaining a feudal and greedy status quo. Nordau's Zionism was a result of the Dreyfus affair and he is merciless in his denouncement of the Catholic Church, which he calls a power as dark as that of Tsarist Russia. He accuses the church of resorting to the basest of instincts in order to maintain its grip on the European peoples: ‘clericalism in France uses patriotism as a means of stirring up anti-Semitism by having those with little resent those believed to have more. French clericalism promotes patriotic bravery and courage as a means of appealing to national vanity and thus manages to associate the authority of Rome, without the slightest doctrinal basis, to France's own glorious past. This results in a state of suspicion and unease amongst the masses and encourages the seeking of continuous revenge for perceived injustices and slights.‘
³

Finally, on 1 January 1914 we reach the year in which the world would change with the eruption of the Great War. Nordau gives us his view of British imperialism and accuses Sir Edward Grey of

He goes on to expound on the social changes cited twelve years earlier as Lloyd George attempts to reclaim land held by aristocratic families, by decree if necessary. This has resulted in ‘feudalistic lords feeling under such pressure that they are selling their land before it can be taken away, with the recent sale of Covent Garden Market by the Duke of Bedford to Mr Mallaby-Deeley for three million pounds only being the most sensational’.
⁴

Nordau's ruminations on contemporary events offer a view of the social evolution taking place in the run-up to the First World War. They are the thoughts of an educated, middle-class, secular Jewish European. Born a German-speaking Hungarian, he considered himself Austrian but lived by choice in Paris. He was a medical doctor by profession and a clinical thinker with a firm conviction in both physical and social evolution. Though his ideas regarding ‘Entartung’ or ‘degeneration’ would later be appropriated in part by the Nazis, it was the institutional anti-Semitism demonstrated by the Dreyfus affair that ultimately made the militantly secularist Nordau into one of the leaders of the Zionist movement. His lengthy year-end interpretations of events add meat to the bones of empirical statistics and demonstrate that the duopoly of the church and ruling families was heading for a spectacular and utterly predictable end.

The ambitions and entitlements of the rising middle classes could no longer be ignored. The threats to this rapidly developing demographic came not only from the unravelling of the nobility. Despite the annihilation of the aristocracy during the Bolshevik Revolution, Marxists aimed their anger principally at the bourgeoisie who, with their newly acquired wealth, were seen as replacing the absolute power that was once feudal. The proletariat was left just as disenfranchised as before. Even without modern communication technology, it was clear to working people that they had been used as pawns during the Great War, thus providing grist to revolutionary mills. That many young Jews would be prominent among them should come as no surprise given the measures taken by the churches in defence of a defunct dynastic order.

The Eislers

The futility of any war in which only the old orders, along with the self-aggrandising middle classes, stood to gain, tipped the balance in favour of the social subversion that defined the family of Hanns Eisler. Charlie Chaplin, Eisler's friend in postwar Hollywood, described the ruthlessness of the Eisler siblings as coming out of one of Shakespeare's histories. Hanns Eisler's use of music as a ‘political weapon’ would be a defining element in Weimar Germany. Many from the political centre and right would claim that Eisler's music was a factor in this shaky German Republic becoming unstable, even ungovernable. An Eisler family time-line from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth helps to clarify Hanns Eisler's unique contribution, and what many saw as an unnatural union of political doctrine and music.

Rudolf Eisler, father of Hanns, was a Jewish philosopher, essayist and lexicographer who married Ida Maria Fischer, a Protestant with whom he had
been living while finishing his doctorate in Leipzig. In order to maintain the appearance of working-class origins, their three children would always describe their mother from Saxony as ‘proletarian’, though this statement is slightly off the mark: she was an ‘irregular’ student at Leipzig's university (the only option available to women at the end of the nineteenth century). Her family was militantly socialist and she was published locally as an essayist, journalist and poet. Her father was in the business of distributing meat products to Leipzig's butchers, resulting in her children referring to her as a ‘butcher's daughter’. Hanns later remarked that his parents met at a fair when his mother sold his father a sausage. Rudolf Eisler came from a wealthy family of Jewish merchants who disapproved of the relationship but accepted their eventual marriage, following the birth in 1895 of their first child Elfriede, who later became Ruth Fischer (discussed in the previous chapter). The family relocated to Vienna, settling in the city's comfortable Third District before circumstances forced a move to the Second, the so-called ‘Matzos Quarter’, where most of Vienna's working-class Jews lived. Rudolf had been denied a permanent position at Vienna's university, not, as often stated, because he was a Jew, but because of his openly declared atheism.

The children's reminiscences of home life seem surprisingly mundane for a family of future revolutionaries: music within the Eisler family was provided by Rudolf, who played the upright piano in the sitting room while singing all of the roles of entire operas and operettas. Gerhart and Hanns pretended to be figures from the Nibelungen Saga, with Elfriede as a serviceable Brünnhilde. The conductor and childhood friend of Hanns Eisler, Jascha Horenstein, recalled his class-mate as badly dressed, already bald at the age of 13, and only interested in soccer.
⁵
Hanns's school reports would seem to bear this out, with poor grades in all subjects except sport. That the Eisler children would become some of the most dynamic personalities in interwar Europe owes much to the Viennese secular-Jewish domestic life provided by their poor but fiercely intelligent parents.

As Ruth Fischer, Elfriede Eisler rose to the top of the German Communist Party, only to be expelled by Stalin for being too radical. She was imprisoned in Moscow for a short period before making her way to Paris, where she became an active anti-Stalinist with Trotsky, staying one step ahead of Soviet death-squads. Her lover and fellow Trotskyite, Arkadi Maslow, was not so lucky, meeting a mysterious end in Havana while awaiting his American visa. Elfriede-Ruth Fischer, fearing for her life after Trotsky's murder and the death of Maslow, suspected her American-based brothers of treachery, believing that they were the only people who knew of Maslow's whereabouts. By this point, she too was resident in the United States, firing off scholarly,
anti-Stalinist publications for Harvard University. She publicly denounced her brothers Hanns and Gerhart as Soviet spies, leading to their arrest and, in the case of Hanns, ultimately to his enforced removal, which amounted to deportation in all but name.