Forbidden Music (34 page)
Authors: Michael Haas
The suspicion ran that a new order, represented by the republic based on the Weimar Constitution existing without monarchs and a humbled church, suited these non-German Jews. As ‘non-Germans’, it was suspected that they had even ‘profiteered’ by the war and its aftermath. It was thus easy to argue that the music they were composing was also ‘foreign’ and ‘un-German’. Even if Jews had made the greatest declarations of loyalty to the various Emperors under whom they fought, it was clear to ‘racial Romantics’ that the German soul, as defined by Wagner and bizarrely seconded by his German-speaking, Francophile, Magyar son-in-law, Liszt, remained an impossibility for the Jew; ‘German Jew’ and ‘Austrian Jew’ could therefore only designate citizenship rather than nationality. In a Kafkaesque twist, even Lissauer's
Paean of Hate
,
which during the war was issued to every German soldier, was later declared by anti-Semites as fundamentally ‘un-German’ and a symptom of a uniquely Jewish hatefulness.
Throughout the interwar years, German Romanticism continued to exert a tenacious hold, as much due to the political fallout of the war as to any of the developments discussed in the previous chapters. Many non-Jewish composers continued to compose music that was ripe with associations of German Romanticism – ‘folklore, heraldry and minnesingers’ as described by Chamberlain – the idea being that, despite Chamberlain's protestations, this was an expression of being ‘German’. The most prominent among them were Wilhelm Kienzl, Joseph Marx, Hans Pfitzner, Emil von Reznicek, Max von Schillings, Franz Schmidt, Max Trapp, and above all, with his eighteen folk-tale influenced operas, Richard Wagner's son Siegfried.
Adolf Weißmann, who was himself Jewish, uses the concept of ‘race’ as the great clarifying agent in his book
Musik in der Weltkrise
,
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from which there is a quotation at the head of this chapter. Weißmann offers a
Who's Who
of younger composers who don't follow the more immediately identifiable modernist trends. He refers to these composers as trying ‘by different means, many on the other side of art's now broken line, to seek new solutions’.
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The list is fascinating as there are names that are unknown today and many that are familiar, but in different contexts. Weißmann writes:
There is one composer who has become the mouthpiece of all modern directions without taking on more than their outer characteristics: the influences on Sigfried Karg-Elert were too broad […]. Receptive and adaptable to so many influences, he became far too prolific. This sort of Modernism remains without significant effect.
Another hope was Rudi Stephan who fell in the war – an anti-Romantic of amassed strength [demonstrated by] such semi-mature works as
Music for Orchestra
or the erotic mystery play based on Otto Borngräber,
Die ersten Menschen
(
The First People
).
Julius Weismann [later a prominent supporter of the Nazi regime] is a composer who is enthusiastically hard at work and writes in a style somewhere between Brahms and Modernism that not only seeks but finds a sense of unity. He is no revolutionary yet remains unconventional and keeps himself largely within the more reticent realms of chamber music.
A set of Orchestral Variations similar in style to Richard Strauss confirmed the exceptional musical talent of the promising young [Jewish composer] Georg Szell. He is a [sensitive] artist who commands a poetic talent for colour while renewing traditional orchestral architecture.
Paul Graener [a prominent composer under the Nazis post-1933] writes for both stage and the concert hall, allowing the new to resonate gently in everything he writes while distilling it into a quiet, symphonically based language. He has had a much-regarded success with his setting of Christian Morgenstern's
Gallows-songs
.
Wilhelm Kempff [active as a pianist during the Nazi years] improvises polyphonically; Walter Braunfels [a Catholic composer of Jewish provenance] brings ‘New-German’ to ever greater heights as noted in his [symphonic work]
Fantastic Visions
– which, by the way, were not overly ‘fantastic’.
Quite remarkable, however, is [the Jewish composer] Erwin Lendvai. The Hungarian native started off in the style of the day. Puccini was an influence in Milan. One clearly recognises in his music a sense of orchestral colour and harmonic individuality. Soon however, he turned his back onto the contemporary. The more he studied German choral music, the greater his antagonism directed against every type of emotional stimulus. Whatever the psychological reasons of his sudden ‘about-face’, one must still recognise a serious musician of unusual ability and knowledge who has cultivated a sober artistic language and thus offered an important contribution to our musical life. Lendvai wishes to resurrect the stylistic purity of earlier music. He objects to all chromaticism, against augmented intervals; he desires a less fulsome type of voice leading. In chamber music, he promotes an appealing yet near chaste stylistic purity. But his most important achievement must remain his choral works….
There are, however, true Romantics still to be found amongst the younger generation of composers such as [the future ardent Nazi] Max Trapp, who in his chamber works and symphonies looks backwards, usually with a nod towards Richard Strauss while giving voice to the simplest of emotions – an artist who clearly prefers living in the realms of Mörike and offers up a gentle lyricism with his puppet show
The Last King of Orplid
. Another supporter of the Romantics is Walter Niemann, a passionate yet extremely clever Brahms-worshipper who sanctifies his love for the piano by composing works which are both musically and structurally beautiful; another one in this mould is Leo Schrattenholz, who remains pleasant enough kept within his small sphere. Aspiring to much more is [the Jewish composer who would later be murdered in Auschwitz] James Simon, and [the Jewish composer] Hugo Leichtentritt, both of whom appear to have their creativity inhibited by their exceptional erudition. They are rooted to a modern style of their own that they wish to evolve, and Leichtentritt has progressed from chamber music to art-song and even opera.
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Weißmann also takes a look at the composers who are influenced by d'Albert and Italian
verismo
. This is an area where he finds much to praise for literary choice and some fine music. Yet, ultimately, he concludes that some element is missing that condemns them to what he calls ‘a mere paper existence’. ‘Apart from d'Albert and the Italian masters, we find composers marching down similar paths such as [Hermann Wolfgang] von Waltershausen, who wrote his own libretto for his opera
Colonel Chabert
in a free adaptation from Balzac. This highly theatrical text lost something in its musical adaptation, though its strongest points were those that focused on the stage. This is quite different from [the Jewish composer] Ignaz Waghalter whose setting of Paul Eger's libretto of Machiavelli's
Mandragola
grips while filling what is essentially a not very musical subject with such quantities of musical ideas that both the saucy tale and the delightful music charge forward together.‘
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Weißmann then goes on to deal with the Dutch composer Jan Brandts-Buys, whose opera
The Tailors of Schönau
had enjoyed considerable success, the Viennese composer Julius Bittner whose opera
Das höllisch Gold
was more successful still, and even comments that Leoš Janáček has, with his opera
Jenůfa
, composed a work that follows in the ‘general racial style’ of his Bohemian predecessors, Smetana and Dvořák. He singles out the German Italian composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari as a ‘post-Wagnerian classicist’ who changes from one work to the next. Another German composer to engage with Italian
verismo
is Paul Graener, whose opera
Don Juan's Last Adventure
and
Theophano
are praised in passing, while Walter Braunfels's
The Birds
‘hovers somewhere between Wagner's
Meistersinger
and Richard Strauss’
Ariadne auf Naxos
’.
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Weißmann continues:
And again we bump into both [Franz] Schreker and [Erich Wolfgang] Korngold. It's no coincidence that these two Viennese are more successful with their operas than any of their contemporaries. Neither is problematic. Schreker attempts to make the erotic profound, he writes his own texts that take us from the flighty historic romanticism of [the Viennese artist] Hans Makart to the most profound. But his
Spielwerk und die Prinzessin
,
Die Gezeichneten
and
Der Schatzgräber
are not the fulfilment of the promise shown by his opera
Der ferne Klang
. They are the result of compromised efforts, highly polished naivety and full of effects while lacking individuality. Yet as a type of hybrid musical theatre, they have their unique place.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold, on the other hand – composer of
Violanta
,
Der Ring des Polykrates
and
Die tote Stadt
– is the only true contemporary opera composer who has been able to balance the many different factors demanded by musical theatre. He is the only one who allows the voice to soar above the
superb instrumentation of his orchestral writing, and he's the only one after Puccini who has the courage and the ability to overcome all of opera's many inherent problems. Of course, it must be understood that this is only possible by sacrificing his individuality.
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Weißmann's views on Mahler remind us how idiosyncratic the age was in which he was writing. Mahler's significance for such Jewish ‘Romantic’ composers as Schreker and Korngold was very different from what it was for Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. For modernists, Mahler had crashed through boundaries that allowed the next generation to explore regions beyond the confines of Romanticism. For the ‘resolute’ Romantics, however, Mahler was a composer who opened a vast landscape of extremes in which they could continue to roam. Weißmann writes:
There is a Mahler problem. […] It lies firmly in the personality of the man himself. […] Mahler is a Jew. He is [also] a Jew of this new age while being at the same time a great symphonist. Is it believable that the so-called death of the symphony – the musical idiom so hallowed by Beethoven – should be revived by a Jew? The connections between race and music are finally being examined despite frequent criticism. [Mahler's] ideals may be questionable, but his Jewishness cannot be denied as an important component in his creativity, even by those who think that ignoring it does him a favour. This Jewish blood is important. Always heated, it attempts a great deal while rarely scaling great heights. It pushes towards dispersion as easily as it pushes towards cohesion. But it has the ability to flow in such a fashion that the Jewishness to which he was born is joined in an inseparable and noble union with the German nature that has always accompanied him. Thus metaphysical thought and intensified emotion become the inheritance of a neurotic creativity. Indeed much more: they march forth into the Beyond where there are no borders – they take on the traits of the transnational. Even in Mahler's [own] spirit, Jewishness has gouged deep furrows. […] In such a hyper-sensitive, creative spirit, nerves are always ready to blast the body asunder. He may feel himself German to the last fibre of his being, but his strength comes only from his state of continuous nervous agitation. Journeys into the metaphysical with emotions pumped to their most extreme are joined in a passionate yet necessary fanaticism. His relationship with nature runs deep; one could almost call it naïve. He wishes to be part of his people and to be a real Austrian. But he remains tortured and tormented […] as a modernist, as a passionate interpreter of the works of others, as a Jew. This is the spirit that invades his music and drives him to the demonic. This accounts for the countless contradictions
in his work and also accounts for its ‘profound’ shallowness, a half-ironic creativity that makes counterfeit appear to be real gold. This accounts for his ingenious re-creation of the sound-worlds of forests and glades. But the most tellingly racial characteristic of all is his Christian fight for sanctity. […] His ability to recreate music is no less passionate than that to create it. Mahler is the consummation of the German into the Jew. Wagner's words, ‘To be German means to do something because it
must
be done’, were for Mahler: ‘To be German is to do what must be done to the point of self-annihilation.’ Thus was the life of a man living in a state of perpetual tension: a self-flagellator continuously whipping himself into a state of ecstasy.
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Julius Korngold summarises much of this important book's content in an extended review offering, again, a view from a bygone age:
The crisis actually starts with the Romantics, the French and the Germans; it's based on a high-strung state of nervous tension that requires constant stimuli. One of the ‘crises’ has to do with rhythm and the fact that its ennobling strength is threatened; then [along] comes the ‘crisis’ of harmony, which works against rhythm and has now moved to the foreground establishing itself as the basis of musical sound. Our nervous state demands new colours; ergo, another ‘crisis’. Melody is being atomised by motifs and by the distraction of colour; [obviously] another ‘crisis’. Regarding form and above all
sonata form
, well, it's of course yet another ‘crisis’. The French, Berlioz more than anyone, started this process. From there followed the Francophile Liszt with his programmatic works that increased spiritual associations and expanded music's harmonic palette. This had already been started by Wagner, who heightened theatrical and emotional experience. Naturally this dissolves traditional structure but employs its motifs in sequential manners in the service of providing yet further nerve-tingling experiences. Even with the great Romantic musical poet Schumann, one notes a lack of rhythmic pulse and, as for form, Mendelssohn only looked backwards. […]
People have become inartistic – their folk music is no longer creative. The artist turns away from his own community and is engrossed only with himself, while honing only the technical perfection of his handicraft. He is distracted by the orchestra that offers colours that not only enchant but also deceive, thus forcing him to expand the melodic and undermine the purity of tonality. It has driven him towards the programmatic which may encourage the intellect but weakens the instincts. Artistry and music part company.
It was with the Impressionists that inventive musicians started to hunt down connections between music and painting. Growing out of Debussy's French Impressionism is a German formless play with colour without spiritual basis, in fact without even a foundation of technique. There is no world-view or strong inner-need to express oneself that can survive the crash brought about by lack of technique and imagination. The fear of being thought conventional inhibits the urge to write melody, thus destroying music's architecture and trampling on its innate narrative. Arriving from Italy we are confronted with Futurism. At the moment, any noun with the suffix ‘ism’ offers an excuse for endless, pointless experimentation. First we had ‘Expressionism’ which, searching for a new primitiveness, camouflaged inability and chicanery. Weißmann does not overlook the many accompanying sub-groupings or the ‘dictatorship of the minorities’ as he calls them.[…] But the confusion resulting from intellectual experimentation […] leads us to the final step: atonality. Chaos now reigns supreme.
But having dazzled us with his diagnosis, Weißmann then appears to be suffering from the symptoms of the very same musical affliction. Just as he points out the misguided, powerless inability that has resulted in the ‘crisis’, he suddenly backs away and proclaims that the ensuing chaos itself is fruitful!
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