THE IDEA OF MUSIC. Schoenberg and others

Transcription

1 THE IDEA OF MUSIC Schoenberg and others

2 THE IDEA OF MUSIC Schoenberg and others by PETER FRANKLIN M MACMILLAN

3 Peter Franklin 1985 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1985 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Franklin, Peter The idea of music: Schoenberg and others. I. Music-Philosophy and aesthetics 2. Music -History and criticism-20th century I. Title 780'.1 ML3800 ISBN ISBN ( ebook) DOI /

4 Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction xi 1. Music, the Will and Ideas 1 2. Strauss's Transfiguration The Problem of Doctor Faustus Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music An Essay by Schoenberg Chaos, the Machine or the Mystic Word Palestrina and the Dangerous Futurists Schreker's Decline 139 Conclusion 161 Notes 169 Index 183 v

5 Acknowledgements I should like to thank the following publishers for permission to quote from works whose copyright they hold: Dover Publications Inc., New York (for Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation), Martin Seeker and Warburg Ltd, London (for Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus), Continuum Publishing Co., New York (for Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music) and Faber and Faber, London (for Schoenberg, Style and Idea). I am also grateful to G. Schirmer, New York, for permission to include here a revised version of 'Palestrina and the Dangerous Futurists', which originally appeared in the Musical Quarterly, Fall My thanks are also warmly offered to J annet King, for her hard work and encouragement, to Chris Hogan, for counting and checking, and to Keith Sherlock, for hearing and reading it all so many times. A particular debt of gratitude is owed to Christopher Hailey, of Bethany, Connecticut, whose extensive knowledge of the music of Franz Schreker, and much else, has so readily been brought to bear on so many of my questions. vii

6 All true, all original music is a swan's song. - Perhaps even our latest music, notwithstanding its predominance and ambition, has but a brief span of time before it; for it originated out of a civilisation whose basis is rapidly sinking, - a forthwith sunken civilization. Nietzsche: 'Nietzsche contra Wagner' 1 ix

7 Introduction If one's aim is to question established ideas about a period of history, it is as well not to begin dogmatically. The proper course must be to piece together a case with reference to specific problematic areas, hoping at least to generate debate from which more significant conclusions might arise. Nowhere is such a course of action more advisable than in the history of an art-form like music - and particularly twentiethcentury European music. The sheer mass of available works, from a large number of national traditions, defies the cataloguer and confounds the historian, whose business is traditionally that of making sense of the data, of selecting from it and arranging it into a coherent picture of change and renewal, progress and decline. The problem about the recent history of an art-form is not so much that of too great a proximity. Rather than affording greater objectivity, the distancing of time merely allows us to forget those pieces that do not fit into the picture. It also permits us more easily to evade the uncomfortable truth that the very historical picture whose currency we endorse started life as a highly selective arrangement of facts, whose initial rationale may well have been primarily critical or didactic. Serious writing on music tends nowadays to fight xi

8 IDEA OF MUSIC shy of criticism, preferring to don the white coat of the 'analyst' and concern itself with notes rather than possibly irrelevant ideas about them. But what notes, and why? Since Alan Walker and Hans Keller demonstrated that the once critically frowned-upon symphonies of Tchaikovsky were 'in fact' remarkably well-organized compositions, analysis has acted as a kind of covert criticism, or rather has attempted to replace critical values with the demonstrable facts of integrated and economical organization (allowing, perhaps, of an attractive schematic precis in the Schenkerian manner). But anything can be analysed and the historian's problem is in no wise solved. The crucial question is: does an acceptance of the necessarily subjective basis of traditional art history, with its selective rather than statistical tendency, negate its value altogether? It depends, of course, on what we want from it. The kind of history that apprises school-children of the fact that Beethoven wrote nine symphonies and came before Brahms, who wrote four, presents few problems. The kind of history that admits the question as to why we concentrate on Beethoven rather than Hummel presents more problems, in that values are brought into play which depend upon critical as much as analytic justification; and to suscribe openly to critical values is to stand ideologically naked in a way that might well merit embarrassment if we could see ourselves from all directions at once. It is, nevertheless, precisely the lack of a really fruitful critical debate that has allowed the 'history of twentieth-century music' to solidify so quickly into xii

9 INTRODUCTION the form of a mythic picture that depends upon the radical propaganda on behalf of a small, if remarkable, coterie of problematic pioneers of the early twentieth century, whose idiosyncratic notions about artistic progress significantly sundered them from what in merely statistical terms would have to be considered the mainstream. Since this propaganda, be it by specific composers speaking on their own behalf or by ardent pupils and adherents, produced a more committed body of literature to which the schol:trly historian might refer than the 'reactionary' mainstream, the seeds were early sown of a mythic history whose overriding justification seemed to be that insight of critical history that in the past it was the misunderstood and isolated innovator who often enough turned out to be the real torchbearer. In spite of Boulez, Stravinsky and others, I am inclined to see the roots of the problem, of problematic 'modern music' indeed, precisely in the Austro German tradition that so effectively dominated Western art-music in the nineteenth century. It is its achievements, its death-throes and attempts at selfrenewal that I am concerned to re-examine here in a critical light. I must state at once that it is not my purpose merely to disparage or to dislodge Schoenberg, Berg and Webem from their richly deserved positions as problematic patrons of Modern Music. What it is my purpose to suggest is that they have received an acclaim that dangerously has come almost to deny the possibility of critical scrutiny. This is the inevitable result of the propaganda basis of their reputation, which has had the curious effect of awardxiii

10 IDEA OF MUSIC ing other, equally important composers (if for different reasons) within the same tradition merely ancillary roles to the highly esoteric achievements of the Second Viennese School. Thus Mahler may become a 'precursor' of expressionism, Strauss a conservative regressive after Elektra, while other figures of great importance in their day have been summarily dispensed with simply because they do not fit into the picture that centres upon Schoenberg and his pupils. It is out of concern at this apparent over-simplification, at the conspicuous lack of what F. R. Lea vis would have called 'collaborative critical debate' in this area, that the essays in this volume seek to experiment with alternative critical approaches in a historical perspective, initially to establish a case for Mahler as a landmark rather than a bridge, and for Strauss as a 'survivor' from whom much may yet be learned. Attention is latterly turned to two figures whose names tend now to mean comparatively little, for reasons indicated above. The central group of studies seeks conversely to consider in a critical light the creative phenomena that were to forge the image of progressive music whose problematic aspect has bedevilled audiences, critics and historians alike for half a century. I must return, however, to my opening rejection of critical dogma. The aim of these essays is to provoke thought rather than to destroy reputations. Their central theme is specifically that, in these analytical times, we ignore the conceptual content and implications of twentieth-century music at our peril - content xiv

11 INTRODUCTION and implications which depend upon the late nineteenth century's creation, for better or worse, of a music that functioned as an expressive image of the human mind in its most modern aspect. The relative freedom or stylistic restriction of this music came to depend more upon composers' conscious or unconscious attitudes towards such age-old problems as the Freedom of the Will or man's capacity for perceiving Truth than the solution of purely musical problems (in the terminology of a more traditional aesthetic approach). The outcome of our consideration of composers' ideas, alongside the art that these ideas conditioned, might well be a renewed respect for both progressive and conservative branches of serious modern music. Both are perhaps equally relevant to a consideration of the profound human troubles of our century that might otherwise seem so far to transcend the fussing of a handful of otherworldly musicians about what they might or might not permit themselves to do in their art. XV