Literature and Music - session 4 - Goethe, Liszt, Wagner, Nietzsche, Mahler

Goethe (1749-1832) Faust, Part One (1808) ‘in Faust’s Study i’ (Oskar Werner) [4:00]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXHmwp4JkGk

excerpts from Faust, including Walpurgisnacht:

 Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Walpurgisnacht, continued: Mephisto Waltz No. 1 – 1859  [Van Cliburn, pianist):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o59zEOq1uBY

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

Wagner, Tristan and Isolde, Prelude – the Tristan chord (Solti and Vienna):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8EQcMurhAI

Liebestode, end of Act 3, Nina Stemme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8enypX74hU

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

In the 1880s, Nietzsche produced a devastating critique of Richard Wagner, announced his rupture with the German artist, who had influenced him, and accused him of embracing the repellant German Volkish (folk nationalist) movement and Antisemitism. The operas are criticized as manipulative, seducing the audience and making them passive.  Wagner is seen as less than Bizet and, now, philosophically insignificant, and he has become a symptom of the broader "disease" affecting Europe: nihilism.

excerpt from The Twilight of the Idols:

excerpt from The Birth of Tragedy (1872):

also, Zarathustra's Midnight Song

Gustave Mahler (1860-1911) Symphony no. 3, 4^th move, Zarathustra’s midnight song (Meier):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aM9hezKudY

Symphony No. 1, 3^rd movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5A5tFyXQio

Notes on the modern period - 23 - Modern Music i

In the course I teach on modernism, students are often stirred and surprised by the radical departures from convention in the modern music they hear in a series of ‘YouTube’ excerpts which I assign (and which I’ll present in a few posts here). Their responses are a more accepting version of the responses of early audiences to the most radical early examples of such music. Famously, there was a riot at the first performance in 1913 of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” and by 1918, Schoenberg had founded the Society for the Private Performance of Music as a venue for the elite contingent of the initiated to listen to his and his students’ demanding atonal music.

Of course, the novels of Virginia Woolf I've been discussing in recent posts are also quite difficult works of art; in many respects, her modern novels 'select their own society' of readers – literary, intellectual, and critical “free-thinkers.” (Woolf’s challenging work reminds us that Bloomsbury was an elite existing more or less on the edge of society and comprised of avant-garde artists, vanguard reformists, bohemian writers, feminists, homosexuals, Jews, etc. The challenging “post-impressionist” art they celebrated and created reflects those roots in a sort of outsider “aristocracy” – as E. M. Forster wrote – “of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky.”)

Similarly, the classical music composed in the first three decades of the twentieth century sharply challenged its listeners. This spiky and difficult music often contains dissonant harmony, off-centered angular rhythm, and new structure. In the next few posts (as in the course I teach), I'll try at least to suggest some of the main features of modern music. I also try to evoke the achievements of this difficult music in both my 1994 critical study Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music and in my 2004 work Hungry Generations: a novel, about musicians and composers in Los Angeles in the wake of the Nazi occupation of Europe. And music and musicians are the topic of at least some of the fiction in my 2011 collection Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable.

The composers I’ll explore too briefly in these posts are Wagner, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartok.

Wagner’s break from customary musical practice involves a pervasive chromaticism: it is an opening up of melody, etc., to all twelve of the half-tones in a scale [i.e., on the piano all twelve keys, both black and white, within an octave between say C and C]. This “fullness of dissonance” - this destabilizing enlargement of the harmonic field - is a precedent for radical artistic innovation which Thomas Mann (in his essay on the composer) sees as the subversive breakthrough and model of freed experiment for all the arts in modernity. The opening melody of “Tristan und Isolde” offers an example. (Here’s a link to Barenboim conducting the Prelude, on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZNHPwS4vmU&feature=related .) The melody's reach up, then down, then searching further up the scale does not achieve a resolution until after several slightly changing repititions; we are made to experience an emotional yearning and instability rendering Isolde’s ultimately mortal passion for Tristan. The passage's flux and flow of chromatic dissonance enact the ravaging yet creative power of the restless, unceasing passion of the lovers (who, according to Wagner, inhabit a sort of Schopenhauerian world of the will).

Wagner’s other break with convention involves the use of such a phrase as a recurrent marker – a leitmotif – embodying Isolde’s emotion; the structure of Wagner’s unfolding “arias” and all the movements of the opera are based on the deployment and interplay of such motifs. It is as if previous ordering forms in classical music and particularly opera had become moribund, in Wagner's view, and required the new ideas about form his "art work of the future" enacts. The climax of the opera is Isolde’s beautiful “Liebestod” or ‘love-death’ with its own characteristic leitmotif, which forms the basis of a powerful aria of immense yearning and orgiastic passion, as multiple repetitions of the melody move through the chromatic scale. (Here is a YouTube version – listen at least from the 3 minute point to the end: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8enypX74hU&NR=1.) Baudelaire describes the listener’s sensation here as experiencing the “joy…of letting myself be penetrated and invaded, in a truly sensual delight resembling that of rising the air or revolving in the sea.”  (Here's an Amazon link to Barenboim conducting all of the opera - Wagner - Tristan und Isolde.)

Wagner’s rendering of the experience of a ‘love-death’ partly echoes the role of death for modernsm, plus something more; there is death's emdodiment of mystery, yet of a pervasive sense of spiritual mobidity in modernity, also of absolute experience beyond reason, and of the haunting result of spiritual extremity, the risk of severing the bonds to community. In the face of these multiple ambitions of Wagner's music, Nietzsche “contra Wagner” emphasizes, however, another sort of death enacted by what he heard as the manipulative “embrace” of such music (which he yet calls "indispensible" here, a view "The Birth of Tragedy" demonstrates). In Bayreuth, which was built for the Wagnerian operatic "rites," he observed in Wagner’s listeners not truly a death of the ordinary self and an entry into an alternative life, but rather a “disease,” a “self-extinction,” and “a fear-repulsing narrowness and…hebetation” – all of this where Wagner would have his listener “yield himself” to the “wonder” of “the human heart,” which “encompasses” and “reconciles” him to existence as he experiences the “ultimate completeness” of the “highest collective art work.” The “all-embracing” theater, mythic drama, poetry, and above all beautiful music created by Wagner’s operas aim to constitute a total work of art: a “Gesamtkunstwerk.”  Nietzsche, of course, rendered his own encompassing "myths" (Apollo and Dionysus and Zarathustra and, finally, himself), yet his fiercest objections to Wagner involve the "all-embracing" gigantism in the composer's use of "Aryan" myths (and also, Nietzsche interestingly complains, to the composer's "descending" to "antisemitism"). So once again we encounter a powerful and spiritually risk-taking gigantism in modernity. Wagner's proto-modern "gigantism" finds its apotheosis in the mythic nature of his imagination and in the resulting "magnification" of the structures, themes, and characters in "Tristan und Isolde" and in the "Ring" cycle. (Here's an Amazon link to the Nietzsche texts: The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner.) I'll later try further to explore Wagner's significance, beyond this sketchy account.

I'll turn in my next posts to Mahler (and the issue of Wagner's influence), the relatively minimalist (!) Debussy, and Ravel, and then to Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

Notes on the modern period - 6 - on Nietzsche and Marx

Two primary modern conceptions of power – of how it operates in society and in the individual – are offered by Marx and Freud, respectively. Nietzsche also developed ideas about what power is and how it operates, and my previous post rather deemphasized his ideas about “the will to power” and instead drew a humanist or perhaps nostalgically post-humanist picture of his vision of Dionysian “joy” arising in tragedy, a picture akin to that presented by Walter Kaufmann and even by Walter Benjamin, say in “Fate and Character” with its image of the tragic form – where “the head of genius lift[s] itself for the first time from the mist of guilt…and becomes aware that he is better than his god” (but as a result is exiled from ordinary language by the very structure of language, of society’s laws and condemnation by the gods).

In Nietzsche's conception of power, the sublimity “beyond good and evil” achieved by the tragic hero (as he confronts the gods' imposition of guilt) is not merely a matter of sublimation or a careful cultivation of his newly realized power. In much of Nietzsche’s exposition of “the will to power,” the hero’s “sublimity” is rather a product of engaging a war-like gauntlet of strengthening possibilities ranging widely from destructive cruelty to fertile creativity, a “saying yes to life” in its destructiveness and its creativity. According to “A Genealogy of Morals,” the will to power at its most primitive involves a brutal purgation of the “ugly,” hypocritical, resentful, self-suppressing, life-rejecting slave morality imposed, in Nietzsche’s view, by the Judeo-Christian religion on humankind. The improvisatory, even perverse intensity of Nietzsche’s condemnations and enthusiasms make his version of the modern dialectic of power seem more unstable and provocative than the more soberly analytical versions offered by Marx and Freud.


Yet their ideas in their own right shake the foundations, and they are in a sense more encompassing, and certainly more modern, for both Marx and Freud employ a modern ‘technological’ language, the mechanistic abstractions of industrial processes, grown massive as the nineteenth century issued into the twentieth. Here is an example from Marx’s early “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts:” “The alienation of the worker from his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him…as something hostile and alien,…turning him into a machine” and condemning him to the privation, sheltering “hovel,” and deformity of the “mediocre.” And in “The Communist Manifesto” he and Engels write, there is in modern society “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’…[which] has resolved personal worth into exchange value” (here and in “Capital,” the abstractions of “political economy” seal the argument – exchange value, use value, surplus value, etc.).

As in Nietzsche’s work, the power of the Marxist revolution would destroy the “alienated” negating structure of human relations and – in a sort of double negation akin to the notion “death, thou shalt die” – would clear the field in order to create a new structure of relations in its place. The dialectical struggle between the bourgeoisie or owning class and the proletariat or working class is even more total in encompassing society as that combat Nietzsche imagines between the quasi-aristocratic “overman” (who self-consciously overcomes his own weaknesses and mediocrities) and the masses (who stew in resentment and/or content themselves with cretinism). The ideal result of Marx’s revolution would be (by means of the negation of private property) the proletariat’s just and no longer alienating appropriation of the bourgeoisie’s negative space of constant technological change and consumption. There is a double destabilization occurring here: the drive toward continually increasing productivity in which “all that is solid melts into air” confronts the drive to erase capitalist ownership and finally to yield the synthesis of a classless society – or in the western democracies, to spread the capacity for ownership widely among the working masses (which Marx, of course, considered a liberal deception and betrayal of workers’ interests). The Marx-Engels Reader (Second Edition)

Marx’s contributions to the modern include this template for the use of power and revolutionary change, the resulting assumption of radical destabilization, and an orderly mechanistic analysis, which paradoxically underpins the program for wiping away, in Marx’s time, the entire economic system of the western world. Related qualities characterize much modern thought across the arts and sciences, from the “paradigm shift” in physics to musical dissonance’s subversion of the harmony based on the conventional diatonic scale. And these qualities – modeling radical change, assuming destabilization, and proposing an alternative order – are equally characteristics of Freud’s thought, with its assignment of rational power to the ego, its recognition of the unconscious irrational flux of the id, and its analysis of a three-part mechanism operating in our minds, comprised of the ego as reason, the id as the erotic drive, and the super-ego as the death instinct or “thanatos.” Freud will be the subject of my next post.

Notes on the modern period - 5 - on Nietzsche

The sort of autonomous self-consciousness that we have been exploring among precursors to the modern can develop – perhaps “intervene” is the better word – in the life of the individual and society in a range of ways, and Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud propose three distinct means. Their three conceptions of how modern lives are shaped and changed emerge from their three different analyses of modern existence. In each, it is clear that immense pressures are placed even on the possibility for critical analysis itself. From the initial Romantic conception of self-awareness there was a fear of those pressures threatening to blunt or erase the creative imagination. Wordsworth addresses this potential blunting and disappearance of the autonomous “discriminating” imagination, in the 1798 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, where he writes that “a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.” The causes, he suggests, are the shocks of “great national events” as well as “the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies;” this “craving” yields a “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.” (Of course, these concerns do not sound unfamiliar given the spectacle of media in our society).

In the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche’s thought focuses on just that blunting of discriminating powers and imaginative potential, and his analysis involves indictments of European and often particularly German national cultures, of the history of Christianity, and of much else, but his critique delves also into the very nature of the language with which humans communicate. When language itself has been corrupted – intrinsically, and certainly in the present – by the obligatory gestures arising from the nature of society (and its modern pressures “imposed by society” in the forms of propaganda, sentimentality, and the manipulative spectacle of media, etc.), then even the possibility of truthful communication is cast in doubt. Nietzsche addresses the relation of language to truth in “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (1873); the “urge for truth” is swept up in the actual state of language, of a “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, the sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” For Nietzsche, there appear to be two modes of engagement of this dilemma. One is to go along “using the customary metaphors,” and the other is to dive into the fray, finally into the ocean of language in an act of deliberate, self-conscious, creative engagement; the former leads to “the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie heard-like in a style obligatory for all,” and the latter yields a sort of aestheticizing of truth and existence. (A quarter century later, Conrad employs some of the same images Nietzsche uses, in a famous statement on the novel: “It is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance…[that] the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words, of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.”)

Nietzsche’s vision of language is, like so much else in his thought, oriented around the tragedy of existence (and there are many explanations proffered for the tragic-minded and nearly anarchic darkness of his thinking). Of course, this tendency did not prevent him (and probably encouraged him) to offer prescriptive advice about the stages of the 'overman's development (as in the early "Human, All Too Human," in which he suggests his early idealism, his disillusionment and rebellion, his later acceptance of life as it is lived, and his ultimate realization of his freedom to choose or "rank" the strengths revealed by the perspectivism he developed). His influential conception of modern autonomy of mind and the imagination focuses above all, though, on the engagement of tragic truth. From The Birth of Tragedy (in 1872) to Twilight of the Idols (in 1888), he inquires about the source and nature of tragic understanding, and he asserts that the “Dionysian, with its primordial joy experienced even in pain, is the common source of music and of tragic [art];” the Dionysian is Nietzsche’s name for the particular joy of art’s autonomous creativity, from his earliest work to his last, and here in The Birth of Tragedy, he proposes that “the ugly and dissonant” – the qualities which arise in art from a truth-telling realism – “are part of an artistic game that the will in the eternal amplitude of its pleasure plays with itself.” In tragic art, “the joy aroused [by it] has the same origin as the joyous sensation of dissonance in music,” and in each case “we must recognize a Dionysian phenomenon: again and again it reveals to us the playful construction and destruction of the individual world as the overflow of a primordial delight.” An anarchic delight is celebrated here in the face of the decay and despair besetting late nineteenth century culture, let alone the authoritarian clamp-down of Bismarck’s regime and the horrendous deaths numbering 200,000 in the recent year-long and ever more mechanized Franco-Prussian War. And in one of his last works, Nietzsche understands that “tragic” joy as the result of demanding more of the structure of existence than it can bear, joy “even” in confronting and destroying the gods, the deepest order of existence, a joy arising out of an overfull spirit which desires “to embody the eternal joy of becoming.” The autonomous self-consciousness and the framing tragic aesthetic Nietzsche celebrates indicate the power to upturn our lives which is characteristic not only of his modern critique of existence.Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library Classics)

That sense of destabilization and threat is evident also in Marx’s famously Hegeleian sentence: “All that is solid melts into air, all this is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” And of course, Marx’s ideas were as significant for twentieth century modernism as Nietzsche’s. They will be the subject I turn to next.