Literature and Music - Modernism

Marcel Proust (1871-1922), In Search of Lost Time, from “Swann’s Way” (1913) excerpt.

Gustav Mahler:

Mahler, Das Lied von der Erde (1909) – Weng Wei – Der Abschied:

English Translation: …I stand here and wait for my friend; I wait to bid him a last farewell. I yearn, my friend, at your side to enjoy the beauty of this evening. Where are you? You leave me long alone! I walk up and down with my lute on paths swelling with soft grass. O beauty! O eternal loving-and-life-bedrunken world! He dismounted and handed him the drink of Farewells. He asked him where he would go and why must it be. He spoke, his voice was quiet. Ah my friend, Fortune was not kind to me in this world! Where do I go? I go, I wander in the mountains. I seek peace for my lonely heart. I wander homeward, to my abode! I'll never wander far. Still is my heart, awaiting its hour. The dear earth everywhere blossoms in spring and grows green anew! Everywhere and forever blue is the horizon! Forever ... Forever ...

Walter and Ferrier (51 and 56): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PogZpvxq6Cg

Ranier Maria Rilke (1875-1926): texts of poems "Music" and Sonnet to Orpheus I, 3

  

Arnold Schoenberg, texts for quartet (George's Transcendence) and for the ending of Moses and Aaron.

String Quartet No. 2, opus 10, 4^th move. (1908), Kolisch, Gilbert

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0GA20IaFVw

Moses and Aaron - 1938, Freiberg Orch. and Grundheber (2:10)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxrQDmmc4jg

Thomas Mann (1875-1955), Doctor Faustus (1947), near the end, chapter 47, on Lamentations of Dr. Faustus; then, earlier texts of Kretchman on op. 111, and Adrian’s thoughts after Kretschmar, culture, and barbarism.

 

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

“Beim Schlafengehen” (1948) – Hermann Hesse:

GOING TO SLEEP Now that day has tired me, my spirits long for starry night kindly to enfold them, like a tired child. Hands, leave all your doing; brow, forget all your thoughts. Now all my senses want to sink themselves in slumber. And the soul unwatched, would soar in free flight, till in the magic circle of night it lives deeply and a thousand-fold.     (2:25):

Kiri Te Kahana, Davis, LSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbU66ttUcqo

Brecht and Weill

The Three-penny Opera (1928) Text of Mack song and ending...

Excerpts from Pabst film – (2:02, 15:30, 18:58, 22:40-26:40):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-igC0jAV_zQ&t=136s

Concluding remarks: 

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) on Pater's aesthetic:

“It taught us to walk upon a rope, tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm.”

--from “Sailing to Byzantium”

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress.

To illustrate what Mann's Kretchmar was referring to:

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in c minor, opus 111, second movement variations:

Claudio Arrau (9, 13:43, 15:29, 17:37, 18:14, 20:47)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ljq4MwzAbo&t=42s

 

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 - 24 - Modern Music ii

One of the stories in my new collection, Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable, imagines the fate of an emigre virtuoso pianist in L.A., Alexander Petrov, who is a friend of Stravinsky and Schoenberg; he is at the center also of an earlier work of mine, Hungry Generations: a novel, which partly tries to convey my pleasure in the history of classical music and especially modern music from Wagner forward. About Wagner, as my previous post tried to show, the evident gigantism in Wagner’s extraordinary operas participates in the modernist impulse to create art which surveys and encompasses the entire span of civilization, reaching back to its mythic origins and moving forward to the present world which is judged to be disintegrating from the mid-nineteenth century onward – and increasingly so, as the two World Wars were fought. This ambitious and audacious vision of human experience announces the current disintegration of traditional thought and received conventions. Such is the vision in Wagner and so too, for example, in Joyce’s Ulysses, with the qualification that Joyce’s creation of Leopold Bloom – as much a mockery of Odysseus as he is – celebrates the character’s struggling humanity. As a result, Joyce’s exposure of the vast, disintegrating edifice of civilization yet leaves some room for the ordinary human being. Such a paradox is not central in Wagner’s work (despite some superficial elements of it in Meistersinger).

However, in Mahler, a composer deeply influenced by Wagner (as every German-speaking classical composer was), we do encounter that paradoxical face-off between the individual versus the massive forces which can crush the human. The individual’s features are reduced to often primitive and, therefore, bitterly ironic markers of expressiveness, yet they survive. I am thinking of the third movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, in which a naive children’s tune is transformed into a deeply sad minor-key funeral march, and so its sweetness is converted into a beautiful but bitter gesture of yearning. Soon in the movement, we hear klezmer-style carnival tunes, and their primitive contours are made to convey a similar yearning for expressiveness, despite their grotesque transformations. (Here is a Bernstein performance of the movement on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEPERXpOqiU&feature=related.) What we hear here is travesty: the children’s folksong and the carnival dance music are mutilated and mocked, and yet they are clung to as embodying the last possibilities of expressiveness and meaning: deformed as they are, they become a lyrical hallowing of the mundane and the clichéd as all that humankind has left of meaning.

The transition from the utter silence at the end of this funeral march to the last movement’s apocalyptic thunderclap is a primal gesture of disruption, and it yields another sort of tragically inflected and travestied march. (Here is a Dudamel performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY_g69mzv2E.) Mahler’s grotesque version of a victory march is, in Adorno’s image, a march as heard and witnessed from the point of view of the vanquished, the victims, who yearn for an alternative to brutality. Mahler’s music becomes an act of mourning for the passing of a "human" world. His symphonies employ huge orchestras, which can dwarf any semblance of the individual, and yet he makes us hear the individual instruments with chamber-music-like clarity. A most eloquent version of this meeting between gigantic resources in sound and the bared individual voices of instruments is to be found in his Symphony No. 3, the fourth movement, in which the mezzo-soprano sings Mahler’s setting of the “Midnight Song” of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “The world is deep, / Deeper than day had been aware. / Deep is its woe;” yet joy is “deeper even than agony. / Woe implores: Go! / But all joy wants eternity - / Wants deep, wants deep eternity.” (Here is Abbado’s great performance with Anna Larsson, on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCEr2mWhYs8&feature=related.) An estranged minimalism (which is ironically a bit at odds with Nietzsche's yearning for the fertile, unbounded spirit) is at work in this movement after the gigantic structures, in terms of both time and sound, heard in the previous three movements, estranged because its “wisdom” is so dwarfed, so close to silence, though all the more moving to the modern ear for that. (There are many great interpretations on cd of the first and third symphonies; here are links to Abbado's [recently] conducting   Mahler: Symphony No. 3 and Bernstein conducting Mahler: Symphony No. 1- Titan / Symphony No. 10 (Adagio).)

Travesty and the tension between gigantism and minimalism are important also in an alternative classical music tradition to that in Germany, Austria, etc. In France, Debussy and Ravel employ features of modernist art with a quite different aesthetic, one based in a sort of floating aleatory associativeness, a graceful, sinuous welcoming dance of fragmentation. We can hear a powerful example of this alternative approach to travesty in Ravel’s “La Valse,” which presents the demonic destruction yet celebration of the mundane clichéd form of the waltz. Ravel disintegrates the form even as he simultaneously adheres to it as a last grotesque source of expressiveness. (Here is the second half of Dror Biron’s brilliant performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdaU-_vFH3g&feature=related# . There is also a wonderful performance available on cd of Argerich playing Ravel’s La Valse with Freire: Rachmaninov: Suite No. 2, Op. 17 / Ravel: La Valse / Lutoslawski: Paganini Variations ~ Argerich / Freire.)

Debussy, the greatest modern French composer, can employ a large orchestra (as he does, for example, in La Mer, or even in his setting of Mallarmé's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune), but he always maintains a clear, supple, associative flow of musical gestures, a sort of stream of consciousness emphasizing unexpected individual "voices." His music continually opens itself to the possibility of an alternative pentatonic harmony independent of classical music’s customary harmonic vocabulary and to the potential logic of synesthetic sensations joining the senses and separate from the ordered development of musical themes, which are always on the verge of fragmenting. (Here is a fine orchestral cd of Debussy: La Mer / Nocturnes / Jeux / Rhapsodie pour clarinette et orchestre - The Cleveland Orchestra / Pierre Boulez.)

Above all, Debussy’s minimalism becomes a means of maintaining individual expressiveness in the face of the experience of fragmentation, of sustaining the pared-down search for “meaning” in the face of chaos. His minimalism is very far from the rather gently beautiful impressionism with which he is sometimes identified. It veers abruptly from the delicate to the violent and back, for example, in Debussy’s Prelude for piano, the 12th in Book 2 - Feux d'artifice, or fireworks. (Here is a fine Maurizio Pollini performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m1_IPErT-U. There is also a very great performance on cd of Sviatoslav Richter playing this prelude along with all of Debussy's Book 2: Richter in Spoleto.)

In my next post, I’ll attempt briefly to discuss Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

Part ii: Schnittke, Shostakovich, Mahler, and the Art of Travesty

To listen to Schnittke’s music is akin to hearing the teetering songs at a wake, songs of rabid and consuming drunkenness. It is as if wild voracity becomes a sign of grief. One searches for the appropriate critical language in order to evaluate the unstable “situation” of expression and reception into which such music draws the listener. Partly this difficulty of critique results from the extremity of that “situation,” that of apocalyptic and at times tortured witness to the endangered process of making meaning itself. To analyze the paradoxical effect of moral and emotional witness in Schnittke and the model he offers music at the start of the twenty-first century, a useful guide is provided by Theodor Adorno’s idea of negative dialectics, of thinking against itself, against the grain of its own founding assumptions. Particularly relevant is Adorno’s use of such critique in his analyses of Mahler’s beautiful, desperate, massive symphonies in Quasi Una Fantasia and Mahler. Adorno’s conception of Mahler’s symphonies can be linked also to Shostakovich’s concerto and symphonic works, and we will see that the musical ideas both composers develop find their inheritor in Schnittke, in his exposure and explosion of symphonic and concerto forms.

Like Mahler’s Ninth Symphony or Shostakovich’s concertos for string soloists, Schnittke’s Fourth Symphony and his First Concerto Grosso and his Viola Concerto expose and travesty a fundamental assumption in certain uses of symphonic and concerto forms. That is their capacity to project the potentially totalitarian communal power of massed orchestral forces, all concertedly sounding together, whether in early modernist Vienna, in mid-century Soviet Russia, or in our own brave new century. These orchestral forces move toward obliterating the struggling individual voice of viola or violin, and the agon between individual and collective is marked in such music by a markedly exposed and disintegrating extremity. The music of Schnittke, like that of Mahler or Shostakovich, witnesses and estranges society’s gestures of power and expressivity, and—in Adorno's phrase from Minima Moralia—reveals those gestures to be, with their rifts and fissures, as indigent and distorted as they would appear in a transfigured, messianic perspective. This conception of aesthetic and ethical witness helps us to clarify why—as Ivashkin and Taruskin assert—Schnittke is the postmodern inheritor particularly of Shostakovich’s mantle.

To see Shostakovich in relation to the idea of witness is to recognize both auspicious expectations of his work and their ironic defeat. One aspect of Shostakovich's paradoxical struggle—in the Eighth String Quartet or his Fifth Symphony, for example—was to absorb into public, Soviet musical conventions certain otherwise abhorred features of early modernism: the Mahlerian symphony; the Neo-Classical transmutation of Bach's contrapuntal example; and the development of chamber music further into the region discovered in Beethoven’s late quartets, in what Schoenberg termed the "progressive" chamber works of Brahms, and in Bartok’s quartets. Subversively assimilating these modernist prerogatives, Shostakovich's major quartets and symphonies express a self-challenging awareness of the ways in which ethics and aesthetics can articulate or collide.

Shostakovich's complex sensitivity to the tension between aesthetic and ethical elements in modern art has often been interpreted in reductive terms, which ascribe either dissident or Stalinist motives to the composer, as he struggled to advance the Western musical tradition within the oppressive and totalitarian context of Soviet Russia. Given the range of his putative motives, to assert that his music is ambiguous does not merely celebrate its modernist autonomy—its brilliance as self-sustaining form; it is to point also to the music’s capacity to evince and even to liberate a range of interpretive responses in the face of a society dominated by assumed and preformed interpretation. Taruskin argues this same point in Defining Russia Musically. He shows how the motifs of the march or of grief in Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony can become infused with ironic transformation to the point of interchangeability. In the familiar material of that symphony, the first movement's sensitive, inward, grieving second theme becomes transformed into the development section's violent, manic march theme, the same theme ironically yielding now a terrifying display of power. There is the inversion of this ironic transformation when the Scherzo's manic travesty of carnival music makes way in a sudden, breathtaking caesura for the Largo's dire requiem—or when the Allegro finale with its catastrophic and brutal march yields suddenly the grievous stagnation in the final few minutes before the rousing and punishing coda.

These transformations render, from within the totalized society, the ironic extremity and the interchangeability of inner complicity and of witness, the sensations almost simultaneously of assimilation into and victimization by the power at work in such a society. At the first performance in Moscow of the Fifth Symphony, the audience of party bureaucrats and musical aficionados was enveloped in a mutual catharsis, drawing from them open weeping and a sense of uplift rousing the audience literally to its feet. This symphony had given subjective voice to the simultaneous sensations of inner complicity and of agonized witness, but not only in the Soviet Union circa 1950. Shostakovich's rendering here of the interpenetration of power and grief is—in Taruskin's words—“an act of witness that gives voice to the silenced cost” from the perspective of the subject within a totalized society.