Beethoven x - as a Shakespearean figure

I tried in my novel Hungry Generations to evoke Beethoven’s perspective on the creative process and on what his creativity might suggest about how we lead our lives (if you wish, click on the Amazon.com site at top of the right column). The novel’s protagonist, Jack Weinstein, is a young composer starting out in a Hollywood studio in 1972 yet devoted to writing serious classical music, and I have him visited by occasional fantasies in which his heroes appear – Schoenberg, Bartok, Stravinsky (the “three bald geniuses”) and especially Beethoven. In writing the few sequences in which Beethoven appears, I liberally and distortedly quote from Beethoven’s own words, and I lace into his comments to Jack a fair number of (pertinent, expressive) echoes of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”  

Here is one sequence from the novel:

The three bald geniuses danced from the raw, gray daylight into the living room. Even the Viennese Jew, serious and aloof, smiled at what Jack played. The thin Russian said: “This is true drunkard's music, yes! Surpassing even the drinking songs of my Hungarian colleague there, sneering in the shadow. It's like the peasant dances I knew as a child; I will illustrate.” He danced and shouted to Jack's wavering beat, stomping his feet, jutting his legs like a Cossack straight out in air, stumbling, and brushing against Beethoven who roared into the room. He glared at the wispy, dancing Russian as short as himself. Karl Beethoven flickered at the door, looking like his uncle's son, the eyes blinking and shifting, even more possessed, a criminal's eyes. His uncle had seen enough and walked toward the piano.

Jack rose from the bench and edged to the table, where he sat before his new notebook, transfixed with alarm and pain and wonder.

Sitting at the piano before the inked sonata pages, Beethoven had an aura of tangled, electric hair sticking out from his head. He hunched before the keys and began to play loud and unhesitating. Obscenities flowed from his lips, snatches of Italian, Russian, Hungarian, and German. His eyes were fixed on Jack's score, and his hands pounded everything, playing wrong notes, extending and further distorting allusions to his own sonatas. The pale Hungarian sat again at the end of the table, the Russian on the couch, the Viennese Jew on the stuffed chair.

At Scherzo's end, Beethoven began to play a wavering snatch of his last sonata, opus 111, the opening of the Arietta. Suddenly he stopped and swung on the piano bench to face them.

“Our whole disassembly present?” he said, bitterly eyeing his nephew who sat on a straight-backed chair he had taken from the table to a corner, between the front door and the entry to the kitchen. Karl frowned there, hang-dog and accusative, looking at them all with punishing resentment.

“See my nephew Karl. I love him like a son, and he hates me. But I know I demand and impose. I am an ass. Write that down,” he said bitterly, and he pointed imperiously to the 1973 journal, its first page open on the table in front of Jack. “Write me down an ass! Write me down an ass-hole! It doesn't matter.” His voice was hoarse and loud with words he could not hear. “What matters is that we seek eternity, that we are condemned to everlasting redemption.”

Against the wind, Jack slowly shepherded himself across Speedway, across the Venice beach, to the shifting sand at the edge of the Pacific. His jacket flew open, and the wind buffeted him. Alone, he faced the dancing wind-driven waves and the wide current eddying far out in the frenzied ocean.
***

The eloquent irony of being “condemned to everlasting redemption” (this is Shakespeare’s good-willed fool Dogberry’s malaprop phrase) is central to the ambiguities of leading a difficult, even harmed life yet being devoted in music to “seeking eternity.” In my novel, then, I tried briefly to render the character of the disabled Beethoven as a self-aware creator, demanding of others and above all of himself. [The above excerpt is found on pages 88-89 of Hungry Generations; Beethoven makes another Shakespeare-aided appearance on pages 152-3 of the novel.] To get to the Amazon.com page for the novel, click on the cover image at the top of the right column.

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 iv: Schnittke, Shostakovich, Mahler - the Art of Travesty

[These thoughts on Schnittke can be read either individually or in order parts i to iv - see i through iii below - or altogether on the "Art of Travesty" page. Also, for my discussion of Joseph Conrad - specifically "Speech and Silence in Conrad's vision of Russia" - see the Conrad page here.]

   The disintegration courted in each Schnittke score both distorts and salvages the contents of his society's music—its classical inheritance, its popular kitsch, its military marches, its buried religious forms, its peasant modes. He recycles these forms of music in such a way as both to salvage them, harmed and fractured as they are, to expose their fracture points, and to reveal the extremity which shadows survival in any totalizing order and which harms the members so “ordered.” As Adorno observes about Mahler, in Quasi Una Fantasia, “the individual’s fractures are the script of truth….In them any social movement appears negatively, as in its victims: the marches in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony are heard and reflected by [and from the standpoint of] those whom they drag away.” Similarly, in Schnittke’s travestied marches, tangos, or baroque obbligato, the distorted resurrection of haunted form itself becomes a mechanism of confrontation. The effect achieved here is similar to that of “the marginal, undomesticated element” in Mahler’s music, as Adorno describes it: “[That element]—archaic, outdated, [and] inimical to compromise—bound itself to traditional material, [which] was thereby reminded of the victims of progress, even musical victims: those elements of language ejected [but also calcified by tradition were] endowed with power in order to resist power. The shabby residue left by triumph accuses the triumphant.” Schnittke’s own accusatory and uncompromising travesties are akin to Adorno’s idea in Negative Dialectics of thought which scrutinizes itself and confronts its own complacency; music today must equally measure itself and be “measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, [or] it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims.”

Taruskin, in his discussion of the composer, makes use of the idea of ‘negative dialectics’ in order to characterize Schnittke’s use of resolution as a sign of degeneracy, as an ironic consonance, so that the noise of great affirmative gestures is exposed as noise. As we have seen, Adorno’s conception can lead to a still deeper understanding of the ways in which this composer’s art aspires to reach through and redeem the haunting and negated discards of history. Such music attempts not only to voice what Adorno calls, in Mahler, “the shriek of horror at something worse than death: pogrom music,” but to restore the life-after-death of history’s broken, extinguished, discarded elements. The notion of restoring the potential of what falls between the cracks of history is developed by both Adorno and his colleague in critical theory Walter Benjamin. Their shared aim is to formulate a critical witnessing of what is suppressed by societies based in rationalized domination and the manipulation of reason. The stance of such witnessing shapes and underlies the late- or post-humanist identity of Schnittke’s postmodern art.

Benjamin and Adorno help us to clarify, in particular, the relationship of Schnittke’s art to grieving. In a discussion of the modern fate of storytelling—analogous in key ways to musical form for a composer like Schnittke—Benjamin suggests that the vanishing remains of life and of an entire tradition can be reclaimed as images, in the “transmissible form” of aesthetic figments. As such music gazes backward like Benjamin’s Angel of History on its vanishing tradition, on the history of musical form, its simultaneous complicity and defiance become apparent in the face of the power of the encompassing society. Music like Schnittke’s witnesses there all the discarded forms, the dashed hopes for transformation and the struggles against silence, which are lodged like “chips” of Messianic hope and expectation in musical history, as in human history. This looking backward exerts a profound pressure to hear what has been silenced, to redeem what has been cancelled, to restore the suppressed to expressivity and an existence in the world of sound. The fertility and wit of Schnittke’s retrievals of past musical gestures—for example, his travestied Classical and Baroque effects—are examples of such resurrection and reconnection, not in a complacent ‘neoclassicism’ but as a means of showing us how grotesquely haunted and pregnant with suppressed possibility is our present in the light of the transformative expectation of us implicit in past art.

Travesty is Schnittke’s mechanism for affirming the expectation that the capacity to generate meaning can endure in the face of unmeaning, of the death of meaning in a commodified and media-dominated world. Travesty becomes productive as a form of mourning. The elegiac generosity and wit of his retrievals of a whole range of music—from hymn and fugue to tango and punk—coexist with the effect of grievous shock which his voracious imitations achieve, sometimes in the very brutality of their sound. In this way, his art creates a double perspective which joins a stark veracity of critical witness with the voracity of travesty, and this double strategy energetically exposes the brutal power of domination in contemporary society, as it simultaneously testifies to what is left out, what has been discarded in the garbage bin as invalidated and invalided. Experiencing the brilliant wit and grief in his musical travesties, a tentative community of listeners is developed. Each of us becomes a witness to the dwarfing excess of power and the haunting distortion of our own complicity, yet each of us also participates at least as auditors in an act of startling and even healing generation, giving voice to what survives, however banal or eccentric or deformed by the scarring dialectic with society’s force.

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

Schnittke's music involves a further exploratory voicing of this situation of witness, of art’s characteristic problem throughout the last century: the struggle of aesthetic form in a brutal era to articulate and stimulate consciousness, with its implicit ethical potential. His “post-everythingist” art exposes and travesties the deformations of power. Even the sound itself absorbs and protests power’s defeating brutality. There is the violin’s violent attack in the Fifth Concerto Grosso, or the massing of brutal cultural discards in the Fourth Symphony’s electric guitar distortion, or the First Concerto Grosso’s use of the intentionally deadened prepared piano melody—a sound which is said to resemble the old Soviet radio identification chimes, rather like NBC. (And that last coincidence reminds us of how complicit is the hyper-mediated sphere of consumer culture in the brutality and banality of modernity.) Where Shostakovich uses banal melodies and effects as the basis for tragic expressivity, Schnittke’s music reveals that our post-modern consciousness of extremity is identical with and emerges from the detritus, the absurd ordinariness and kitsch of the present. (There is a link here to the films of Schnittke’s friend Andrei Tarkovsky, which present lyrical forms infused with chaos and a defeating brutality. Think of the continuous envisioning of decay, detritus, and incineration in Nostalgia.) The pervasive brutalization of culture is rendered, assimilated, but transformed in Schnittke’s music, and this strategy has a double impact. It can seem to reproduce the affront of the uninteresting, and yet this nervous and energized evocation of crude banalities also enacts the springing vitality of travesty, its ironic and energized transformation.

This paradoxical confrontation of the brutalization of culture is dramatized particularly in Schnittke’s concertos, and the outlines of his characteristic musical and ethical strategies clearly emerge here. For example, in the second movement Allegro of the Viola Concerto, the viola's empowered individual personality, with its subjective extravagance of gesture, is pitted against the collective power of the orchestra's brutal march theme. The ironically excessive stylization of both orchestral grossness and the violist’s virtuoso intensity project a wild competition of nostalgias, a grotesque and ironic double valorization of both individual and collective. In this movement, we hear the withering excess of blasting factory sounds confronting the violist’s virtuosic yet fractured folk melody. At the movement’s catastrophic climax, the orchestral violence explodes and the brutality becomes explicit of the orchestral collective all sounding together; here, the viola is reduced from energized playfulness to fragmentary squeaks of sound, and its ghost of melody is now a trivial travesty of carnival tunes. The brutal, manic force of the Viola Concerto’s climax plays with power and the simulation of destruction; it ironically reproduces and explodes the ethos of domination in the blasted space of postmodern society, whether in autocracy’s propaganda theater or in media’s theaters of manipulation. Schnittke's listener must endure a version of that brutal blasting, but one also hears the coexistence—travestied and playfully ironic—of alternate voices, counter styles, other melodies.

Schnittke's music frequently strikes the ear as an overhearing of distressed, endangered conversation among a musical gathering of survivors who share jokes, stifle screams, search for solace, and vent a fragmenting rage. This effect is especially apparent in Schnittke’s chamber music, for example the Third String Quartet. In it, we hear a repeated collage of three thematic fragments: an antique and solacing modulation from Orlando de Lassus' Stabat Mater; then the dissonant kernel of theme at the core of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, the most radical destabilizing gesture in his late works; and finally, a sequence of tones based on the letters of Shostakovich's name. Haunting these fragments is the ghostly echo of a heavy-footed pesante folk theme. These themes represent fragmentary residues of musical traditions, of alternative pasts or inheritances, which have been retrieved in broken form, fragmented and—as such—transformed into what we have for meaning in a "post" or latter-day culture. This post-humanist transformation in Schnittke’s music is not parody but travesty. The musical fragments are clung to and valued for whatever grotesque and broken expressivity is possible in a usurped, harmed, and invalid culture. The musical gestures are reached for, mangled though they are, as all that is left for art to use now. (One is reminded of Schnittke’s Mann-like version of Doctor Faustus, desperately ransacking and travestying the past.)

A typical subject of travesty in Schnittke is the clichéd material of the Classical and Baroque eras, the musical conventions of Mozart and Haydn, Bach and Vivaldi. Classical form here is skewed into a means of assault. Take the form of the toccata, developing from Bach and the Baroque through Schumann to Prokofiev; Schnittke absorbs and deranges the form’s agitated and incessant repetitions into a sort of freakish intensity, disorienting and transformative. In his powerful Concerto Grosso #1, for example, the fifth movement drives a related repetitive Vivaldiesque violin figure into exaggeration and excess, loud and climactic, and then it is abruptly juxtaposed to tango. High and low styles are made to interpenetrate; in the tango, the Baroque harpsichord joins with virtuoso violin to express a sort of death: death of classical rhetoric, death by drowning in kitsch, which is confirmed by the climactic reentry of the deadened radio identification chimes on the prepared piano. Bathos is the risk and the cost of this strategy, and yet the music's violent voracity—absorbing all it touches, whether high Baroque or tango—becomes an expression of grief. Death of form becomes the energized occasion of witness, and desperation of gesture becomes a powerful incitement to attend to the haunted, blasted space of the postmodern. The sensations of Schnittke’s listerners are, at least in part, of enduring together as witnesses to a cataclysm, so that even the most innocently playful theme bears the marks of a sort of irradiation, of the grotesque, the harmed, as if the music were voiced and inflected by and within its own breakdown.

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.

Part i: Schnittke, Shostakovich, Mahler - the Art of Travesty

i

The music of Alfred Schnittke, who died in August 1998 at age sixty-three, embodies crucial features of the postmodern fate of art. Its signal quality is an encompassing passion for transformation; its lustful and consuming energy seeks to absorb the entire tradition of music, from medieval chant through classical conventions to punk rock. New transformation, new appropriation, is its formal prerogative, whether in music of repose and silvery calm or in the midst of frenzy. Like Karamazov’s buffoonery and the Idiot’s fit, his music consumes all the energy in the Hall of Music, deranging, zapping, and travestying all the disintegrating forms and ruined or falsified vocabularies resounding in the Hall’s grave air. With its “polystylistic” pastiches and travesties of earlier composers, this music has proved to be widely compelling to audiences in Russia and also in Europe, Asia, and the United States. The reasons for its impact reflect on both the nature of postmodernism and the situation of music in recent decades.

In the nineteen-nineties, two discussions of the composer helped to clarify his impact and influence. In 1996, the larger of these studies appeared, Alexander Ivashkin’s Alfred Schnittke in Phaidon’s Twentieth Century Composers series. Here we learn of Schnittke’s Russian, Jewish, and Catholic German background, his early exposure to Viennese musical culture, the formative impact of Shostakovich’s work, and the influence of his teacher Philip Gershkovich’s conception of a polystylistic music, which would echo and absorb the full range of music from pre-Baroque to Webern and beyond. Ivashkin is particularly interested in exposing the hidden content of Schnittke’s music, its “submerged symbolic element” and “spiritual content.” He argues on the basis of its musical echoes of various liturgies that Schnittke’s music conveys and depends on a particularly Russian form of mystical Christianity. Given the extraordinarily wide range of sacred and profane echoes in Schnittke’s music, it is a bit reductive to zero in on its “mysticism.” More interesting than the putative hidden content here is, I think, the intention itself of hiding content. That there are multiple levels of suggested and obscured meanings is characteristic of its musical formations. The significance of its multifarious form is not that it bears a specific meaning but that it enacts the promise of meaning when no meaning can be “spoken”—when meaning-making has become packaged and propagandistic, a usurped if not obliterated activity.

The capability of music to express the potential for meaning when meaningful utterance is obliterated by a society’s apparatus of cliché is a subject approached ten years ago in Richard Taruskin’s delving study of the crises of identity shaping Russian musical history, Defining Russia Musically. It is Shostakovich’s music which Taruskin sees as offering Schnittke a model of musical “polysemy,” a term for the strategically ambiguous voicing of multiple “subtexts and multivalent meanings,” expressing—or, better, insinuating—potentially and simultaneously both “freedom and constraint.” In the repressive context of Soviet society, music (famously, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony) offered “its blessed polysemy, [which] afforded…a consolation no other art could provide.” The dire sense of the Soviet context is most evident in Taruskin’s chapter on Schnittke. In his analysis of the “posteverythingist” composer, Taruskin notes that the late Soviet version of the “’semiotic’ or signaling aspect, a traditional characteristic of Russian music”—say, in the use of “discord”—is transformed by this music into a sort of screen onto which any meaning can be projected in “whatever terms (ethical, spiritual, autobiographical, political) the listener may prefer.” Given its ambiguous and ironic recycling of “prefabricated associations” and bathetic clichés, “the result is socialist realism minus the socialism. It implies dramaturgy and aspires, beyond that, to the condition of philosophy.”

Taruskin is undecided about Schnittke’s realization of this aspiration, and he spends some pages exposing what he perceives to be tasteless and omnivorous exaggeration and bathos: “No other composer so fearlessly recycles cliché.” Yet he also identifies the gamble implicit in Schnittke’s ambiguously transforming into extreme travesty and irony all the bloated entities of musical cliché (whether Soviet dreck or commercialized pablum or academic still-lifes). Where Taruskin perceives the risk of loss—of the failed gamble—Ivashkin hears a quasi-messianic Russian Orthodox strain in Schnittke’s music. Both formulations would do well to acknowledge more generously its key feature: its voracity, a voracious welcoming even of failure and collapse, or especially these, for the lust of appropriation in this music is matched only by its sense of mourning. (In his opera, Life with an Idiot, Schnittke has Proust, Dostoyevskian doubles, and all the others wildly, absurdly waltz about only to collapse in acute pain before our eyes and ears.)

A certain hesitation is understandable in the face of such lustful musical extremity, as we witness the imaginative voracity intensely charging each of his best scores, continually assimilating and transforming musical materials into deracinated and destabilized ambiguity. (One is reminded of Edward Said’s Adornian conceptions—in Musical Elaborations—of transgressive music and of performance as “an extreme occasion.”) Such music enacts a passionate, uncontainable consuming of all music in its path, “without respite, which makes us, the spectators[/listeners], gasp with anguish at the idea that nothing will ever be able to stop it.” These are Artaud words, in “Theatre and the Plague,” describing Giovanni at the climax of “‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” Ford’s boundary-violating, genre-exploding Renaissance drama. Schnittke similarly explores a region of transgressive and outrageous travesty, yet it simultaneously ranges into a zone of outraged grief, of mourning for the death of the very forms its so prodigally travesties.