Forbidden Music (23 page)

Ernst Toch, the New Objectivist

In the midst of all this energetic exuberance stood a rather austere figure, almost forgotten today, who alongside Hindemith was one of the prime exponents of the age: Ernst Toch. Toch was older than Hindemith and was arguably more established as a composer by the end of the war. He thus offers a clearer image of what went into the psychology that shaped New Objectivity. With Hindemith, it is more difficult to say whether he shaped the movement through his boundless youthful creativity or if the movement shaped him. Toch, on the other hand, grew into it through a sequence of carefully considered steps. Interestingly, both Toch and Hindemith produced similar artistic responses, having approached them from very different directions.

Though Toch maintained that he was basically self-taught, he had studied – like so many other Viennese composers – with Robert Fuchs; indeed, he was only 16 when Fuchs accepted him into his harmony class. Toch's first quartet was taken up by the prestigious Rosé Quartet when he was 18. Originally he was a student of philosophy and medicine at Vienna's
University before winning a scholarship in 1909 to study composition in Frankfurt, entering its Conservatory the same year as Hindemith.

Toch's musical relationship with Vienna was unique. He recalled that his resolve to become a composer came to him when, as a boy, he heard a newspaper vendor announce the death of ‘the composer Johannes Brahms’ in 1897. Until then, he hadn't realised that it was even possible to be a composer. His family disapproved of his musical interests (they refused even to attend the Rosé premiere of his quartet), and he remained isolated and largely unaware of, indeed impervious to, the intoxicating sound-world of the musical developments represented by Mahler, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Schreker. Years later, when listening to Mahler's symphonies, Toch admitted that all he could hear were obvious compositional errors.

Following graduation in Frankfurt, Toch moved to Mannheim, where he taught the piano until – in a fit of patriotic fervour – he joined the Austrian army at the outbreak of war. His music, until his return after 1918, was pleasantly Brahmsian, its inoffensiveness sharpened slightly by the obvious influence of Reger, with whom he was in correspondence until Reger's death in 1916. If Julius Korngold could describe the early music of Schreker as ‘tame’, he would have referred to Toch's first works as ‘timid’.

Much of Toch's music from this period is exceptionally appealing, but rarely can a musical personality have diverged so markedly as did the prewar and postwar Toch. While Julius Korngold implied that Schreker's change in style was due to opportunism, Toch's was due to witnessing the horrors of battle and the belief that, with the fall of the old order, everything needed to change. His exquisitely crafted works from before the war now seemed inappropriate. Like so many others, he saw no future in Austria, and his patriotism turned to indifference, if not outright disdain. He moved back to Mannheim, since German law compelled Austrian citizens to return to where they had lived prior to 1914. During 1919 both Toch and Hindemith took a sobering turn towards New Objectivity.

In 1921, Prince Max Egon zu Fürstenberg founded what would become the first of many new music festivals in interwar Germany in the Black Forest town of Donaueschingen. Hindemith's Third Quartet Op. 16 was given its premiere during the festival's inaugural season in 1921, and Hindemith became Artistic Director of chamber concerts until a falling out with Fürstenberg meant relocating activities to Baden-Baden. With the performance of Toch's Op. 26 quartet by the Amar Quartet (in which Hindemith played viola) in 1922, Toch also became a regular feature in Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden. By the early 1920s, both Toch and Hindemith had produced a bolder reaction to the sobering spirit of the age than was the case
in art, theatre or literature, which were still largely caught up in the dying throes of Expressionism.

In 1925, an exhibition at Mannheim's Kunsthalle called ‘The Art of Post-Expressionism: New Objectivity’ was the first time that the style in which Hindemith and Toch had been composing was given a name, though in reference to the visual arts, and it was curated by Toch's friend Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, director of the Kunsthalle. In 1924, Toch established a Society for New Music which would place Mannheim at the forefront of contemporary music in the 1920s – a position it maintained until 1933.

From 1922 onwards, no new-music festival seemed complete without something by Toch. In 1927, the
New York Times
printed a portrait of Toch together with Bartók in an article on new music in Germany;
⁵⁴
and in 1930, another large portrait and article on Toch and Hindemith appeared in the same paper.
⁵⁵
In 1932, the
New York Times
covered the performance of Toch's Piano Concerto No. 1 and a recital of his music.
⁵⁶
These American reports of Toch were as nothing compared with the extensive coverage of his music in Germany during the same period. By 1929, Toch and his wife had abandoned Mannheim for a large villa in one of Berlin's greenest and plushest suburbs, where he began writing a steady stream of music for stage, radio and screen.

Why is Hindemith's music familiar to us today and Toch's largely forgotten? At the heart of this question, there are both aesthetic and practical factors. By the early 1930s, Toch had not composed nearly as much music as Hindemith, nor was he as skilled at self-promotion as his indefatigable younger colleague. Hindemith's enthusiasm for controversy and ‘bad-boy’ creativity would ultimately land him in trouble, first because he was too eager to find an accommodation with the Nazis in 1933, and then because the Nazis didn't want to have anything to do with him after Hitler objected to his comic Zeitoper
Neues vom Tage
,
⁵⁷
in which a nude soprano sings an aria about central heating while lying in the bath. This messy chapter in Hindemith's life left him morally and ethically compromised.

Toch, on the other hand, arrived in the United States in 1933 with publication of his music in the hands of the American affiliate of his German publisher Schott, and also, thanks to the friendship of George Gershwin, membership of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), which allowed him to collect royalties from performances. Things looked very bright for the newly arrived refugee and his family until ASCAP's rival BMI bought up Toch's American publisher, resulting in a ruthless suppression of ASCAP composers. These were issues that Hindemith, arriving in the United States in 1940, managed to avoid by joining BMI from the outset. Unlike Hindemith, Toch had countless Jewish relatives who needed
help emigrating from Austria. He had little choice but to go to Hollywood in order to earn as much as possible to secure the necessary affidavits. Hindemith became a professor of composition at Yale and was not to experience the sort of compositional hiatus that resulted from Toch's obligations to produce music by the yard for Hollywood studios.

After freeing himself from the movie industry after the Second World War, Toch embarked on a frenzy of composing in an attempt to recapture the prewar successes of works such as his Cello Concerto (first performed by Emanuel Feuermann in 1925) and First Piano Concerto of 1926. With performances of this work by the likes of Walter Gieseking with Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic – and the premiere on 20 August 1934 at the London Promenade Concerts of his Second Piano Concerto with the composer as soloist and conducted by Sir Henry Wood – Toch seemed to have joined the European mainstream before Hindemith. Like his near contemporary Wellesz, he must have been seen by younger composers as an elder statesman of the international new-music circuit. During these years, Toch enjoyed a reputation that was nearly as exalted as Schoenberg, and his book on the construction of melody,
Melodielehre
(1923), was hailed as a companion to Schoenberg's
Harmonielehre
. (Schoenberg himself, already propagating his twelve-tone theory, neither greeted the arrival of
Melodielehre
nor acknowledged any connection.)
Melos
, Schott's answer to Universal Edition's
Anbruch
, unsurprisingly banged the drum for their house composer who, as a performer, enjoyed the additional prestige of a contract with the piano manufacturer Blüthner. The pianist and teacher Eduard Beninger in the February 1928 issue praises the First Piano Concerto in terms that tell us as much about the context of New Objectivity in which Toch was composing as it does about the work itself: ‘The qualities which I wish to highlight in Toch's piano works, apart from their harmonic freedom, are the successful implementation of large cyclic structures; lack of expressive shades of light and colour; reduction of the overloaded chord and an underpinning of the piano's intrinsic neutral character by way of motorised performance technique.‘
⁵⁸

As if to snatch away the last vestiges of Schoenbergian thunder, Toch even took the idea of
Sprechgesang
and developed it into something brilliantly mischievous with his three pieces for spoken chorus from 1930 entitled
Gesprochene Musik
(
Spoken Music
), which included the still famous
Fuge aus der Geographie
, or
Geographical Fugue
, translated into English by Henry Cowell and a bedazzled John Cage, who had heard its premiere in Berlin.

In public, Toch was serious and withdrawn. Berthold Goldschmidt, in conversation with the author, recalled that whenever Toch appeared at any of
the new-music festivals in Germany, he seemed the very personification of the modern composer. Unbeknown to Goldschmidt, the photographer August Sander, while working on a highly regarded series of genre photos from the interwar years, chose Toch as the model for his representation of ‘The Composer’.

Like Hindemith and Weill, Toch was not particularly taken with the idea of atonal or dodecaphonic music. In any case, by the mid-1920s, some of the extremes that had convulsed music had settled into the newly defined diatonic homes offered by Neue Sachlichkeit. Toch's ambition was rather to find ways of incorporating unresolved dissonances within his music without tonal derailment.

His ethical sense was as strong as Schoenberg's, as can be seen in his writings, letters and essays where we come closer to encountering the real Toch. He corresponded with nearly everyone involved in contemporary music during his lifetime and wrote countless essays, many apparently not intended for publication but meant as a means of sorting out his own thoughts. He often wrote these in German and translated them into English, perhaps as exercises to be kept alongside stacks of notebooks filled with lists of English synonyms and their German equivalents. Such essays were full of bitter sarcasm and often had intriguing titles such as
Die Germanen sind Blond
(
The Teutons Are Blond
). He also kept a ‘dream journal’ in which we find the confused synthesis of his present life in Los Angeles and his past. He reports dreams of being visited by rabbis and relatives from Austria, and his mortification that they have no understanding of how to behave in American society.

Toch was raised in a traditional Jewish home and it appears that his spiritual life was quite different from that of his practical wife Lili (née Zwack), the daughter of a wealthy banker. Contradictions abound between Toch's private letters and essays and his wife's ‘oral history’ housed at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. If she mentions Judaism at all, it's not in relation to her own family which was apparently secular. Despite the murder of her sister in a Nazi camp, she expresses no feelings for either the religion or its domestic and social traditions. Toch is very different: even though he refused to allow himself to be pinned down as a traditional, devout Jew, he composed a number of works in exile based on Jewish subjects such as the ‘Covenant’ movement from the multi-composer
Genesis
Suite,
⁵⁹
his
Cantata of the Bitter Herbs
, written in memory of his mother who died just before Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany, or his Fifth Symphony, sub-titled
Jephtha
. His essay
Glaubensbekenntnis eines Komponisten
(
Composer's Credo
) from March and April 1945 is profoundly ethical, even spiritual: