Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (11 page)

In 1905 Dresden was one of the most beautiful cities on earth, a delicate Baroque jewel straddling the Elbe. It was a fitting location for the première of a new opera composed by
Richard Strauss,
called
Salomé.
Nonetheless, after rehearsals started, rumours began to circulate in the city that all was not well backstage. Strauss’s new work was said to be ‘too hard’ for the singers. As the opening night, 9 December, drew close, the fuss grew in intensity, and some of the singers wanted to hand back their scores. Throughout the rehearsals for
Salomé,
Strauss maintained his equilibrium, despite the problems. At one stage an oboist complained, ‘Herr Doktor, maybe this passage works on the piano, but it doesn’t on the oboes.’ ‘Take heart, man,’ Strauss replied briskly. ‘It doesn’t work on the piano, either.’ News about the divisions inside the opera house were taken so much to heart that Dresdeners began to cut the conductor, Ernst von Schuch, in the street. An expensive and embarrassing failure was predicted, and the proud burghers of Dresden could not stomach that. Schuch remained convinced of the importance of Strauss’s new work, and despite the disturbances and rumours, the production went ahead. The first performance of
Salomé
was to open, in the words of one critic, ‘a new chapter in the history of modernism.
¹

The word
modernism
has three meanings, and we need to distinguish between them. Its first meaning refers to the break in history that occurred between the Renaissance and the Reformation, when the recognisably modern world began, when science began to flourish as an alternative system of knowledge, in contrast with religion and metaphysics. The second, and most common meaning of modernism refers to a movement – in the arts mainly – that began with
Charles Baudelaire
in France but soon widened. This itself had three elements. The first and most basic element was the belief that the modern world was just as good and fulfilling as any age that had gone before. This was most notably a reaction in France, in Paris in particular, against the historicism that had prevailed throughout most of the nineteenth century, especially in painting. It was helped by the rebuilding of Paris by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussman in the 1850s. A second aspect of modernism in this sense was that it was an urban art, cities being the ‘storm centres’ of civilisation. This was most clear in one of its earliest forms, impressionism, where the aim is to catch the fleeting moment, that ephemeral instance so prevalent in the
urban experience. Last, in its urge to advocate the new over and above everything else, modernism implied the existence of an ‘avant-garde’, an artistic and intellectual elite, set apart from the masses by their brains and creativity, destined more often than not to be pitched against those masses even as they lead them. This form of modernism makes a distinction between the leisurely, premodern face-to-face agricultural society and the anonymous, fast-moving, atomistic society of large cities, carrying with it the risks of alienation, squalor, degeneration (as Freud, for one, had pointed out).
²

The third meaning of modernism is used in the context of organised religion, and Catholicism in particular. Throughout the nineteenth century, various aspects of Catholic dogma came under threat. Young clerics were anxious for the church to respond to the new findings of science, especially Darwin’s theory of evolution and the discoveries of German archaeologists in the Holy Land, many of which appeared to contradict the Bible. The present chapter concerns all three aspects of modernism that came together in the early years of the century.

Salomé
was closely based on Oscar Wilde’s play of the same name. Strauss was well aware of the play’s scandalous nature. When Wilde had originally tried to produce
Salomé
in London, it had been banned by the Lord Chamberlain. (In retaliation, Wilde had threatened to take out French citizenship.)
³
Wilde recast the ancient account of Herod, Salomé, and Saint John the Baptist with a ‘modernist’ gloss, portraying the ‘heroine’ as a ‘Virgin consumed by evil chastity.’
⁴
When he wrote the play, Wilde had not read Freud, but he had read Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s
Psychopathia Sexualis,
and his plot clearly suggested in Salomé’s demand for the head of Saint John echoes of sexual perversion. In an age when many people still regarded themselves as religious, this was almost guaranteed to offend. Strauss’s music, on top of Wilde’s plot, added fuel to the fire. The orchestration was difficult, disturbing, and to many ears discordant. To highlight the psychological contrast between Herod and Jokanaan, Strauss employed the unusual device of writing in two keys simultaneously.
⁵
The continuous dissonance of the score reflected the tensions in the plot, reaching its culmination with Salomé’s moan as she awaits execution. This, rendered as a B-flat on a solo double bass, nails the painful drama of Salomé’s plight: she is butchered by guards crushing the life out of her with their shields.

After the first night, opinions varied. Cosima Wagner was convinced the new opera was ‘Madness! … wedded to indecency.’ The Kaiser would only allow
Salomé
to be performed in Berlin after the manager of the opera house shrewdly modified the ending, so that a Star of Bethlehem rose at the end of the performance.
⁶
This simple trick changed everything, and
Salomé
was performed fifty times in that one season. Ten of Germany’s sixty opera houses – all fiercely competitive – chose to follow Berlin’s lead and stage the production so that within months, Strauss could afford to build a villa at Garmisch in the art nouveau style.
⁷
Despite its success in Germany, the opera became notorious internationally. In London Thomas Beecham had to call in every favour to obtain permission to perform the opera at all.
⁸
In New York and Chicago
it was banned outright. (In New York one cartoonist suggested it might help if advertisements were printed on each of the seven veils.)
⁹
Vienna also banned the opera, but Graz, for some reason, did not. There the opera opened in May 1906 to an audience that included Giacomo Puccini, Gustav Mahler, and a band of young music lovers who had come down from Vienna, including an out-of-work would-be artist called Adolf Hitler.

Despite the offence
Salomé
caused in some quarters, its eventual success contributed to Strauss’s appointment as senior musical director of the Hofoper in Berlin. The composer began work there with a one-year leave of absence to complete his next opera,
Elektro.
This work was his first major collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose play of the same name, realised by that magician of the German theatre, Max Reinhardt, Strauss had seen in Berlin (at the same theatre where he saw Wilde’s
Salomé).
¹⁰
Strauss was not keen to begin with, because he thought
Elektra’
s theme was too similar to that of
Salomé.
But Hofmannsthal’s ‘demonic, ecstatic’ image of sixth-century Greece caught his fancy; it was so very different from the noble, elegant,
calm
image traditionally revealed in the writings of johann Joachim Winckelmann and Goethe. Strauss therefore changed his mind, and
Elektro
turned out to be even more intense, violent, and concentrated than
Salomé.
‘These two operas stand alone in my life’s work,’ said Strauss later; ‘in them I went to the utmost limits of harmony, psychological polyphony (Clytemnestra’s dream) and the capacity of today’s ears to take in what they hear.’
¹¹

The setting of the opera is the Lion Gate at Mycenae – after Krafft-Ebing, Heinrich Schliemann.
Elektra
uses a larger orchestra even than
Salomé,
one-hundred and eleven players, and the combination of score and mass of musicians produces a much more painful, dissonant experience. There are swaths of ‘huge granite chords,’ sounds of ‘blood and iron,’ as Strauss’s biographer Michael Kennedy has put it.
¹²
For all its dissonance,
Salomé
is voluptuous, but
Elektra
is austere, edgy, grating. The original Clytemnestra was Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who described the early performances as ‘frightful…. We were a set of mad women…. There is nothing beyond
Elektra….
We have come to a full-stop. I believe Strauss himself sees it.’ She said she wouldn’t sing the role again for $3,000 a performance.
¹³

Two aspects of the opera compete for attention. The first is Clytemnestra’s tormented aria. A ‘stumbling, nightmare-ridden, ghastly wreck of a human being,’ she has nevertheless decorated herself with ornaments and, to begin with, the music follows the rattles and cranks of these.
¹⁴
At the same time she sings of a dreadful dream – a biological horror – that her bone marrow is dissolving away, that some unknown creature is crawling all over her skin as she tries to sleep. Slowly, the music turns harsher, grows more discordant, atonal. The terror mounts, the dread is inescapable. Alongside this there is the confrontation between the three female characters, Electra and Clytemnestra on the one hand, and Electra and Chrysothemis on the other. Both encounters carry strong lesbian overtones that, added to the dissonance of the music, ensured that
Elektra
was as scandalous as
Salomé.
When it premiered on 25 January 1909, also in Dresden, one critic angrily dismissed it as ‘polluted art.’
¹⁵

Strauss and Hofmannsthal were trying to do two things with
Elektra.
At the most obvious level they were doing in musical theatre what the expressionist painters of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc) were doing in their art – using unexpected and ‘unnatural’ colours, disturbing distortion, and jarring juxtapositions to change people’s perceptions of the world. And in this, perceptions of the ancient world had resonance. In Germany at the time, as well as in Britain and the United States, most scholars had inherited an idealised picture of antiquity, from Winckelmann and Goethe, who had understood classical Greece and Rome as restrained, simple, austere, coldly beautiful. But Nietzsche changed all that. He stressed the instinctive, savage, irrational, and darker aspects of pre-Homeric ancient Greece (fairly obvious, for example, if one reads the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
without preconceptions). But Strauss’s
Elektra
wasn’t only about the past. It was about man’s (and therefore woman’s) true nature, and in this psychoanalysis played an even bigger role. Hofmannsthal met Arthur Schnitzler nearly every day at the Café Griensteidl, and Schnitzler was regarded by Freud, after all, as his ‘double.’ There can be little doubt therefore that Hofmannsthal had read
Studies in Hysteria
and
The Interpretation of Dreams.
¹⁶
Indeed, Electra herself shows a number of the symptoms portrayed by Anna O., the famous patient treated by Josef Breuer. These include her father fixation, her recurring hallucinations, and her disturbed sexuality. But
Elektra
is theatre, not a clinical report.
¹⁷
The characters face moral dilemmas, not just psychological ones. Nevertheless, the very presence of Freud’s ideas onstage, undermining the traditional basis of ancient myths, as well as recognisable music and dance (both
Salomé
and
Elektra
have dance scenes), placed Strauss and Hofmannsthal firmly in the modernist camp.
Elektra
assaulted the accepted notions of what was beautiful and what wasn’t. Its exploration of the unconscious world beneath the surface may not have made people content, but it certainly made them think.

Elektra
made Strauss think too. Ernestine Schumann-Heink had been right. He had followed the path of dissonance and the instincts and the irrational far enough. Again, as Michael Kennedy has said, the famous ‘blood chord’ in
Elektra,
E-major and D-major mingled in pain,’ where the voices go their own way, as far from the orchestra as dreams are from reality, was as jarring as anything then happening in painting. Strauss was at his best ‘when he set mania to music,’ but nevertheless he abandoned the discordant line he had followed from
Salomé
to
Elektra,
leaving the way free for a new generation of composers, the most innovative of whom was Arnold Schoenberg.
*
¹⁸

Strauss was, however, ambivalent about Schoenberg. He thought he would be better off ‘shovelling snow’ than composing, yet recommended him for a Liszt scholarship (the revenue of the Liszt Foundation was used annually to help
composers or pianists).
²⁰
Born in September 1874 into a poor family, Arnold Schoenberg always had a serious disposition and was largely self-taught.
²¹
Like Max Weber, he was not given to smiling. A small, wiry man, he went bald early on, and this helped to give him a fierce appearance – the face of a fanatic, according to his near-namesake, the critic Harold Schonberg.
²²
Stravinsky once pinned down his colleague’s character in this way: ‘His eyes were protuberant and explosive, and the whole force of the man was in them.’
²³
Schoenberg was strikingly inventive, and his inventiveness was not confined to music. He carved his own chessmen, bound his own books, painted (Kandinsky was a fan), and invented a typewriter for music.
²⁴

To begin with, Schoenberg worked in a bank, but he never thought of anything other than music. ‘Once, in the army, I was asked if I was the composer Arnold Schoenberg. “Somebody has to be,” I said, “and nobody else wanted to be, so I took it on myself.” ‘
²⁵
Although Schoenberg preferred Vienna, where he frequented the cafés Landtmann and Griensteidl, and where Karl Kraus, Theodor Herzl and Gustav Klimt were great friends, he realised that Berlin was the place to advance his career. There he studied under Alexander von Zemlinsky, whose sister, Mathilde, he married in 1901.
²⁶