Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (12 page)

Schoenberg’s autodidacticism, and sheer inventiveness, served him well. While other composers, Strauss, Mahler, and Claude Debussy among them, made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth to learn from Wagner’s chromatic harmony, Schoenberg chose a different course, realising that evolution in art proceeds as much by complete switchbacks in direction, by quantum leaps, as by gradual growth.
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He knew that the expressionist painters were trying to make visible the distorted and raw forms unleashed by the modern world and analysed and ordered by Freud. He aimed to do something similar in music. The term he himself liked was ‘the emancipation of dissonance.’
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Schoenberg once described music as ‘a prophetic message revealing a higher form of life toward which mankind evolves.’
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Unfortunately, he found his own evolution slow and very painful. Even though his early music owed a debt to Wagner,
Tristan
especially, it had a troubled reception in Vienna. The first demonstrations occurred in 1900 at a recital. ‘Since then,’ he wrote later, ‘the scandal has never ceased.’
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It was only after the first outbursts that he began to explore dissonance. As with other ideas in the early years of the century – relativity, for example, and abstraction – several composers were groping toward dissonance and atonality at more or less the same time. One was Strauss, as we have seen. But Jean Sibelius, Mahler, and Alexandr Scriabin, all older than Schoenberg, also seemed about to embrace the same course when they died. Schoenberg’s relative youth and his determined, uncompromising nature meant that it was he who led the way toward atonality.
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One morning in December 1907 Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, Gustav Klimt, and a couple of hundred other notables gathered at Vienna’s Westbahnhof to say good-bye to Gustav Mahler, the composer and conductor who was bound for New York. He had grown tired of the ‘fashionable anti-Semitism’ in Vienna and had fallen out with the management of the Opéra.
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As the train pulled out of the station, Schoenberg and the rest of the Café Griensteidl set,
now bereft of the star who had shaped Viennese music for a decade, waved in silence. Klimt spoke for them all when he whispered, ‘Vorbei’ (It’s over). But it could have been Schoenberg speaking – Mahler was the only figure of note in the German music world who understood what he was trying to achieve.
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A second crisis which faced Schoenberg was much more powerful. In the summer of 1908, the very moment of his first atonal compositions, his wife Mathilde abandoned him for a friend.
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Rejected by his wife, isolated from Mahler, Schoenberg was left with nothing but his music. No wonder such dark themes are a prominent feature of his early atonal compositions.

The year 1908 was momentous for music, and for Schoenberg. In that year he composed his Second String Quartet and Das Buch der hängenden Gärten. In both compositions he took the historic step of producing a style that, echoing the new physics, was ‘bereft of foundations.’
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Both compositions were inspired by the tense poems of Stefan George, another member of the Café Griensteidl set.
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George’s poems were a cross between experimentalist paintings and Strauss operas. They were full of references to darkness, hidden worlds, sacred fires, and voices.

The precise point at which atonality arrived, according to Schoenberg, was during the writing of the third and fourth movements of the string quartet. He was using George’s poem ‘Entrückung’ (Ecstatic Transport) when he suddenly left out all six sharps of the key signature. As he rapidly completed the part for the cello, he abandoned completely any sense of key, to produce a ‘real pandemonium of sounds, rhythms and forms.’
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As luck would have it, the stanza ended with the line, ‘Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten,’ ‘I feel the air of other planets.’ It could not have been more appropriate.
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The Second String Quartet was finished toward the end of July. Between then and its premiere, on
21
December, one more personal crisis shook the Schoenberg household. In November the painter his wife had left him for hanged himself, after he had failed to stab himself to death. Schoenberg took back Mathilde, and when he handed the score to the orchestra for the rehearsal, it bore the dedication, ‘To my wife.’
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The premiere of the Second String Quartet turned into one of the great scandals of music history. After the lights went down, the first few bars were heard in respectful silence. But only the first few. Most people who lived in apartments in Vienna then carried whistles attached to their door keys. If they arrived home late at night, and the main gates of the building were locked, they would use the whistles to attract the attention of the concierge. On the night of the première, the audience got out its whistles. A wailing chorus arose in the auditorium to drown out what was happening onstage. One critic leaped to his feet and shouted, ‘Stop it! Enough!’ though no one knew if he meant the audience or the performers. When Schoenberg’s sympathisers joined in, shouting their support, it only added to the din. Next day one newspaper labelled the performance a ‘Convocation of Cats,’ and the
New Vienna Daily,
showing a sense of invention that even Schoenberg would have approved, printed their review in the ‘crime’ section of the paper.
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‘Mahler trusted him without being able to understand him.’
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Years later Schoenberg conceded that this was one of the worst moments of his life, but he wasn’t deterred. Instead, in 1909, continuing his emancipation of dissonance, he composed Erwartung, a thirty-minute opera, the story line for which is so minimal as to be almost absent: a woman goes searching in the forest for her lover; she discovers him only to find that he is dead not far from the house of the rival who has stolen him. The music does not so much tell a story as reflect the woman’s moods – joy, anger, jealousy.
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In painterly terms,
Erwartung
is both expressionistic and abstract, reflecting the fact that Schoenberg’s wife had recently abandoned him.
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In addition to the minimal narrative, it never repeats any theme or melody. Since most forms of music in the ‘classical’ tradition usually employ variations on themes, and since repetition, lots of it, is the single most obvious characteristic of popular music, Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet and
Erwartung
stand out as the great break, after which ‘serious’ music began to lose the faithful following it had once had. It was to be fifteen years before
Erwartung
was performed.

Although he might be too impenetrable for many people’s taste, Schoenberg was not obtuse. He knew that some people objected to his atonality for its own sake, but that wasn’t the only problem. As with Freud (and Picasso, as we shall see), there were just as many traditionalists who hated
what
he was saying as much as how he was saying it. His response to this was a piece that, to him at least, was ‘light, ironic, satirical.’
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Pierrot lunaire, appearing in 1912, features a familiar icon of the theatre – a dumb puppet who also happens to be a feeling being, a sad and cynical clown allowed by tradition to raise awkward truths so long as they are wrapped in riddles. It had been commissioned by the Viennese actress Albertine Zehme, who liked the Pierrot role.
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Out of this unexpected format, Schoenberg managed to produce what many people consider his seminal work, what has been called the musical equivalent of
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
or E=mc
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.
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Pierrot’s
main focus is a theme we are already familiar with, the decadence and degeneration of modern man. Schoenberg introduced in the piece several innovations in form, notably
Sprechgesang,
literally songspeech in which the voice rises and falls but cannot be said to be either singing or speaking. The main part, composed for an actress rather than a straight singer, calls for her to be both a ‘serious’ performer and a cabaret act. Despite this suggestion of a more popular, accessible format, listeners have found that the music breaks down ‘into atoms and molecules, behaving in a jerky, uncoordinated way not unlike the molecules that bombard pollen in Brownian movement.’
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Schoenberg claimed a lot for
Pierrot.
He had once described Debussy as an impressionist composer, meaning that his harmonies merely added to the colour of moods. But Schoenberg saw himself as an expressionist, a Postimpressionist like Paul Gauguin or Paul Cézanne or Vincent van Gogh, uncovering unconscious meaning in much the same way that the expressionist painters thought they went beyond the merely decorative impressionists. He certainly believed, as Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead did, that music – like mathematics (see chapter 6) – had logic.
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The first night took place in mid-October in Berlin, in the Choralionsaal
on Berlin’s Bellevuestrasse, which was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1945. As the house lights went down, dark screens could be made out onstage with the actress Albertine Zehme dressed as Columbine. The musicians were farther back, conducted by the composer. The structure of
Pierrot
is tight. It is comprised of three parts, each containing seven miniature poems; each poem lasts about a minute and a half, and there are twenty-one poems in all, stretching to just on half an hour. Despite the formality, the music was utterly free, as was the range of moods, leading from sheer humour, as Pierrot tries to clean a spot off his clothes, to the darkness when a giant moth kills the rays of the sun. Following the premières of the Second String Quartet and
Erwartung,
the critics gathered, themselves resembling nothing so much as a swarm of giant moths, ready to kill off this shining sun. But the performance was heard in silence, and when it was over, Schoenberg was given an ovation. Since it was so short, many in the audience shouted for the piece to be repeated, and they liked it even better the second time. So too did some of the critics. One of them went so far as to describe the evening ‘not as the end of music; but as the beginning of a new stage in listening.’

It was true enough. One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so ‘easy’ as they had been. Schoenberg, like Freud, Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Weininger, Hofmannsthal, and Schnitzler, believed in the instincts, expressionism, subjectivism.
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For those who were willing to join the ride, it was exhilarating. For those who weren’t, there was really nowhere to turn and go forward. And like it or not, Schoenberg had found a way forward after Wagner. The French composer Claude Debussy once remarked that Wagner’s music was ‘a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.’ No one realised that more than Schoenberg.

If Salomé and Elektra and
Pierrot’s
Columbine are the founding females of modernism, they were soon followed by five equally sensuous, shadowy, disturbing sisters in a canvas produced by Picasso in 1907. No less than Strauss’s women, Pablo Picasso’s
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
was an attack on all previous ideas of art, self-consciously shocking, crude but compelling.

In the autumn of 1907 Picasso was twenty-six. Between his arrival in Paris in 1900 and his modest success with
Last Moments,
he had been back and forth several times between Malaga, or Barcelona, and Paris, but he was at last beginning to find fame and controversy (much the same thing in the world where he lived). Between 1886 and the outbreak of World War I there were more new movements in painting than at any time since the Renaissance, and Paris was the centre of this activity. Georges Seurat had followed impressionism with pointillism in 1886; three years later, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Aristide Maillol formed Les Nabis (from the Hebrew word for prophet), attracted by the theories of Gauguin, to paint in flat, pure colours. Later in the 1890s, as we have seen in the case of Klimt, painters in the mainly German-speaking cities – Vienna, Berlin, Munich – opted out of the academies to initiate the various ‘secessionist’ movements. Mostly they began as impressionists, but
the experimentation they encouraged brought about expressionism, the search for emotional impact by means of exaggerations and distortions of line and colour.
Fauvism
was the most fruitful movement, in particular in the paintings of Henri
Matisse,
who would be Picasso’s chief rival while they were both alive. In 1905, at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, pictures by Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Rouault, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, and Charles Camoin were grouped together in one room that also featured, in the centre, a statue by Donatello, the fifteenth-century Florentine sculptor. When the critic
Louis Vauxcelles
saw this arrangement, the calm of the statue contemplating the frenzied, flat colours and distortions on the walls, he sighed, ‘Ah, Donatello chez les Fauvres.’
Fauve
means ‘wild beast’ – and the name stuck. It did no harm. For a time, Matisse was regarded as the beast-in-chief of the Paris avant-garde.

Matisse’s most notorious works during that early period were other
demoiselles de modernisme – Woman with a Hat
and
The Green Stripe,
a portrait of his wife. Both used colour to do violence to familiar images, and both created scandals. At this stage Matisse was leading, and Picasso following. The two painters had met in 1905, in the apartment of Gertrude Stein, the expatriate American writer. She was a discerning and passionate collector of modern art, as was her equally wealthy brother, Leo, and invitations to their Sunday-evening soirées in the rue de Fleurus were much sought after.
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Matisse and Picasso were regulars at the Stein evenings, each with his band of supporters. Even then, though, Picasso understood how different they were. He once described Matisse and himself as ‘north pole and south pole.’
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For his part, Matisse’s aim, he said, was for ‘an art of balance, of purity and serenity, free of disturbing or disquieting subjects … an appeasing influence.’
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