Schoenberg Conducting Mahler 2nd
One commenter proclaims that it sounds the way Boulez would do it? Do you agree?
Via Norman Lebrecht:, Arnold Schoenberg conducting the second movement of Mahler's Symphony No. 2.
What's So Degenerate About Korngold?
While blogging about Renee Fleming’s performance of “Ich ging zu ihm,” I mentioned in passing that Korngold’s opera was considered Entartete Musik (“degenerate music”). What does this mean?
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Entartete (“degenerate” or “decadent” in English) was Nazi epithet for art and music the regime considered objectionable for racial or ideological reasons. Korngold, as a Jewish composer, was automatically in this category, but race was not the only way to be designated decadent. Ties with Jewish friends and colleagues would do it, as Anton Webern (somewhat a Hitler supporter in the early years) would learn. Content (like the black characters in Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf) would do it. Being too modern or too jazzy (i.e. “African”) qualified as well. (See our recommended books.)
The Nazi campaign against many of its best musicians was part of a larger, more notorious campaign against modern art, which in 1937 climaxed in a multi-city exhibition of “degenerate” art selected from thousands of pieces stolen from museums. The following year, an exhibit on degenerate music opened in Düsseldorf. An image of the Entartete Musik exhibition catalog can seen here. (Warning: it’s pretty offensive.)
Decca released an Entartete Musik CD series beginning in the 1990s, with special emphasis on more rarely performed works.
“From a purely musical point of view, the “Entartete Musik” series has, with unanimous international critical acclaim, brought back to life more than 30 forgotten key works from the first half of this century by composers such as Braunfels, Goldschmidt, Haas, Korngold, Krása, Krenek, Ullmann and Waxman. These recordings may help the listener imagine what the musical life in Europe was before its destruction by the Nazis, and what it might have been if these great branches had not been abruptly cut off.” (Decca press release)
Korngold was among the lucky ones — he made it to Hollywood and wrote several popular film scores. But some of the composers mentioned in this Decca press release (Pavel Haas, Hans Krása, Viktor Ullman) died in the Holocaust. I will try to get together a list of the “degenerate” composers and performers along with their main works and fates. For now, I just have a great
A Brief Comment on a Common Objection to Atonality
Like so many other classical music lovers, musicians, and bloggers, I too am impressed by the new book by Alex Ross, “The Rest is Noise”, and am enjoying this perceptive, engaging and big spirited work. But I would like to comment on a suggestion or appraisal made in the book concerning the deep difficulties a listener faces with Schoenbergian atonality — and I don’t dispute for a second that many fair minded listeners have difficulties with Schoenberg and his atonal colleagues and progeny. Schoenberg understood this as well. This is the passage I find problematical:
“The source of the {Schoenbergian} scandal is not hard to divine; it has to do with the physics of sound. Sound is a trembling of the air, and it affects the body as well as the mind. This is the import of Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone, which tries to explain why certain intervals attack the nerve endings while others have a calming effect. At the head of Helmholtz’s rogue’s gallery of intervals was the semitone, which is the space between any two adjacent keys on a piano. Struck together, they create rapid “beats” that distress the ear — like an irritating flash of light, Helmholtz says, or a scraping of the skin. ..similar roughnesses are created by the major seventh, slightly narrower than the octave, and by the minor ninth, slightly wider. These are precisely the intervals that Schoenberg emphasizes in his music.”
Most composers know nothing of acoustics, and don’t care to know anything about it, because they intuitively understand that the effect of any given interval or harmony is so contextual that the remoteness of any given overtone from the fundamental note is comparatively meaningless. The evolution of harmony teaches us this… compare Renaissance polyphony with a Clementi sonatina, or Gesauldo with early minimalism, or even Chopin with Tchaikovsky and the nexus between style and intervallic content becomes apparent. Phrases such as Helmholtz’s “distress the ear”, “calming” and “irritating” sound amateurish and possibly philistine, and the attempt to quantify a listener’s aesthetic perception scientifically is an old and fruitless game. It seems depressingly clinical, as well. And whose ears are we talking about? Professionals? the public at large? I’d like to trade ears with Pierre Boulez. You can’t tell me that Boulez perceives a minor ninth the way your Uncle Marty does.
Schoenberg emphasizes relatively remote harmonic relationships. So does Debussy. So do certain Jazz musicians. So does Ravel. So does Varese. So does my beloved Milhaud. But these relationships are as “natural” as any of the more obviously primary relationships. It’s a question of vocabulary and syntax.
Schoenberg’s music is difficult because he eliminates a hierachical relationship between sonorities and is relentlessly contrapuntal, and because he rarely repeats things. Some of his tonal works, such as the First String Quartet and the First Chamber Symphony, are as hard for the novice as the atonal pieces. I promise you, the First Quartet is more difficult than the exquisitely clear neo-classic Third Quartet, for instance.
A major reason why Schoenberg is so difficult, therefore, is not that he was the “liberator of the dissonance”, but because he was the “eliminator of the dissonance”…providing of course, that we apply the proper (natural) context for the workings of his admittedly esoteric and complex vocabulary.
To read excerpts from The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross, visit Alex’s blog. Alex also has links to listen to some of the works he discusses in the book.
Arnold Lunaire: The Sun Never Shines in Schoenberg
One of the most striking aspects of the Central European fin de siecle in music is the dominance of nocturnal imagery. Naturally, you could trace this back to that absolutely fundamental work for the era, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, with the velvety eroticism of the great second act. In expressionist art generally, the night dominates; consider Klimt, Schnitzler, Kafka. And in music, the night rules.
I know very well that Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder ends with a magnificent sunrise, dispelling the nightmare shroud of cruel fate and uncontrollable eroticism that had pervaded this hymn to lonliness and lunacy. The piece begins with a superlative prelude depicting twilight; an invitation to the world of the night. Consider the spooky, albeit hysterical world of Verklaerte Nacht, and of course don’t forget Pierrot Lunaire, Pierrot of the moon. And indeed, lunar imagery dominates the work. Even when Schoenberg looks to a French artist for inspiration, who does he find? Why, Maurice Maeterlinck, of course. (the most iconic scene in Pelleas et Melisande takes place in the castle catacombs.) And don’t forget that most nightly of nightly works, Erwartung. It seems as if Schoenberg can’t take a step without stumbling over a corpse or something, illuminated by Pierrot’s moon.
The attentive reader will have noticed that all these works, tonal or atonal, predate Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic period. Perhaps more relevant is that they all precede World War One, the “Great War”, and scads of commentators like to find prescience in the artists of this era, as if they were a bunch of Cassandras. Maybe. I prefer to see inevitable stylistic evolution stemming from Wagner’s Tristan, as well as a new attention to interior emotitional and psychological states, as exhibited most noticeably in the writings of Sigmund Freud. Perhaps Darwin’s discoveries play a role in the existential sweepstakes as well. That night functions as a metaphor is obvious, in any case.