Art is a phenomenon not of biology but of history - R. G.
Collingwood
1. INTRODUCTION
In the niches of the facade of Garnier's Academie Nationale de Musique
in Paris, the Grand Opera, are placed four busts of composers who, a century
ago, must presumably have been regarded as the worthiest representatives
of opera or of music generally: Mozart next to Spontini, Beethoven next to
Auber. It is always a desperately diffcult task to choose just four names
from the multitude of acknowledged masters. But surely the selection at the
Place de l'Opera is particularly strange. Who made the mistake: experts or
public?
The answer is that, while the public was not directly consulted, it misled
the experts by heaping successes on both Spontini and Auber, at one time
even preferring Spontini's Vestale to his neighbour's Don Giovanni and Auber's
Muette de Portici to Beethoven's Fidelio. And the same public afterwards
calmly stabbed the experts in the back by consigning Spontini and Auber to
oblivion. Now the reminder in golden letters is as ineffective as it seems
irreparable.
Those were the days when the public, the generality of uncommitted music-lovers,
ruled the musical scene, passing judgement or revising it, unconcerned with
the opinion of experts but guided by an instinct which corrected every initial
mistake as surely as the needle of the compass always corrects itself
Those days are over. Public judgement and public rule are suspended. The
material changes of the art, transportation and preservation, protection
and profitability have gone hand in hand with a revolution, inside the art,
the speed and thoroughness of which far exceed all the known changes of the
past. All that happened before in music was evolution, transition from style
to style, from intention to intention; through the last three hundred years
we can follow music from erudition to beauty, from beauty to expression.
Wagner and even Richard Strauss felt indebted to Gluck as their spiritual
ancestor, despite the vast difference between his music and theirs. But in
the last fifty years there has been a break which has left no spiritual kinship
between old and new music. Music now strives to cut itself off from its past,
indeed from its most glorious past, from its Golden Age. This would be painful
even if the results were more manageable.
If a similar revolution has taken place in painting and sculpture, it has
been mitigated by the fact that no comparable Golden Age preceded it, and
that this revolution has found itself a label by calling its works 'abstract'.
A label is reassuring; it creates a category and defines a direction. If
one has a label one knows, or believes one knows, what one is doing. But
new music will not accept a label or submit to a heading. Whatever one calls
it, dodecaphonic or serial, structural or indeterminate, it will not allow
itself to be nailed down. It still seems to scatter in all directions away
from the solid and great achievements of the recent past.
This is bound to irritate and disorientate the uncommitted music-lover, to
whom new music generally has become strange and remote. 'Is it right,' he
must ask, 'that Beethoven, who has been dead for almost a century and a half,
still means so much to me, while Boulez, living next door to me, means so
little?' The answer to this simple question would be equally simple if one
were to assume, as quite a few people do, that the revolution in music was
the inconsiderate vandalism of a few wayward rebels. But half a century of
destruction and experiment without apparent new purpose, or with so many
conflicting purposes as to obscure any clear line of development, indicates
some deep-seated disturbance.
This is why this strange and remote new music deserves and requires to be
taken seriously. If one cannot live with it as one still lives with all the
earlier music from Bach to Debussy, one must at least try to find out where
one stands and how the present confusion fits into the context of the past.
In life as well as in art there have been good and bad times, which have
not been welcomed with the same enthusiasm and have not left posterity with
the same sense of admiration. But bad times, too, have their relevance and
cannot be dismissed. Nothing is as tantalizing as the feeling of having lost
contact with the times. Assessing the time, measuring what it can create,
comparing and contrasting the present with the past, may supply no guidance
for the future, but may still restore the confidence which the uncommitted
music-lover has lost Anxious questions will have to be asked and answered,
questions which have been avoided in all the writings about new music. They
are useless for the composer working under the compulsion of forces of which
he is unaware. They are vital and inescapable for those who cannot find
consolation in their bewilderment.
In these fateful years of change and revolution many musicians have crossed
my path, from the greatest of my time to the undernourished and underpaid
young proof-reader whom I successfully recommended as conductor of the Viennese
performances of Brecht-Weill's Beggar's Opera-to his eternal gratitude. Poor
fellow! He never looked as if he could weather the storm.
If one spends a lifetime at the foot of Olympus one might hope to meet the
Olympians, superior beings enjoying their own genius and fulness of life
without ever looking over their shoulders, without resentments, sure of
themselves and of their mission. I must confess that I have never met such
an Olympian. Perhaps he did not exist in my time any more. Or has music always
been incapable of breeding such Olympians?
Music is curiously enclosed within itself. It seems to know nothing but its
own creator. The visual arts and literature must take note of the world around
them and assume an attitude towards it, but music is impervious to any knowledge
and wisdom. Whatever the composer wishes to be, apart from being a composer,
his work will not disclose it Nor does music meet with the other arts; it
collides with them. Poetry, in particular, is crushed by it. Whatever has
been written about it in the last two hundred years, it remains unalterably
true that music sucks the marrow from even the sublimest text. This anonymity
and cruelty are bound to be reflected in the character of the musician. Musicians
generally may not be evil but they certainly are not good-Liszt being perhaps
the only notable exception. (Beethoven may have dreamt of an ideal human
race but he hardly counted any of his contemporaries among it. And Richard
Wagner was almost evil.) To do good is not the task of music, nor of its
creators. Music has no vocabulary for it, no words for love of mankind and
for selflessness. And where there is no vocabulary, there is no awareness
of the object. There lies a thorny contradiction. No other art gives itself
away so freely, receives its re-creator with such open arms as music does-or
did, until fairly recently. It makes the man in the musician all the more
fascinating, the man who knows and feels only himself and still scatters
his riches among the people, friends and strangers alike.
And this brotherhood of envy and selfishness has been faced with the most
formidable artistic and human problems. How did they stand or lose their
ground? There is a human side to the whole struggle for and against a new
art in the midst of a changing world which must not be forgotten when talking
of music. For one of the major issues in our time is the personality, the
individuality of creative man.
2. 'LA MUSICA A' MIEI TEMPI'
Every generation sings, with Rossini's Bartolo, 'La musica a' miei tempi
era altra cosa,' trying to justify its preposterous veneration of old or
dislike of new music. This is and remains one of the strangest phenomena
of music-at least, of European music. One is somewhat surprised to hear
Americantype pop-songs from Japanese singers and marching songs after the
Russian model from Chinese demonstrators. At school we were told that in
Korea, more than in any other part of the Far East, life and customs had
remained unchanged for two thousand years, yet this did not prevent both
North and South Koreans from having all the planes and tanks and guns to
wage war in its most modern form. In Europe things did not happen with such
unexpected suddenness, but life changed again and again, sometimes for reasons
which seemed obvious and sometimes inexplicably. Nothing gave more convincing
evidence of such changes of thought, mood, enterprise, fashion or food than
the arts; but no old art fell into such disrepute as music. If the artists
of the Italian Renaissance despised the barbaric gothic style of the North,
their reverence for the older Greek and Roman classicism was boundless; if
we do not now build as Kallikrates built or paint as Raphael painted or write
poetry as Homer or Milton did, the old masterworks have none the less lost
nothing of their validity. They are a constantly re-valued and upgraded asset
in the balance sheet of mankind. Who could seriously pretend that Bramante's
light was dimmed by Le Corbusier, or that Leonardo's stature has been reduced
by Picasso? Yet in music not one artist has arisen who, over the centuries,
has added to our patrimony. One becomes more painfully aware of this strange
mortality of music in an age which is again turning away from the past, with
all the old radicalism. When the symphony of the eighty-year-old Zoltan Kodaly
was first performed in Lucerne he said, as if to excuse it, 'This is the
music of my time'- la musica a' miei tempi.
The latest music is not 'the music of my time'. I must try to find, amid
all the stormy changes of the last fifty years, the point where I was left
behind, a point not so easily determined that I can say without hesitation
which precise work at which precise date was still just within my range.
One has to be honest with oneself. In my case I am following the phenomenon
of ageing with a certain critical curiosity; I disapprove of my inclination
to halt the world at a particular moment and to dread any change because,
unwillingly, I believe that everything that follows must be inferior to what
has gone before. This applies not only to music but to many minor and major
habits of daily life, to places, to people. I can therefore still understand
the latest developments in a tech-nical sense, and regret their necessity,
but I no longer take part in them.
This does not mean that one has to return to one's first love, like Otto
Klemperer or Ernest Ansermet and many other former champions of the new,
much less try to prove, for merely biological reasons, the exclusive validity
of the old and the invalidity of the new. This is especially true if, instead
of attempting to assess the value of the new, one is content with a comparison,
leaving any verdict to the public in the widest sense which, without
considera-tion of new gods, their prophets or detractors, is the only competent
architect of the temples of the arts.
When I made my first acquaintance with music, electric tram-ways were not
the only astounding innovation: Richard Wagner too was the subject of violent
debate. There were serious experts who insisted that Wagner had destroyed
all musical form and that his 'endless' melody was a contradiction in itself
because form was definite and a fundamental requirement of all melody. I
seem to remember that the harmonic freedom of Wagner's music was much less
debated. The 'Tristan sequence' certainly sounded strange but it was not
yet accused, as it is today, of corrupting our whole tonal system. I remember
a summer holiday spent with my parents and the family of a schoolfriend of
mine in a house buried amid the enormous forests of Northern Bohemia, when
in ten weeks my friend's mother, an able pianist with a small but expressive
voice and also an enthusiastic Wagnerite, took me through every bar and every
note of the Ring, playing, singing, explaining, to persuade me that
music had not ended with Mozart and Beethoven, as I was inclined to believe.
I can still hear her singing 'Des seimigen Metes sussen Trank wirst du mir
nicht verschmahen . . .' and her quiet insistence that no sweeter or more
beautiful tune had been written before or since. She did not, in the end,
make me a Wag-nerite, a blind admirer of everything Wagner wrote and of how
he wrote it, but perhaps I was not made for any kind of blindness.
Brahms too was 'new', but he presented no problems. One could like his music
without getting into arguments with one's friends Tchaikovsky, no less new,
was labelled a barbarian--apparently synonymous with Russian, more of which
language was heard in Prague, where I grew up, than anywhere else outside
Russia. Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov were often played, not so much for
their music as for their political sympathies and opposition to Austro-German
domination. But the musical revolution really came from Debussy and Richard
Strauss. Of the two Debussy was, in Prague, more a rumour than a living person.
I remember vaguely 'L'Apres-midi d'un faune' at the Czech Philharmonic, and
the irritation it caused me afterwards when I found that I could remember
no more than the very first phrase. On the other hand Strauss's symphonic
poems were often played. Conductors loved them and we, the young audiences,
were enchanted with them. This, for us, was new music, harmonic freedom,
springy rhythm, ravishing sound and harsh clashes, and all this without
demolishing all the notions of the glorious past. One could hear in the same
concert Beethoven's Seventh and Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel and one
could see the bridge spanning a century.
In 1909 I heard Elektra (Salome had been performed too but was presumably
considered unsuitable for a schoolboy). That new music was indeed more violent,
and more dissonant. With Mozart and Haydn it had been a lovely little angel,
now smiling, now weeping. Beethoven had introduced a brutality which Haydn
found abhorrent, but now, in unguarded moments at least, the little angel
had become a raging fury. Elektra was easily the most dissonant-sounding
piece of pre-war years, not excepting Stravinsky's Rite of Spring
written five years later. What a change from Donna Anna's 'Vendetta ti
chiedo !' to Elektra's 'Vater! Agamem-non, dein Tag wird kommen'! Two years
later, though, there followed the sensational success of Rosenkavalier.
I well remember the white and green posters with Roller's figurine which
could be seen on the hoardings in Prague and, strange as it may sound today,
there were special trains which took music-lovers from Prague to Dresden,
150 miles away, across the border in Saxony; but in those blessed days one
needed no passport and Austrian crowns were as good as German marks. I was
surprised to hear the experts among them my music-teacher, who was a simpleton--
say that with Rosenkavalier Strauss had withdrawn from the ranks of
the avant-garde and returned to the security of big royalties and small
objectives. For me, certainly, the work did not have the cyclopic grandeur
of Elektra but it had instead a fragrance which no other music had
and which has not diminished with many years of close acquaintance.
Looking back, I can understand better the disappointment of the young. The
break seems to have occurred some time between 1908
and 1911: in
1911 Petrushka was
first performed, in I9I2', Pierrot lunaire,
in I9I 3 The Rite of Spring
and Ariadne auf Naxos. The ways had divided. Some said
that the end of music had arrived--which they had not said of
Elektra--while others, such as Florent Schmitt in Paris and Alfred
Kerr in Berlin, spoke of 'new steps of listening', whatever that may have
meant. Those who relied on their ears, which until then had exercised supreme
authority in music, could only observe that in evil times music, too, had
to sound dissonant--although in 1913 there was as yet no conclusive proof
that the times were really evil.
Dissonance has a long history, and it is not easy to find a clear connection
between its development and that of the times. Before J. S. Bach, chromaticism
was considered cacophonous; even at the time of his death conservative musicians
still looked upon it as a symptom of disease. But composers became used to
using all the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, and dissonances stole
in like thieves at night. The introduction to Mozart's string quartet in
C major, K. 465, of I785 is intriguing not because of the disson-ances themselves
but because of the still unrecognizable intention behind them. Twenty years
later Beethoven combined a sustained dominant seventh with the common chord.
People called it one of Beethoven's frequent extravaganzas and were reconciled
when the dissonance ruefully resolved itself and returned to the beloved
E Iqat major. In the Seventh such comfort was not easily to be had, but 'Not
these sounds,' said Beethoven later, rejecting his own violent discord.
Yet this did not prevent younger composers from rattling at the locked doors
of the harmonic edifice wherein they felt themselves more and more closely
confined. Schubert experimented, not always happily and not always with
restraint, in getting from one key to another, distant one without walking
the long corridors of the usual modulations. Chopin heard hidden enharmonic
relationships which loosened the fabric of tonality so much that Wagner,
with an ear not perhaps naturally sharper but sharpened by new circumstances,
could advance from Lohengrin to the Tristan sequence; for in
Lohengrin tonality had already breached its banks. One only had to continue
in this way, adding more and more vehemence in keeping with a world that
became noisier every day, and one arrived at Strauss and Debussy--and Gustav
Mahler, too, though Mahler's works were then so rarely played that they could
not be regarded a@s a characteristic feature of musical life. It was all
an apparently consistent development or progressive change, leading up to
Schoenberg's Pierrot and Stravinsky's Rite.
One would not get very far in trying to relate the progressive change in
music to the progression of extra-musical events. The period between Bach
and Mozart was comparatively quiet in Europe, though one might say that it
was then that the seeds of future troubles in politics, economics and music
were sown. Mozart and Haydn, the fathers of the French Opera Comique, Cimarosa,
Paisiello, to name only the most outstanding musicians of the time, all witnessed
the French Revolution, but their music was un-affected. It had already gained
a large measure of that freedom which, in other contexts, led to great social
and political convul-sions. Beethoven, however, was affected by both the
spirit and the letter of the new era. His music had an earthy or democratic
quality as distinct from, or even opposed to, the more aristocratic attitude
of Mozart's or Haydn's; it had what his contemporaries, with a mixture of
shock and fascination, called vulgarity. But Beethoven, like Mozart and Haydn,
is called a 'classic', though musical classicism has little or nothing in
common with literary or architectural classicism except in its formal perfection.
Some-thing was stirring within life and within the arts, of which Beethoven
may be regarded as a forerunner.
The industrial revolution, a reality in England, a distant fear on the Continent,
may have sparked off the Romantic movement, with its nostalgia for a vanishing
dream-world. At this point there is a much closer resemblance between the
arts, between Schumann and Eichendorff. It was the same flight of fancy in
each case, trying to escape from reality and knowing nothing but its own
jubilant or aching heart. 'Programme music', Berlioz and Liszt, belong
spiritually to Victor Hugo and all of them to Wagner and to his
Gesamtkunstwerk, the 'total' work of art embracing all the arts in
one and the same aim, a thing that had never and could never have been thought
of before. Music had indeed joined company with the other arts, reflecting
as they did in some half-conscious way the coming of the greatest change
in European life and temper.
In the last decade before the Great War there was no need for apparently
far-fetched theories. The kinship between Renoir and Debussy was obvious;
that of Schoenberg-Stravinsky and Picasso-Braque-Derain's 'analytical cubism'
even more so. Together music and the other arts conspired against all tradition.
Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that music was the last blossom flowering
in the autumn of the relevant culture, a language of a bygone era arriving
too late; and that 'all truly significant music is a swansong'. This has
certainly been true of the past. Gothic music was much less complicated than
the finely chiselled stone decorations on the windows, walls, portals and
towers of the cathedrals where it was sung, but, more important, it had nothing
of their grandeur, nothing of the mystery of their dark, high vaults. Music,
indeed, missed the great movement of the Renaissance altogether. What we
know as Renaissance music is really gothic in the feeling of its polyphonic
tracery, unaware of the clear, straight lines of Renaissance art. Up to that
time Nietzsche was obviously right.
Then, quite inexplicably, music caught up with Baroque art. It is difficult
to understand why Nietzsche thought Handel's music was the true expression
of the Lutheran spirit. With its coloraturas and fiorituras, with its ravishing
beauty of sound, Baroque music seems to come from the same intellectual climate
as the large canvases and painted ceilings with their exuberant colours and
movements, the fantastic, gilded interiors of Baroque churches and palaces.
Music suddenly found its rightful place and became as pompous and stilted
as the fashion, the style and the language -- and often as hollow. And from
that moment--about 1650--music followed close on the heels of the other arts.
The musical equivalent of Racine or Claude Lorrain was not Mozart, not
Figaro or Don Giovanni, but the opera seria, the
tragedie lyrique which was finally interred with Idomeneo and
La Clemenza di Tito. Far from being a swansong, Mozart's music was
a premonitian and we have seen how, in the nineteenth century, it could never
again be left behind.
How music springs from the unconscious will perhaps never be explained. But
it has acquired an almost prophetic quality, it has become a most sensitive
seismograph which records every tremor of emotion. There is some consistency
in this development: music had to become up to date as Baroque music had
done. It had to possess itself of all its means, as the music of Mozart and
Haydn did, it had then to become individual and personal as Mozart had already
foreshadowed and Beethoven then consummated; and from there it found its
way into the greater mystery of the human mind. It was the end of a long
road from a craft to an art. It was this new quality of music which, in the
nineteenth century, drove the stormclouds of coming change across its once
serene skies and led inexorably to the crisis of the years before the First
World War. By then it was no longer concerned with external problems of
composition alone, but with the convulsions of the time itself--with the
soul.
Looking back at those pre-war days, which seem now as far away as the days
of Charlemagne, I cannot help wondering how and why the arts alone were driven
to warn the world of the impending catastrophe. I am not using this strong
word lightly: in I9I4 mankind left its secure dwellings to wander into the
wilderness of half-imagined, half-formulated new ideals and has not settled
again to this day. Up to that fateful summer day in 1914 lifewas indeed secure,
to a degree that seems almost un-believable to us: diplomats, though as dangerous
as ever, were proverbially polite; currencies were reliably stable; the greater
part of the world was open and travellers needed no passports but could settle
where they wanted and take all their money and possessions with them; summers
were hot and winters cold, the rich were rich and the poor were poor, and
everything was in its proper place. True, there were some incidents, wars
in Manchuria and in the Balkans, which fertilized the toy industry but did
not disturb the prevailing sense of satisfaction.
Only the arts were nervous, upset and uncomfortable, as if they had the animal's
instinctive awareness of an approaching storm. There is a passage in the
Klytemnestra scene from Elektra, easily the harshest piece of music
before the Rite, which mirrors the whole situation: in the midst of
the most violent harmonic clashes there comes (at figure I68) an almost honeyed
phrase in thirds and sixths: 'Wenn einer etwas Angenehmes sagt'--'If someone
says something agreeable'. Many agreeable things were said, but the
arts did not believe them. For the people, the public, there was still much
consolation to be found in Verdi, then almost contemporary, in Puccini, whose
sun shone brightly, and in Viennese operetta and its sweet, illusionist tunes.
It is an intriguing thought that the statesmen of the last decade before
the First World War could have consulted not only their diplomatic files
but, perhaps with the help of psychiatrists, the arts as well. They might
have gleaned there some wisdom no other visible fact could provide, a warning
that something was stirring in the human mind which might escape their control
and set the whole world on fire. But the outraged conservatives would not
look for enlightenment, nor could the radical innovators spell out the reasons
for their malaise. So fate had to take its course, as in a Greek tragedy,
and everyone professed surprise.
War broke out, suddenly and, as it seemed, senselessly. So tenuous was all
the elaborate security that a few shots in a far corner of the Balkans unleashed
a conflagration without parallel in European history. War came not as a
hollow-cheeked fury with a flaming torch, running howling through the land,
but as a paper ghost, pasting with remarkable composure large posters on
walls calling men to arms for reasons which were either unintelligible or,
if intelligible, unconvincing. This was particularly true in the old
Austro-Hungarian Empire, composed as it was of a dozen nations who were
determined never again to live together in peace. But, for the present, their
uniforms were still the colourful affairs we had seen at school in pictures
of the capture of Belgrade by Prince Eugen.
Like all wars, it did the arts no good. Gold went for steel and pens for
rifles. It was like a change of scene on a darkened stage. When, five years
later, the lights went up again nothing stood where it had been before. We
came home from the war like Enoch Arden: the world had taken to new ideals.
Music, in particular, broke out of its stable like a wild horse and became
atonal. How all the good old rules went with the wind! Atonality was not
just a new light. It was a bomb, threaten-ing to blast the once luxurious
palace of music to the ground. That fitted well into the general mood of
destruction, which had priority over every thought of reconstruction. We
had not freed ourselves. Time and circumstance had done it for us, by an
inexorable process. For six hundred and fifty years Austria's destinies,
accord-ing to the old National Anthem, had been united with the Hapsburg
throne, a much more ancient union than that of music with tonic and dominant.
If the one was dispensable, why not the other? Those were great days: the
days of collages, of Dadaism and Sur-realist manifestos. All this
was atonal, intended to destroy the past root and branch. The futurists of
the past had become the artists of the present, and if the general political
and economic confusion made the new world less desirable than the old had
been, the arts at least seemed to enjoy the new paradise.
But musicians had to think of the future. Complete freedom is a fickle friend.
If a new art was to arise from chaos it had to find shelter in new rules.
