The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Alex Ross
urge to develop his thematic material: the melody remains static while the accompaniment evolves. Cloudy whole-tone sonorities mark the horizon of the faun’s vision, where shapes dissolve in mist.
All this suggestion eventually coalesces into a voluptuous, full-orchestral love song in D-flat major. The strings savor long, flowing unison lines, more akin to Indian ragas than to Wagner or Strauss. It is music of physical release, even of sexual orgasm, as Vaslav Nijinsky demonstrated in his undulating dance of the Faun at the Ballets Russes in 1912. “I hold the queen!” Mallarmé’s faun exults. Yet the tritone lingers in the bass, a mystery ungrasped.
With the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, sketched in the early 1890s and then extensively revised before its 1902 premiere, Debussy created a new kind of interior music drama, using Wagner as raw material. The text is by the Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, and, as Strauss would do in Salome, Debussy set Maeterlinck’s play word for word, following its riddling prose wherever it took him. The love triangle of Pelléas, his half brother Golaud, and the inscrutable wandering princess Mélisande moves toward a grim climax, but most of the action takes place offstage; the score places the listener in a liquid medium into which individual psychologies have been submerged. Debussy’s established resources—whole-tone scales, antique modes, attenuated melodies that rise from wavering intervals—conjure an atmosphere of wandering, waiting, yearning, trembling.
Later come glimpses of a beautiful country on the other side. When Pelléas and Mélisande finally confess their love for each other—“I love you,” “I love you, too,” without accompaniment—the orchestra responds with a simple textbook progression moving from a tonic chord to its dominant seventh, except that in Debussy’s spectral scoring it sounds like the dawn of creation. A similar transfiguring simplicity overtakes the prelude to Act V, in which we discover that Mélisande has given birth to a child.
At some point, Debussy’s sense of himself as a sonic adventurer, a Faustian seeker, dissipated. By 1900 he was no longer calling for a Society of Musical Esotericism; instead, he prized classic French values of clarity, elegance, and grace. He was also listening intently to Spanish music—in particular, to the cante jondo, or deep song, tradition of Andalusian flamenco. His major works from the first decade of the century—La Mer; the Preludes, Book I, and Estampes for piano; and the cycles of Images for piano and for orchestra—intermingle familiar qualities of unearthliness with dancing movement and clean-cut lyricism. “Voiles” (“Sails”), in the Preludes, confines itself almost entirely to the whole-tone scale. “Steps in the Snow” revolves around hypnotic repetitions of a four-note figure. But “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair” has a melody of the sort that begs to be whistled in the street; many people would be surprised to learn that it had been “composed” at all. And the “Interrupted Serenade,” a Spanish scene, intertwines flamenco guitar with Arabic scales suggestive of Moorish influence. Debussy did not learn to write such music in Faustian isolation; instead, he picked up clues from desultory nights at the opera, operetta, cabarets, and cafés.
Paris bohemia promoted an easy back-and-forth between occult esotericism and cabaret populism, not least because the two worlds were sometimes literally on top of each other. The Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross met in a room above the cabaret Auberge du Clou, and as the cabal debated its arcane philosophy, the insinuating tunes of the café-concert would have floated up from below.
In such places, Debussy often encountered Erik Satie, another clandestine revolutionary of the fin de siècle, and, in some ways, the more daring one. Satie, too, dabbled in Rosicrucianism, serving briefly as the house composer for the Order of the Rose-Cross of the Temple and Graal, which the novelist Joséphin Péladan had founded in a Parsifal daze. Satie’s music for Péladan’s play Le Fils des étoiles (1891) begins with a totally irrational string of dissonant six-note chords—the next step beyond late Liszt. Yet a life of experiment was not to Satie’s liking. The son of a publisher of music-hall and cabaret songs, he found deeper satisfaction in playing piano at the Auberge du Clou. He achieved liberation from the past in three piano pieces titled Gymnopédies, which discard centuries of knotted-brow complexity in favor of a language at once simple and new. In the first eighteen bars of the first piece, only six pitches are used. There is no development, no transition, only an instant prolonged.
The conductor Reinbert de Leeuw has written: “Satie was, in a manner of speaking, starting European musical history all over again.” The same could have been said of Debussy, who, in 1901, remarked to his colleague Paul Dukas that too many modern works had become needlessly complex—“They smell of the lamp, not of the sun.” Debussy was describing the motivation for his latest work, the Nocturnes for orchestra, and in particular for the movement “Fêtes,” which depicted a festival in the Bois de Boulogne, replete with the sounds of soldiers’ trumpets and the cries of the crowd. This was the germ of an alternative modernism, one that would reach maturity in the stripped-down, folk-based, jazz-happy, machine-driven music of the twenties. In essence, two avant-gardes were forming side by side. The Parisians were moving into the brightly lit world of daily life. The Viennese went in the opposite direction, illuminating the terrible depths with their holy torches.
Schoenberg
Schoenberg was born in 1874. His father, Samuel Schönberg, came from a German-speaking Jewish community in Pressburg, which is now Bratislava, in Slovakia. (Schoenberg dropped the umlaut from his name when he fled Germany in 1933.) Samuel Schönberg moved to Vienna as a young man to make a living as a shop keep er. There he met and married Pauline Nachod, who came from a family of cantorial singers. The couple lived in modest circumstances and did not own a piano. Their son learned much of the classical repertory from a military band that performed in a coffee house on the Prater. Arnold taught himself several instruments and played in a string quartet that occupied a room set aside for messenger boys. He learned instrumental forms by subscribing to an encyclopedia, and waited for the S volume to arrive before composing a sonata.
One way or another, Schoenberg absorbed so much music that he had no need for formal instruction. He did take some lessons from Alexander Zemlinsky, a slightly older composer who wrote fine-grained, lyrically potent music in the vein of Mahler and Strauss. Zemlinsky’s father was Catholic, his mother was the daughter of a Sephardic Jew and a Bosnian Muslim. In 1901, Schoenberg married Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde, who, a few years later, would set off the central emotional crisis of his life.
After working for a time as a bank clerk, Schoenberg took on various odd musical jobs, conducting a workers’ chorus, orchestrating operettas, and writing sentimental songs. In late 1901, he moved to Berlin to serve as a musical director for high-minded revues at the Überbrettl cabaret, or, as it was later called, the Buntes Theater. This organization was the brainchild of Ernst von Wolzogen, who hoped to import to Berlin the streetwise sophistication of Paris cabarets such as the Chat Noir and the Auberge du Clou. In the wake of financial difficulties, Wolzogen quit his enterprise in 1902, and Schoenberg, short on work, returned to Vienna the following year. Aspects of the cabaret reappeared in the 1912 song cycle Pierrot lunaire, where the soloist floats between speech and song. If Schoenberg later characterized his atonal music as a gesture of resistance to the popular mainstream, in the early days his stance was significantly more flexible.
Sharp-witted, widely cultured, easily unimpressed, Schoenberg made himself at home in the coffee houses where the leading lights of fin-de-siècle Vienna gathered—the Café Imperial, the Café Central, the Café Museum. The great men in Vienna all had their circles of disciples, and Schoenberg quickly assembled his own. In 1904 he placed a notice in the Neue Musikalische Presse announcing that he was seeking pupils in composition. Several young men showed up as a result. One was Anton Webern, a stern young soul who may have seen the ad because it appeared directly beneath a report on the desecration of Parsifal in America. (The previous year, Heinrich Conried, Mahler’s future employer, had staged Parsifal at the Met, breaking the rule that made Wagner’s sacred opera exclusive to Bayreuth.) Another was Alban Berg, a gifted but feckless youth who had been working in the civil service.
The early works of Schoenberg always come as a pleasant shock to listeners expecting a grueling atonal exercise. The music exudes a heady, luxurious tone, redolent of Klimt’s gilt portraits and other Jugendstil artifacts. Brash Straussian gestures mix with diaphanous textures that