The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Alex Ross
to the tenth power.” The metaphor was apt: the modernist strain in twentieth-century music, as it branched out from Schoenberg, would complicate itself exponentially.
Webern was reserved, cerebral, monkish in his habits. The scion of an old Austrian noble family, he earned his doctorate at the Musicological Institute of the University of Vienna, writing a dissertation on the Renaissance polyphonic music of Heinrich Isaac. In his early works he drew variously on Wagner, Strauss, Mahler, and Debussy; the 1904 tone poem Im Sommerwind is a not exactly kitsch-free affair of lustrous orchestration, post-Wagnerian harmonies, and fragrant whole-tone chords. After entering Schoenberg’s orbit, Webern enthusiastically changed course and joined in the search for new chords and timbres, and, it would seem, he sometimes moved ahead of his teacher in the expedition to the atonal pole. Webern later recalled that as early as 1906 he wrote a sonata movement that “reached the farthest limits of tonality.”
In the summer of 1909, while Schoenberg was composing his Five Pieces for Orchestra and Erwartung, Webern wrote his own orchestral cycle, the Six Pieces, Opus 6. It is an incomparably disturbing work in which the rawness of atonality is refracted through the utmost orchestral finesse. Webern’s pieces, no less than Schoenberg’s, are marked by personal experience—here, lingering anguish over the death of the composer’s mother, in 1906. We hear successive stages of grief: presentiment of disaster, the shock of the news (screaming, trilling flocks of trumpet and horns), impressions of the Carinthian countryside near where Amalie Webern was laid to rest, final memories of her smile.
In the middle of the sequence is a funeral procession, which begins in ominous quiet, with a rumble of drums, gong, and bells. Various groups of instruments, trombones predominating, groan chords of inert, imploded character. An E-flat clarinet plays a high, wailing, circling melody. An alto flute responds in low, throaty tones. Muted horn and trumpet offer more lyric fragments, over subterranean chords. Then the trombones rise to a shout, and the winds and the brass fall in line behind them. The piece is crowned with a crushing sequence of nine-and ten-note chords, after which the percussion begins its own crescendo and builds to a pitch-liquidating roar. The age of noise has begun.
The Six Pieces was arguably the supreme atonal work. After writing it, Webern forswore grand gestures and found his calling as a miniaturist. When he heard Pelléas et Mélisande in 1908, he was amazed at Debussy’s ability to make so much from so few notes, and sought the same economy in his own music. The Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 10, show Webern’s art of compression at its most extreme: most of the movements last less than a minute, and the fourth piece contains fewer than fifty notes. A smattering of dolce tones on mandolin; soft repeated tones on clarinet; a couple of high muted cries from the brass; more plucks and plinks of harp, celesta, and mandolin again; and, to conclude, a tiny song on solo violin, “like a breath”—this music is practically Japanese, like brushstrokes on white paper. By clearing away all expressionistic clutter, Webern actually succeeded in making his teacher’s language easier to assimilate. He distributed his material in clear, linear patterns, rather than piling it up in vertical masses. The listener can absorb each unusual sonority before the next arrives.
Intellectuals of fin-de-siècle Vienna were much concerned with the limits of language, with the need for a kind of communicative silence. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, marking a boundary between rational discourse and the world of the soul. Hermann Broch ended his novel The Death of Virgil with the phrase “the word beyond speech.” The impulse to go to the brink of nothingness is central to Webern’s aesthetic; if the listener is paying insufficient attention, the shorter movements of his works may pass unnoticed. The joke went around that Webern had introduced the marking pensato: Don’t play the note, only think it.
Webern’s works hang in a limbo between the noise of life and the stillness of death. The ease with which the one melts into the other is one major philosophical insight that arises from them. The crescendo in the funeral march in Opus 6 is among the loudest musical phenomena in history, but even louder is the ensuing silence, which smacks the ears like thunder.
Alban Berg was a debonair, handsome man, self-effacing and ironic in his attitude to the world. There was great empathy in his large, sad eyes; he was physically fragile, a chronic sufferer of severe bronchial asthma, and he identified strongly with all for whom life did not come easily. “Such a dear person,” one friend said after his death—not a common eulogy at the funerals of geniuses. Yet, as the novelist and essayist Elias Canetti said, “[Berg] wasn’t lacking in self-esteem. He knew very well who he was.”
Blessed with a fine-tuned sense of the absurd, Berg stayed somewhat aloof from the utopian fantasies of the Schoenberg circle. On one occasion Berg had trouble keeping a straight face when his comrade-in-arms Webern, at a rehearsal of his Quartet for violin, clarinet, tenor saxophone, and piano, Opus 22, told the saxophonist to play a descending major seventh with “sex appeal.” Berg feigned an asthma attack, fled the room, and burst into hysterical laughter.
Berg liked to think that he was descended from the aristocracy, cultivating the air of a dilapidated baronet who knows how far down in the world he has come. He was, in fact, a thoroughbred bourgeois, whose father, Conrad Berg, worked in an exporting firm and later went into business selling Catholic devotional items. (One of the family’s regular customers was Anton Bruckner, who brought in a favorite crucifix for repairs.) Conrad Berg died suddenly in 1900, leaving the family in financial difficulties. Johanna Berg, the widow, considered sending the then fifteen-year-old Alban to New York, so that he could work alongside his brother Hermann at the toy distributor George Borgfeldt & Co., with which their father had been associated. At the last minute, an aunt stepped in to subsidize Alban’s studies. Hermann, incidentally, later scored a sales coup by marketing the first teddy bears, three thousand of which he purchased at the 1903 Leipzig Toy Fair.
Berg had an unpromising adolescence. He fathered an illegitimate child with a family servant, suffered academic failures, and, in the wake of another love affair, attempted suicide. Although he had been writing songs in Romantic and impressionist styles since the age of fifteen, his talent was hardly prodigious.
Schoenberg molded Berg into a substantial musical force, but there was a price to be paid for the transformation. For much of his youth Berg was essentially subjugated to Schoenberg’s will, sometimes functioning as little more than a valet. His tasks in the year 1911 included packing up a van when his teacher moved to Berlin, looking after bank accounts, engaging in fund-raising schemes, addressing legal problems, and proofreading and indexing Harmonielehre. After one barrage of demands, Schoenberg had the temerity to ask, “Are you composing anything?!?!” He dismissed as worthless several of Berg’s finest early works. The student never ceased his adoration, although a proud determination grew in him, together with hidden resentments.
Like Schoenberg and Webern, Berg was incubated in the golden age of Mahler and Strauss. So ardent was his Mahler worship that he once trespassed on the Master’s dressing room to steal a baton. Opulent, upward-and downward-lunging melodies of the Mahlerian variety appear in Berg’s scores from beginning to end. Strauss’s Salome made him swoon; he heard the opera in Graz, of course, and six more times in 1907, when the Breslau Opera brought its production to Vienna. “How I would like to sing to you Salome which I know so well,” Berg wrote to an American friend. His Altenberg songs, which incited the climactic outbreak of violence at the “scandal concert” of 1913, are structured around a mildly dissonant collection of five notes—C-sharp, E, G-natural, G-sharp, B-flat—which appears throughout Strauss’s opera and sounds as a single chord at the beginning of Salome’s final monologue. Luxuriating in this ambiguous sonority, the young composer seems reluctant to give up the degenerate, inbred language that Schoenberg condemned in Harmonielehre. Berg would soon be labeled the approachable Romantic of the Schoenberg school, the one who, as the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas says, makes a turn toward the audience.
Yet it wasn’t Berg’s bent for nostalgia that worried Schoenberg. Instead, he chastised his pupil for displaying a “rather too obvious desire to use new means”—perhaps thinking of the twelve-note chord in the Altenberg songs. There were always two sides to Berg; he pined for sweet, kitschy sounds, but he also had a mathematical fetish, a love of complexity for complexity’s sake.