The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Alex Ross
for cello, and one for flute, viola, and harp. They were couched in a taut, songful style, perfumed with the palmy air of the French Baroque. New beauty should fill the air, Debussy told Stravinsky, when the cannons fall silent.
On March 23, 1918, the day before Palm Sunday, the Germans opened a two-pronged campaign of terror against Paris. Gotha planes launched an audacious daytime air raid, killing several people in a church. Krupp’s latest masterpiece, the Paris Gun, began firing on the city from seventy-five miles away. Paris was awash in noise—shells booming in the air every fifteen or twenty minutes; policemen beating warning signals on drums; church bells ringing and trumpets pealing as the planes approached; recruits chanting in the streets, schoolchildren singing “La Marseillaise,” people defiantly shouting “Vive la France!” from windows. The death of Achille-Claude Debussy, on the following Monday, was hardly noticed.
Les Six and Le Jazz
In an absorbing study of war’s effect on twentieth-century music, the composer Wolfgang-Andreas Schultz observes that feelings of “hyper alertness, distance, and emotional coldness” often overcome the survivors of horrifying events. Just as the traumatized mind erects barriers against the influx of violent sensations, so do artists take refuge in unsentimental poses, in order to protect the self against further damage. Stravinsky’s assumption of a “hard” aesthetic after 1914 exemplified a deeper shift that was taking place in the European mind—a turning away from the luxurious, mystical, maximalist tendencies of turn-of-the-century art. This was one aspect of the postwar reality. Another was the rise of popular music and mass technologies—cinema, the phonograph, radio, jazz, and Broadway theater.
Paris audiences got a foretaste of the Roaring Twenties in the spring of 1917, during one of the bloodiest periods of the war, when the Allies launched the ill-considered Nivelle offensive and the Germans responded with a lethal defensive strategy named Operation Alberich (after the master dwarf in the Ring). On May 18, six years to the day after the death of Gustav Mahler, the Ballets Russes again shocked the city by presenting an uproarious, circus-like production titled Parade. A scintillating array of personalities participated: Erik Satie wrote the music, Jean Cocteau created the libretto, Pablo Picasso designed the sets and costumes, Léonide Massine choreographed, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote the program notes (inventing the word “surrealism” in the process), and Diaghilev provided the scandal. As Francis Steegmuller recounts, the great impresario had conceived a brief passion for the Russian Revolution, and at a previous Ballets Russes evening he had unfurled a red flag behind the stage. Because the Bolsheviks were at that time pushing for a Russian withdrawal from the war effort, French patriots took umbrage at Diaghilev’s revolutionary symbolism and showed up at Parade shouting, “Boches!”
The plot of Parade, such as it is, deals with relevance: how can an older art form, such as classical music or ballet, still draw an audience in the age of pop music, the cinema, and the gramophone? At a Paris fair, the managers of a traveling theater are deploying various music-hall performers—acrobats, a Chinese magician, a Little American Girl—in order to entice passersby. But the side acts prove so entertaining that the audience refuses to go inside. Low culture thus becomes the main attraction. Cocteau made some notes to Satie in which he described the pseudo-American aesthetic he had in mind:
The Titanic—“Nearer My God To Thee”—elevators—the sirens of Boulogne—submarine cables—ship-to-shore cables—Brest—tar—varnish—steamship apparatus—the New York Herald—dynamos—airplanes—short circuits—palatial cinemas—the sheriff’s daughter—Walt Whitman—the silence of stampedes—cowboys with leather and goatskin chaps—the telegraph operator from Los Angeles who marries the detective at the end …
Satie’s score defines a new art of musical collage: jaunty tunes don’t quite get off the ground, rhythms intertwine and overlap and stop and start, sped-up whole-tone passages sound like Warner Brothers cartoon music yet to come, bitter chorales and broken fugues honor the fading past. The “American Girl” episode contains a kooky paraphrase of Irving Berlin’s “That Mysterious Rag,” with one passage marked “outside and aching.”
Francis Poulenc recalled the elation he felt as a teenager on attending Parade: “For the first time—it has happened often enough since, God knows—the music hall was invading Art with a capital A.” Poulenc typified a new breed of twentieth-century composer whose consciousness was shaped not by the aesthetic of the fin de siècle but by the hard-hitting styles of the early modernist period. This young man had studied the Rite, Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces for Piano, Bartók’s Allegro barbaro, and the works of Debussy and Ravel. He had also soaked up French popular songs, folk songs, music-hall numbers, sweet operetta airs, children’s songs, and the stylish melodies of Maurice Chevalier.
Poulenc was one of a number of young composers who stormed onto the scene after the war, enacting a generational turnover in French music. Others were Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Louis Durey, Germaine Tailleferre, and Georges Auric. In 1920, they were dubbed Les Six. Satie was their godfather, or, more accurately, their funny uncle.
Cocteau appointed himself spokesman of the group and supplied a manifesto in his 1918 pamphlet The Cock and the Harlequin. The first order of business was to get rid of Wagner and Debussy. “The nightingale sings badly,” Cocteau sneered, playing off the line “The nightingale will sing” in Verlaine’s “En Sourdine,” which Debussy had twice set to music. Stravinsky, who four years earlier had failed to respond to Cocteau’s proposal for a ballet about David and Goliath, also came in for criticism; the Rite was a masterpiece, yes, but one that exhibited symptoms of “theatrical mysticism” and other Wagnerian diseases. “Enough of nuages, waves, aquariums, ondines, and nocturnal perfumes,” Cocteau intoned, pointedly slipping in titles of pieces by Debussy and the no longer cutting-edge Ravel. “We need music on the earth, MUSIC FOR EVERY DAY. Enough of hammocks, garlands, gondolas! I want someone to make me music that I can live in like a house.” For all his glib generalities, Cocteau succeeded in articulating the spirit of the moment: after the long night of war, composers were done with what Nietzsche called, in his critique of Wagner, the “lie of the great style.”
Paris in the twenties displayed a contradiction. On the one hand, it embraced all the fads of the roaring decade—music hall, American jazz, sport and leisure culture, machine noises, technologies of gramophone and radio, musical corollaries to Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Simultaneism, and Surrealism. Yet beneath the ultramodern surface a nineteenth-century support structure for artistic activity persisted. Composers still made their names in the Paris salons, which survived the general postwar decline of European aristocracy, partly because so many wealthy old families had succeeded in marrying new industrial money.
The chief hosts and hostesses of Paris, such as the Comte de Beaumont, the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles, the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, and the American-born Princesse de Polignac, were eager, even desperate, to present new “looks” each season. The virtue of salon culture was that it illuminated connections among the arts; young composers could exchange ideas with like-minded painters, poets, playwrights, and jacks-of-all-trades like Cocteau. The disadvantage was that all this bracing activity happened at considerable distance from “real life.” The members of Les Six were writing “MUSIC FOR EVERY DAY” that everyday people had little opportunity to hear.
The first great vogue was le jazz. Paris had taken a fancy to African-American music as early as 1900, when Sousa’s band played the cakewalk during its first European tour and Arthur Pryor showed off his trombone glisses. Debussy responded with “Golliwog’s Cake-walk,” from the suite Children’s Corner (1906–8), where rag rhythm was interlaced with a wry citation of the initial motif of Tristan und Isolde. In 1917 and 1918, American troops came to Paris, bringing with them syncopated bands such as Louis Mitchell’s Jazz Kings and James Reese Europe’s 369th Infantry Hell Fighters. In August 1918 the Comte de Beaumont hosted a jazz night at his town house; African-American soldier-musicians played the latest dance tunes while Poulenc presented his prankishly charming Rapsodie nègre, full of pseudo-African mumbo jumbo on the order of “Banana lou ito kous kous / pota la ma Honoloulou.”
There is no need to belabor the point that le jazz was condescending toward its African-American sources. Cocteau and Poulenc were enjoying