The Rest Is Noise Series: Doctor Faust: Schoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality. Alex Ross
This is a chapter from Alex Ross's groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise.
It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you're attending concerts in the episode Here Comes the 20th Century.
Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany and a MacArthur Fellowship. The Rest is Noise was his first book and garnered huge critical acclaim and a number of awards, including the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of Listen to This.
DOCTOR FAUST
Schoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality
From The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross
Contents
Suggested Listening and Reading
About the Publisher
Schoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality
One day in 1948 or 1949, the Brentwood Country Mart, a shopping complex in an upscale neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, was the scene of a slight disturbance that carried overtones of the most spectacular upheaval in twentieth-century music. Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of the émigré novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, was examining grapefruit in the produce section when she heard a voice shouting in German from the far end of the aisle. She looked up to see Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonal music and the codifier of twelve-tone composition, bearing down on her, with his bald pate and burning eyes. De cades later, in conversation with the writer Lawrence Weschler, Feuchtwanger could recall every detail of the encounter, including the weight of the grapefruit in her hand. “Lies, Frau Marta, lies!” Schoenberg was yelling. “You have to know, I never had syphilis!”
The cause of this improbable commotion was the publication of Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Thomas Mann, a writer peculiarly attuned to music, had fled from the hell of Hitler’s Germany into the not-quite paradise of Los Angeles, joining other Central European artists in exile.
The proximity of such renowned figures as Schoenberg and Stravinsky had encouraged Mann to write a “novel of music,” in which a modern composer produces esoteric masterpieces and then descends into syphilitic insanity. For advice, Mann turned to Theodor W. Adorno, who had studied with Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg and who was also part of the Los Angeles émigré community.
Mann self-confessedly approached modern music from the perspective of an informed amateur who wondered what had happened to the “lost paradise” of German Romanticism. Mann had attended the premiere of Mahler’s Eighth in 1910. He had briefly met Mahler, and trembled in awe before him. Some three decades later, Mann watched as Schoenberg, Mahler’s protégé, presented his “extremely difficult” but “rewarding” scores to small groups of devotees in Los Angeles. The novel asks, in so many words, “What went wrong?”
Leverkühn is an intellectual monster—cold, loveless, arrogant, mocking. His music absorbs all styles of the past and shatters them into fragments. “I have found that it is not to be,” he says of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, whose “Ode to Joy” once spoke for mankind’s aspiration toward brotherhood. “It will be taken back. I will take it back.” The illness that destroys Leverkühn is acquired in a curious way. He tells his friends that he is going to see the Austrian premiere of Salome in Graz. On a secret detour he sleeps with a prostitute named Esmeralda, whose syphilitic condition is visible on her yellowed face. Leverkühn contracts the disease deliberately, in the belief that it will grant him supernatural creative powers. When the devil appears, he informs the composer that he will never be popular in his lifetime but that his time will come, à la Mahler: “You will lead, you will strike up the march of the future, boys will swear by your name, and thanks to your madness they will no longer need to be mad.” Since Faustus is also a book about the roots of Nazism, Leverkühn’s “bloodless intellectuality” becomes, in a cryptic way, the mirror image of Hitler’s “bloody barbarism.” The cultish fanaticism of modern art turns out to be not unrelated to the politics of fascism: both attempt to remake the world in utopian forms.
Schoenberg was understandably incensed by this scenario, which gave a pathological veneer to his proudest achievements. The real-life composer could be a bit spooky at times—“I can see through walls,” he was once heard to say—but he was hardly a cold or bloodless man. He set about revolutionizing music with high passion and childlike enthusiasm. As a born Viennese who venerated the Austro-German tradition, he could never have mocked Beethoven’s Ninth. As a Jew, he divined the true nature of Nazism sooner than did Mann. Aloofness was not his style; he was, among other things, a galvanizing, life-changing teacher, dozens of whose students, from the operatic Berg to the aphoristic Anton Webern, from the Communist Hanns Eisler to the hippieish Lou Harrison, played conspicuous roles in twentieth-century music.
Yet Mann knew what he was doing when he put his composer in league with the devil. Faust’s pact is a lurid version of the kinds of stories that artists tell themselves in order to justify their solitude. Eisler, when he read Mann’s novel, connected it to the perceived crisis of classical music in modern society. “Great art, as the Dev il maintains, can now only be produced, in this declining society, through complete isolation, loneliness, through complete heartlessness ... [Yet Mann] allows Leverkühn to dream of a new time, when music will again to a certain extent be on first-name terms with the people.” Other composers of the fin de siècle similarly conceived their situation as a one-man fight against a crude and stupid world. Claude Debussy, in Paris, assumed an antipopulist stance in the years before 1900 and not coincidentally broke away from conventional tonality in the same period. But Schoenberg took the most drastic steps, and perhaps more important, he set forth an elaborate teleology of musical history, a theory of irreversible progress, to justify his actions. The Faust metaphor honors the dread that Schoenberg’s juggernaut inspired in early listeners.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Schoenberg’s music no longer sounds so alien. It has radiated outward in unpredictable ways, finding alternative destinies in bebop jazz (the glassy chords of Thelonious Monk have a Schoenbergian tinge) and on movie soundtracks (horror movies need atonality as they need shadows on the walls of alleys). With the modernist revolution splintered into many factions, with composers gravitating back to tonality or moving on to something else, Schoenberg’s music no longer carries the threat that all music will sound like this. Still, it retains its Faustian aura. These intervals will always shake the air; they will never become second nature. That is at once their power and their fate.
Vienna 1900
In his early stories Thomas Mann produced several lively portraits of a widespread turn-of-the-century type, the apocalyptic aesthete. The story “At the Prophet’s,” written in 1904, begins with an ironic ode to artistic megalomania:
Strange regions there are, strange minds, strange realms of the spirit, lofty and spare. At the edge of large cities, where street lamps are scarce and policemen walk by twos, are houses where you mount til you can mount no further, up and up into attics under the roof, where pale young geniuses, criminals of the dream, sit with folded arms and brood; up into cheap studios with symbolic decorations, where solitary and rebellious artists, inwardly consumed, hungry