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  • German Modernism: Music and the Arts
  • Nick Chadwick
German Modernism: Music and the Arts. By Walter Frisch. pp. x + 322. (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2005, £29.95. ISBN 0-520-24301-3.)

This book is a study of relationships between music and the other arts in the German-speaking lands between 1880 and 1920. Although it is often the practice of writers on music of this period to regard composers maturing in the 1880s and 1890s as leading from Romanticism to modernism, this is not Walter Frisch's purpose here. As he states (p. 1): 'It is the goal of the present book to isolate heuristically the four decades straddling 1900—to give them their due, so to speak, without seeing them as "transitional", as being on the way from Romanticism to modernism.' In this respect, his approach can be compared with that of his The Early Works of [End Page 658] Arnold Schoenberg 1893–1908 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), which similarly considers Schoenberg's early works primarily for their own sake, not for their historical significance.

Frisch starts with a discussion of what he calls 'ambivalent modernism', an outlook which can be seen at its most extreme in the case of Wagner, whose musical 'progressiveness' was countered by his reactionary political and cultural views and his hatred of 'modernism', which he saw as un-German and Jewish-inspired. Indeed, in the period covered by this book Wagner remained the chief operatic influence, even in 'modernist' works showing the literary influence of naturalism, such as Schreker's Der ferne Klang; although Schreker's musical style in this opera (though not in those that followed, especially Der Schatzgräber) owes little to Wagner, the musical technique employs leitmotivs in what is essentially a Wagnerian manner. Frisch is probably justified in his opinion that Der ferne Klang 'represents the most thoroughgoing attempt at German operatic naturalism in the years around 1900' (pp. 78–9). In his discussion of the opera Frisch draws heavily, but not uncritically, on Ulrike Kienzle's study Das Trauma hinter dem Traum: Franz Schrekers Oper Der ferne Klang und die Wiener Moderne (Schliengen, 1998) and in particular on her comparison of Grete's Forest Scene at the end of Act I with Schoenberg's Erwartung. He shrewdly observes that 'Schreker's musical language for the "psychogram" of Grete's Forest Scene seems too anodyne to be as path-breaking as Kienzle asserts' (p. 82). It could be said that the most 'naturalistic' element in Der ferne Klang is not the music, for all its originality and interest, but Schreker's libretto, with its contemporary setting and, particularly in Acts I and III, frequently colloquial conversational tone.

In seeking to identify musical examples analogous to naturalism in literature, Frisch discusses, in addition to such obvious verismo operas as D'Albert's Tiefland and Schillings's Mona Lisa, Strauss's setting of Karl Henckell's poem 'Lied des Steinklöpfers', which is one of his songs to words by naturalist poets. Strauss's Salome may seem far from naturalism, but Frisch regards the music for Herod in Scene iv of the opera as 'probably . . . one of the most advanced psychodramatic portraits in opera up to this point in history. It is here that we see clearly the kind of "new psychology", located in the realm of the senses and nerves, of which [Hermann] Bahr wrote' (p. 85). As Frisch recognizes, it is music such as this, rather than Grete's Forest Scene in Der ferne Klang, which bears comparison with Erwartung. He observes that although in both Salome and its companion one-acter Elektra the action unfolds in 'real time', Strauss the composer sometimes 'stretches' time, as in Salome's closing monologue, 'where we are pulled inexorably inside her mind in what Kienzle would consider a musico-dramatic psychogram' (p. 83). (Another example of 'stretched' time, not mentioned by Frisch, might be the extended orchestral interlude between Scenes iii and iv of Salome; since Salome remains on stage throughout, it seems reasonable to regard this section as a 'psychogram' of Salome's mental state rather than merely a commentary on the action.)

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