To Boulez and Beyond: Music in Europe since "The Rite of Spring" (review)

To Boulez and Beyond: Music in Europe since The Rite of Spring. By Joan Peyser. New York: Billboard Books, 1999. [xvii, 382 p. ISBN 0-8230-7875-2. $24.95.]

In To Boulez and Beyond: Music in Europe since "The Rite of Spring," Joan Peyser has combined two earlier books: The New Music: The Sense behind the Sound (New York: Delacorte Press, 1971) and Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma (London: Cassell, 1977). The former "describes the lives and works of Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky and Edgard Varèse" (New Music, vi); the latter extends the life-and-works approach to Pierre Boulez. Peyser adds a final chapter, bringing the Boulez story up to date, and an afterword for reflection on the contemporary music scene. At the outset of the new, composite book, she cites Paul Henry Lang for shaping her method, by "shift[ing] the emphasis away from the traditional approach--examining the details within a score--and towards a view of music in the context of cultural history" (p. vii). Peyser, however (perhaps emulating Jacques Barzun, the book's dedicatee) is more oriented toward histories of ideas and authors than detailed cultural analysis. And by her own description, she aspires to be modern music's Kitty Kelly as much as its Jacques Barzun: "I continued to press for a more psychological way of approaching history. All of this took place in the 1950s, more than twenty-five years before the burgeoning of the full disclosure biography that swept American publishing in the 1980s and 1990s" (ibid.). To Boulez and Beyond does, indeed, offer copious "disclosures": a "double suicide pact" between Boulez and a mysterious romantic liaison; Boulez's alcohol consumption at dinner ("several cocktails, the better part of a bottle of wine, a cognac, and two or three scotches" [p. 281]); Varèse's vasectomy; Schoenberg's overwhelming numerological superstitions. Framing all this, the introduction and concluding chapters provide broad generalizations about contemporary culture and its discontents.

The subtitle of this compilation, however, portends something even more comprehensive, and the book's omissions are perplexing. Only one Italian composer (Luciano Berio) makes an appearance, and then almost entirely as an "F.O.P." ("Friend of Pierre"). Among the British, only the young Thomas Adès surfaces in the introduction, and he is there to exemplify a presumably transitory aesthetic approach that will not "wipe out Schoenberg's idea and serve as a model for the music to come" (p. xvi). But what, then, is "Schoenberg's idea"? And in what sense is this a book about "music in Europe since The Rite of Spring"?

Peyser describes the book's trajectory and implicitly addresses these questions in the introduction:

To Boulez and Beyond: Music in Europe Since The Rite of Spring tells the story of how Schoenberg's secreting of his own powerful passions, corseting them through his carefully constructed methods, led Stravinsky and a long line of composers to where we are today: anticipating an art that has more in common with the medieval period than with anything we have known since the beginning of the Renaissance. All indications suggest it will be music of low intensity, not individual but communal, characterized by an anonymity that Boulez says he covets today." (p. xvii)

The rhetoric here is dramatic, and the domain vast--so much so that it is hard to know where to begin a response. Peyser's opposition of "passion" and "method" seems forced; so, surely, does the distillation of Schoenberg's achievement to the "secreting of powerful passions." The author's subsequent discussion of the two titanic composers emphasizes dialectical opposition and overt competition rather than any form of genealogical connection. Moreover, she argues for continuity between Stravinsky's pre- and postserial "formalism," which undermines the genealogical tie to Schoenberg. Later, Peyser characterizes Boulez (as she has both Schoenberg and Stravinsky) as hypercompetitive and egomaniacal; so Boulez's apparent "coveting" of...