Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds

6. The Bitter Truth of Modernism: A Late-Romantic Story

140 Some scene setting is required for my final engagement with late-romanticism in one of its more reactive and perhaps terminal modes. Here a late-romanticism that has taken critical self-awareness to a point where, as in the first movement of Korngold’s symphony, it seems almost to enact its own invalidation and submit to the linear “history of modern music” which it has been my aim to problematize. But the late-romantic crisis involved here, like the post–First World War “Opernkrise” that it shadowed, was located in the interwar years, its outcomes terminally chapter 6 The Bitter Truth of Modernism A Late-Romantic Story Moses: Shall Aron, my mouth, fashion this image? Then I have fashioned an image too, false as an image must be. Thus I am defeated! Thus all was but madness that I believed before, And can and must not be given voice. O word, thou word, that I lack! —Moses, speaking the final lines of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, 1928–32 Starkman: Rosita, look! I sense Romanticism— It isn’t dead yet! Enthralling, gripping, I prophesy . . . Rosita: Oh shut up! —A critic in Schreker’s Christophorus, 1925–29, act 2, scene 51 The Bitter Truth of Modernism | 141 threatened, unsupported by factions or followers. Given its often localized , specifically conditioned nature, and the enormity of contemporary world-historical events, this late-romantic crisis was less widely noticed than those mythologized musical-modernist ones supposedly marked by the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps and Schoenberg’s Viennese “Skandalkonzert” in that same year.2 In order to understand events nearly two decades later, as experienced by one composer of the period, it is worth invoking the undoubted richness and almost chaotic diversity of the culture of “Weimar” Germany between the wars, even as it headed toward disaster. Here, after all, was where the purveyors of late-romanticism could expect to meet (and did meet) the harshest and most articulate of their public critics in a musical culture as replete with criticism, journalism, and opinions as it was with orchestras, concert halls, and opera houses, not to mention cinemas, nightclubs, operetta and vaudeville theaters. Audiences were inevitably multiplying and fragmenting. My final subject , Franz Schreker, had in fact taken early Weimar period operagoers by storm with his richly erotic, veristic demonstrations of creative and psychosexual boldness in works whose settings and music glowed with a kind of magic-realist color. This his orchestra famously produced in tones that ranged from the apocalyptically “expressionist” to the most subtle experiments in late-romantic timbral alchemy, creating sounds that glistened and luminesced in extraordinary ways. Schreker’s investment in the trappings of what could easily be put down to late-romantic nostalgia and decadence was certainly beginning to inspire more or less fond lampoons by his own composition students in the mid-1920s—but their fashion-conscious levity was unwittingly aligned with more dangerous forms of critical denunciation in a world where even music criticism could slip with threatening ease into explicitly political gear.3 After dismissive reviews of his opera Irrelohe in 1924, Schreker, the composition teacher who could turn his hand to many styles, responded to what he clearly saw (earlier than Korngold in Vienna) to be a decisive change in the cultural-political climate and the potential reconstitution of his audience. New Music was in fashion; it was the era of the International Society for Contemporary Music and a host of festivals devoted to music variously new and old, sometimes both together. The grand Romantic style of “art”-earnestness was at the same time being challenged by a new metropolitan fashion- and style-conscious embrace of mass cultural manners and sounds, whether in Brecht’s high-minded political Lehrstücke for the common man or in satirical cabaret songs 142 | The Bitter Truth of Modernism that embraced both decadence and modernity with wry irony. And then there were the “Zeitopern” (literally, “contemporary operas”) exemplified by Schreker’s pupil Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf of 1927. That opera’s programmatic “replacement” of the old-style glacier- and Nature-inspired composer Max by the black jazz violinist Jonny, who would strike up the dance embarkation number as they all boarded the train to America at the end, thematized something of the later Weimar fantasy—be it ironic or genuine. It played to a desire for modern urban escapism into...