Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds

1. Setting the Scene: Grandiose Symphonics and the Trouble with Art

1 chapter 1 Setting the Scene Grandiose Symphonics and the Trouble with Art Within the period 1890–1914, and especially in the Germanspeaking lands, modernism chiefly manifested itself . . . as a radical intensification of means toward accepted or traditional ends (or at least toward ends that could be so described). That is why modernism of this early vintage is perhaps best characterized as maximalism. The cultural phase . . . was called the fin de siècle not only because it happened to coincide with the end of a century, but also because it reflected apocalyptic presentiments. . . . The acceleration of stylistic innovation, so marked as to seem not just a matter of degree but one of actual kind, requiring a new “periodization ,” looks now, from the vantage-point of the next fin de siècle, to have been perhaps more a matter of inflated rhetoric than of having new things to say. —Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music Having invoked the autobiographical mode as a tool in my introduction, I should confess at once that this book is one in which I intend to indulge my passion for this period of Western musical history that I love and which, I suspect, many secretly cherish even as they avow that they probably shouldn’t. As we have seen, it has accordingly been labelled transitional , decadent, over-inflated, and characterized by a desire always to be satisfying what Richard Taruskin has described as its apparently obsessive drive toward “maximalism.”1 In putting it this way—by confessing a more than modestly scholarly interest in a period so weighted with the concrete boots of critical put-downs—I inevitably invoke the politics of 2 | Setting the Scene my subject even as I nervously prepare my apologetics for an era that is additionally awkward in that it fits no neat chronological box. Too many “periods” overlap here, across stretches of two adjacent centuries. When these thoughts were originally presented as a series of public lectures, I perhaps eccentrically, but deliberately, described the era from which my examples were drawn as “the age of Leverkühn.” The reference is to the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn, whom Thomas Mann offered up in his 1946 novel Doktor Faustus as a sacrificial victim to the inexorable rise of high musical modernism of the “difficult,” Schoenbergian kind. Since it is also a difficult novel that is as much admired as read, I should explain that Leverkühn was born in 1885 and died in 1940. The “difficulty” of the high modernist works that crown his tragic career, and which were meticulously imagined by Thomas Mann, was closely related to that of music by real-life composers like Schoenberg and Stravinsky; indeed, Leverkühn develops a synthetic compositional technique so like Schoenberg’s technique of “composition with twelve tones” that the novel’s publication led to rancorous exchanges between Mann and Schoenberg which resulted in the former eventually agreeing to include at the back of all subsequent copies an explicit acknowledgment that the technique apparently alluded to was “in truth the intellectual property” of Schoenberg.2 The difficulty of such music stemmed directly from its avoidance of the more conventional harmonic and melodic manners employed in late-romantic works that were being positioned by Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School Marxist philosopher and critic who was Mann’s adviser on Doctor Faustus, as exemplifying the troublingly manipulative and ideologically compromised excesses of Wagnerian and postWagnerian symphonic and operatic music. Modernist and left-wing critics like Adorno considered such music to be commodified false consciousness , designed for easy consumption; what was being consumed they associated directly with the problems and ideology of an imperial, culturally bourgeois Europe rolling toward and through the revelatory disaster of the First World War. We “know where it all led,” as commentators have been prone to put it, with darkly knowing emphasis. Late-romantic musical manners, as I shall call them, were thus critically consigned to guilty historical irrelevancy, and perhaps worse things still in the decades of fascism. Interwar modernists and avant-garde artists seemed advisedly to be seeking a different direction and different goals. They too nevertheless owed much to Romanticism, whose contradictory character I invoked in the double image that appeared on posters figure 1. Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer above the Mists, c. 1818 (Kunsthalle, Hamburg), overlaid with an artist’s impression, from the London Illustrated News, 9 September 1865, of “Franz...