Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds

2. Pessimism, Ecstasy, and Distant Voices: Listening to Late-Romanticism

23 chapter 2 Pessimism, Ecstasy, and Distant Voices Listening to Late-Romanticism I looked at those Beethoven lovers, sitting there goggle-eyed and exclaiming: “That’s by our Beethoven. It’s a German work. There’s a double fugue in the last movement.” . . . Others were graphic: “The symphony represented the story of the origins of man—first chaos, then the divine ‘Let there be light!’ And the sun rose upon the first human, who was delighted with such magnificence—in short the whole first chapter of the Pentateuch!” I grew angrier—and quieter. And how they all eagerly scanned their texts and finally applauded! I seized Eusebius by the arm and dragged him down the steps past the smiling faces. —Robert Schumann, “Florestan’s Shrovetide Oration Delivered after a Performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” 18351 One way to challenge oppressive historical narratives is to propose alternatives, albeit in the spirit of dialectical debate rather than of crude iconoclasm. Instead of seeking “modernist” impulses in the music of late-Romanticism (prejudged otherwise to be a manifestation of ‘decadence ’ or ‘maximalism’), we might, for example, propose that official European Modernism was itself entirely a late manifestation of Romanticism : from the perspective of the audience it was perhaps even a late, decadent phase of Romanticism. The modernists may have worn the patched jacket of the suburban intellectual rather than the silk dressing gown of the metropolitan aesthete, but the well-rehearsed oppositional 24 | Pessimism, Ecstasy, and Distant Voices binary between modernists and romantics could be culturally clarified as one in which each side constructed the other as irrelevant, on grounds which included social affiliation, class, and political sympathies. Adorno ’s New Music of the early twentieth century might similarly be recognized as no more nor less a function of the dialectic of Enlightenment than had been Romanticism itself. W.H. Wackenroder and E.T.A. Hoffmann had by 1800 already established a conceptual and potentially ironic distance between art as idea, even art as experienced, and art as a form of cultural practice and productive force. This binary already rested less upon an oppositional tension between styles than on a creative one between art and the audience on which it depended, out of whose ranks it would now be renewed without the sanction of external authority. The critical force of the ironic conceptual binary between art as idea and art as practice, often linked exclusively to “modernism,” remained active within Romanticism even as it advanced into its late phase, acquiring in varying proportions characteristics of both “decadence ” and populism. The forms in which its decline was represented, lamented, or even mocked still spoke to and relied upon a comparatively popular or mass audience. Thomas Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach and Adrian Leverkühn— characters selected from either end of Mann’s career, and of our period that spans the twentieth-century’s two great wars, share the knowledge that already burdened Wackenroder’s Joseph Berglinger as he laboriously traversed the boundary between the receivers and the practitioners of music. Both were, or became, “artists,” seekers after artistic perfection , who, as a result, became disabled in some way as participants in normal social life and thus grew aware of the folly of aesthetic idealism or (in Leverkühn’s case) its ancient proximity to the Devil’s business . What Aschenbach (in Death in Venice in 1911) and Leverkühn (in Doctor Faustus in 1946) tended to lose, however, in their more abstracted and dysfunctional devotion to forms of aesthetic idealism within a narrative framework of decline, was Berglinger’s lively memory of overwhelming, socially situated aesthetic experience as the site on which that idealism was forged, as was their affinity with “the decadent ,” who might appear to be its emblematic guardian. Sometimes the line between the decadent and the artist was blurred, each a performative function of the other. A curious story of covered tracks and selfhatred emerges here. We should not forget that it was, ironically, as an impoverished and socially aspiring Romantic art-escapist that Berglinger learned his haughty disdain for the “masses,” for his fellow music Pessimism, Ecstasy, and Distant Voices | 25 enthusiasts. Similarly, it was as members of the audience at a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1835 that Schumann’s “Band of David” would learn to scorn and distance themselves from their fellow listeners, seen as so many Philistines, so many ignorant burghers, social...