An Ambivalent Commemoration: Wagner at 200 (Part 4 – The Wagner Question)

Concerning this sorcerer, dark things are said. No one has seen him: he is known only by his power. That power is magic. The castle is his work…
Wagner’s prose draft for Parsifal, regarding the antagonist Klingsor (1865)

I hate you Richard Wagner… But I hate you on my knees.
Leonard Bernstein, from an unfinished documentary on Wagner (1985)

The party’s over. The day is past. Composer Richard Wagner has passed the bicentenary mark, his milestone birthday providing a space in which to reflect on his significance. A man who wrote unforgettable music, which inspires either great devotion or revulsion. A man whose influence on other genres, even other artforms (including literature and cinema), continues to resonate. And, on top of that, a man whose attitudes towards Jews and influence on Adolf Hitler continue to place him at the centre of a longstanding question: Can we separate the value of “great works” from creators who, to varying degrees, fall short of being great people?

This brings up the notion of judging others. If I may employ a bit of bumper sticker theology (provided you’re Christian): “Christians aren’t perfect. They’re just forgiven.” Also, after he moved in with the Griffin family of Quahog, Rhode Island, O.J. Simpson asked an angry mob a similar question.

So who are we to judge others for their imperfections?

On the other hand, some people are less perfect than others, because the things they do (e.g. rape, murder, genocide) go beyond the mundane fuck-ups we all make. While he didn’t directly commit any of the former (as far as we know), Wagner’s own judgments on what constituted “imperfection” went beyond the latter and had long-term implications. So it’s difficult not to judge him. Besides, if we were perfect, we wouldn’t judge others, anyway. To further complicate matters, some argue that his works contain coded anti-Semitism. Not only in the characters who possess stereotypically “Jewish” traits, which Wagner’s contemporaries supposedly would have understood, but also aspects of the music itself.

Nonetheless, while Wagner’s anti-Semitism is undeniable, evidence regarding the extent of his influence on Hitler remains vague. To further complicate matters, some of the most unlikely people become some of his biggest fans and advocates, perhaps even apologists. (For what it’s worth, Theodor Herzl, who was instrumental in the Zionist movement, drew inspiration from Wagner.) As musicians or audience members, some vie for tickets to the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the metaphorical magic castle where only Wagner’s works are performed. Even in Wagner’s lifetime, the composer could honestly claim that some of his best friends were Jewish.

One can find a couple of variations on the Bernstein quotation that headlines this posting. Unfortunately, even on YouTube, not a trace of the unfinished documentary seems to exist for public viewing. Whatever form it takes, the quotation summarizes the attitude that haunts many who fall under the spell of Wagner’s music. In her Wagner bicentennial posting Dear Richard, I need to tell you something…, author and music journalist Jessica Duchen underscores the “it’s complicated” aspect of loving Wagner… or at least his music. After all, if the music is so beautiful, so sensitive, shouldn’t the person be as well? Or is it all part of a game, where Wagner essentially remains the winner? As Duchen pointedly writes:

I go through all this, Richard; I soul-search, I agonise; yet I still love you. You can’t help who you love, you can’t help how you feel. It’s pure chemistry; and both physically and spiritually it’s beyond your will… It’s always impossible, if you try to rationalise it; it’s utterly transgressive; yet it’s impossible to resist.

Loving you breaks all our taboos.

And you’d have wanted it that way, because that’s how it is for your characters and you know, as an artist and craftsman, that the taboos heighten emotion. So we don’t just love you – we become slaves to you, because of the insecurity, the fear, the taboo-busting passion you arouse, and it is manipulative and frightening and terribly, terribly beautiful.

Don’t hate the player…

I’ve trod this ground before, mainly in relation to the bizarre usage of Wagner in an anti-Obama advertisement put out by the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI).

In the aforementioned posting, I provide numerous examples of the complicated relationship between Wagner and Jews who love his music, including musicians like Bernstein and Daniel Barenboim, as well as Stephen Fry and Larry David (or at least the character on Curb Your Enthusiasm).

Susan Buck-Morrs’ article Aesthetics and Anaesthetics (1992) provides further food for thought not only about Wagner, but also “all-encompassing” environments in general. Focusing on the nineteenth century, it discusses parallel developments in industrialization, medicine (especially anaesthetsia), and the notion of “phantasmagoria.” The term may encompass a variety of tools and environments where illusions reign supreme, ranging from magic lanterns to “immersive” environments (including the kinds with which we’re familiar today). While phantasmagorias generally favour one sense, multiple senses can engage with such environments in tandem. Drawing upon musicologist Theodor Adorno’s critique of Wagner, Buck-Morrs postulates how the composer’s interest in the “total artwork” acts as a form of aesthetic anaesthetsia. Based on this argument, one could easily say that the Bayreuth Festspielhaus acted as a sensual refuge from the social conditions created by industrialization… the twist being that industrialization helped bring about their creation. Whether or not one agrees with her assessment, Buck-Morrs makes a claim that’s worthy of contemplation: Wagnerian music drama floods the senses and fuses them… in a [quoting Adorno] ‘permanent invitation to intoxication, as a form of oceanic regression’ (24).

If one extrapolates this idea to other “all-encompassing” forms, are we also in danger of being seduced by the agendas of aesthetic sorcerers in various media, who count on the “anaesthetics” they employ to lure us to their wares? All as we try to “get away” from the struggles of our everyday lives? What horrors, even distorted halls of mirrors, could such anaesthetics give rise to? In more recent times, the U.S. military appropriated the idea of the helicopter attack from Apocalypse Now in raiding houses during the Iraq War.

Of course, this also assumes that such environments make us passive, a claim that Adorno and various of his acolytes have historically liked to make about our engagement with various media. Of course, one can easily discern a kind of judgmental intellectual superiority, based on flimsy evidence. How do they define “passivity,” anyway? And what if our desire for so-called “escape” is actually the best way to confront some of our deepest fears and desires… as some actors do when purportedly portraying “someone else?” Put another way, what if escapism isn’t actually a form of escape? What if listening to Wagner can be a way of not denying extreme contradictions, but rather of confronting them head-on?

This all returns to the central question: How can a man with such attitudes (including not only his anti-Semitisim, but also his less-than-endearing ways of treating people in general) compose such beautiful music? I can’t purport to answer this question, at least not definitively. Each side will have its own claims, and they’ll be more than willing to hurl abuse at each other. So those of us who wrestle with Wagner… and, more broadly, perhaps even our own favourite “problematic,” self-contradictory artists… can only be left to sort things out for ourselves. That said, different sides making an attempt to listen to each other seems a good place to start, at least for some modicum of mutual understanding. Perhaps at the next milestone commemoration of Wagner, whatever form it takes, there will be some movement in that direction. But no matter what, the spectre of Wagner will continue to haunt us, because what it symbolizes remains so compelling.

Hasta la vista, Tonality

We probably all know the basic story of a guy named Arnold, who immigrated from Austria and ended up settling in California. Many of you are probably thinking about the musclebound movie star, who became the state’s governor, and who now has a new “tell all” memoir out. However, there’s someone else to whom the same first sentence could apply. His last name even starts with the same three letters. One main difference is that he didn’t have an affair with, for instance, Brigitte Nielsen. This other Austrian Arnold influenced a range of musicians, including a composer of cartoon shorts, various jazz musicians, and a genre-crossing Icelandic singer-songwriter.

Even if they’re not keen on classical music, many people have at least heard in passing the names of composers who have become well-established within the genre: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky, just to name a few. However, even among a number of people who self-identify as fans of the genre, some more “recent” composers are approached with apprehension. One of them is Arnold Schoenberg, who was born in 1874, and passed away in 1951 (which is why I use the word “recent” advisedly).

Schoenberg was a near-contemporary of late German Romantic composers like Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, who created relatively “lush” music, somewhat (though not entirely) similar to what you might hear at the movies. In fact, a number of Hollywood film composers during the 1930s and 1940s (including some who immigrated from German-speaking lands), drew upon both for inspiration. Schoenberg initially created works in a similar style. This is quite apparent in his earlier pieces, as in the string piece Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night,” 1899) and the full orchestral work Pelleas und Melisande (1903).

By 1909, personal crises and emerging aesthetic changes in other arts (such as writing and painting) started to orient Schoenberg in a different direction. Atonality, perhaps best described as the lack of a set musical key from which to establish tension and resolution within a piece, became a defining feature in Schoenberg’s works. For this reason, atonal works can create a sense of unease for many people, which probably accounts for his relative lack of popularity; there’s tension without the implied promise of release. Schoenberg’s atonal technique appears in his Expressionistic piece Erwartung (“Anticipation” or “Expectation”), as well as compositions with vaguely nondescript and clinical titles like Three Pieces for Piano and Five Pieces for Orchestra.

Not that other composers, such as Mahler and Strauss, didn’t use atonal techniques. They just weren’t as hardcore as Schoenberg. Furthermore, the lack of a tonal centre seemed a reflection of his inner turmoil (not too different from Mahler’s more ambivalent position between tonality and atonality), as well as perhaps that of Europe. Within a few years, boiling tensions among the continent’s major powers and growing nationalism exploded into the mass mechanized death of World War I. By the time it was over, many well-established imperial powers (including Schoenberg’s Austria-Hungary) ultimately collapsed.

By invoking the powers of atonality, Schoenberg claimed that he was engaging in an “emancipation of the dissonance.” Less charitable folks might say that he tried to “have his cake and eat it, too,” as he claimed that his seemingly clean break from previous composition practices remained part of the overall tradition of “Austro-German” composition. Tonality, in other words, was clapped out, and music needed to move beyond its confines to remain fresh (Something only a “German” could do.) After growing weary of atonality, Schoenberg developed the more orderly “Twelve Tone” system in the 1920s, wherein all twelve pitches on the chromatic scale are treated equally.

With their apparent promises of emancipation and egalitarianism, the quasi-political aspects one could read into Schoenberg’s compositional techniques were treated a bit more literally by some of his admirers. Sociologist, musicologist, and aspiring composer Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), who was part of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School (which actively rejected oppressive Soviet-style Communism), was one of them. He praised the dissonance in Schoenberg’s compositions for “confronting” the alienation brought about by living within capitalist society. For Adorno, this accounted for Schoenberg’s relative lack of appeal. It wasn’t that the music hurt listeners’ ears. Rather, people couldn’t handle what the music seemed to imply [for Adorno]. A truth that, per Adorno, more tonal composers tried to sweep under the carpet by “resolving” such internal tensions, remaining complicit in maintaining the status quo.

While Schoenberg appreciated and formed a loyal following, best exemplified by the composers of the Second Viennese School, he usually found Adorno’s extrapolations exasperating. Especially near the end of his life, the composer had justifiable concerns about the idolatry, perhaps even dogma, forming around him, both from Adorno and a number of others. (Speaking of which, Schoenberg’s only opera was Moses und Aron.) In a letter written in late 1949, Schoenberg excoriated Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music, “this blathering jargon, which so warms the hearts of philosophy professors when they introduce a new awkward expression.” And this was a book that actually praised Schoenberg at the expense of his rival Igor Stravinsky! Furthermore, as an interview from 1949 demonstrates, Schoenberg doesn’t come across quite as harshly or iconoclasticly as one might caricature him, whether among his detractors or his own followers.

Schoenberg’s influence is quite vast. It goes beyond the confines of literalist acolytes typically associated with western art music, who discouraged their students from working with tonal composition techniques, and whose vehement stance in that regard likely backfired on them and (by unfortunate extension) Schoenberg. One composer who cited Schoenberg as an influence was Arkansas-born Scott Bradley (1891-1977), perhaps best known for lending his talents to MGM cartoons during the 1940s. Yes, we’re talking about the predecessors of Itchy and Scratchy, as well as the frenetic irreverence of Tex Avery (which you can hear bits of in this well-known bit of hilarity):

Thinking about something like Erwartung, one could imagine the effectiveness of his techniques in conveying horror as well. As Alex Ross aptly states in The Rest Is Noise, “horror movies need atonality as they need shadows on the walls of alleys” (38, 2007). Ross also mentions jazz as another type of music that can echo Schoenberg, specifically proffering Thelonious Monk’s “glassy chords” as an example. It’s also apparent in Homage to Elliott Carter and Arnold Schoenberg, performed here by composer Donal Fox:

And now, finally, for the main reason why I posted this, as well as its relevance to genre crossover. This month marks the 100th anniversary of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, another piece from Schoenberg’s atonal period.

For a 1996 performance at the Verbier Festival, conductor Kent Nagano asked singer-songwriter Björk to perform the Sprechstimme role. (“Speaking and singing,” one example of which is Lili von Shtupp’s “I’m Tired” from Blazing Saddles.) For those who know Björk, it’s difficult to categorize her primary musical genre. This is reflected in her Wikipedia entry, which lists around 10 different ones. What’s more, one of Björk’s songs even makes an allusion to Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night. Throughout “Hidden Place,” she samples a series of notes from that work a number of times.

Luckily, this website provides specifics by including a link to both pieces, saving everyone some work in making the connection.

If only there was some way to make these kinds of relationships, whether musical or extramusical, more readily apparent. I won’t say that it would be as “revolutionary” or “emancipating” as Schoenberg’s music, but it’d be quite a departure from the more conventional structures of recommender systems that stubbornly remain in place today. In the meantime, I have quite a number of readings to do to figure out how to model a broad theoretical framework, which could inform the development of such a system. With comprehensive examinations coming up soon, the number of postings might be spare. But, as the other Austrian Arnold once said…

Also Recommended

Bernstein, Leonard. 1973 (1992). The Unanswered Question: The Twentieth Century Crisis (linked at 25:45; extends into discussion about Mahler, as well as Schoenberg disciple Alban Berg).

Ross, Alex. 2007. Authors@Google: Alex Ross (linked at 7:56; about seven minutes specifically on Schoenberg).

Ross, Alex. 2007. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux:
Doctor Faust (pp. 33-73). Brave New World (pp. 355-410).

Let’s Do the Time Warp: Older Music in Newer Contexts

Before reading this posting, think for a few moments about the music of your youth. Here are a few questions to guide you:

• What did you listen to as an adolescent, or in your early twenties?
• More broadly, what music pervaded your zeitgeist…the spirit of your time? Were you aware of that music?
• Did you ever feel that your musical tastes were out of step with everyone else’s?
• Did any music from previous times, such as the moving target of “classic rock,” ever resonate with you?

Based on personal observations, whether in-person conversations or Facebook threads, the music of one’s youth becomes a frame of reference for contemplating one’s place within… well, the world, maybe even the universe. The first two questions pertain to that notion. For some people, it can be a bit different, as the other two questions imply. As music journalist Alex Ross recounts in his 2004 New Yorker piece Listen to This (also reprinted in a 2010 collection of essays by the same name), he listened almost exclusively to classical music when he was growing up, hardly even considering the merits of popular music until attending university. In many ways, I can relate to Ross’ story. Possibly because of my own classical inclinations, I have occasionally pondered an interesting temporal trick: How a work composed one or two hundred years earlier could also be part of a broader contemporary zeitgeist. I know that makes little sense. The people who committed those notes to paper have been gone for decades, perhaps even a few centuries.

I started thinking a bit more deeply about this possibility recently, especially in relation to my research. When we think about music from a specific year (say as an extra-musical facet), could it include interpretations of works from many years before? The inconsistencies of dates on my iTunes account, sometimes derived from metadata found on compact discs, clearly illustrates this puzzle; it could be the original recording date, the digital remastering date, or the date of composition (which is relatively rare). Combine it with the notion of older music having greater personal resonance than newer music, and it gets even more confusing.
The catalyst for such contemplation derives from a quote found in Music and Mind in Everyday Life, written by Eric Clarke, Nicola Dibben, and Stephanie Pitts. It states the following within the third chapter “Expression and Communication in Performance”:

Recordings from different times and places demonstrate that expressive performance cannot be divorced from its cultural and historical context. Historical recordings of classical music are particularly interesting, because although the musical materials are constant, the performance styles can be radically different… In fact… musical structure, performance conventions, the emotional ‘narrative’ that a performer discovers or invents, the possibilities and limitations of the instrument, and the performer’s own engagement with it are all tightly bound together in a complex web of interactions, as the psychologist Patrik Juslin has tried to indicate in a model of expressive performance (p. 45).

I cannot speak about the perspectives of performers per se, but I can say that I tend to associate certain classical recordings with my adolescence. And not even necessarily recordings I heard at that time. Browsing through the selection of recordings at Harmony House in Toledo, Ohio, provided a heady contrast, or perhaps even complement, to the rock music playing in the background. In 1989, I bought my first compact disc (an RCA digital remastering of the legendary Artruo Toscanini conducting Wagner) at that store. That same year, Eva Marton performed the title role of Richard Strauss’ Salome at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Whether it was recorded from the radio, bootlegged, or whatever else, I very recently discovered a two-part upload of the final scene.

Even though I didn’t attend the performance, it brings to mind memories of that year: moving from the countryside into town; my sophomore and junior years of high school; the girls I pined for; various popular culture artifacts like Tim Burton’s Batman (possibly because of its own grimly comedic aspect, with Jack Nicholson’s Joker terrorizing a fictional analogue to NYC); and the historical significance of events that occurred later that year, which I’ll discuss in a bit. But what else was in the air musically that year? The top song that comes to mind is Madonna’s highly controversial “Like a Prayer,” whose parallels to Salome I outline in a previous posting.

In a series of two postings, I also discuss U2’s engagement with the Salome story in the early 1990s, around the same time as a number of new recordings of Strauss’ opera.

One early 1990s performance of the final scene became available four years ago on YouTube. More specifically, it is from the Wiener Staatsoper, with a recording date of 12 December 1991… not long after the release of Nevermind and Achtung Baby.

What was I doing then? Likely panicking about the end of my first term at university, preparing for final exams, looking forward to being home a few weeks during the holidays (during which time I had my wisdom teeth extracted, and attended a home basketball game), and approaching my 19th birthday. Despite the somewhat murky recording quality, those memories can emerge upon hearing the recording, along with fantasies of actually being there… an adolescent Gen Xer wandering around in early-1990s Vienna, with this Salome performance as a capstone, its climax firing my imagination as devastating sonic waves of desire and satiation reverberated throughout the performance hall.

It’s amazing how a recording can throw off our temporal sense, regardless of the time it comes from, or the type of music. How it can summon up memories, and perhaps even daydreams of alternative universes. But is this the kind of thing musicologist and social theorist Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) warned about, whether for old or new recordings? Escapism and sentimental wallowing (per his writings from the late 1930s through early 1940s) possibly acting as a soft-handed way of ensuring maintenance of the status quo? Not enabling music, preferably in the German tradition, to move “forward?” After all, Adorno made clear his disdain for both popular music and works by a number of composers (especially the romantics), due to what he perceived as an emphasis on emotional and/or physiological effect (or “manipulation”) over structural integrity. Given Adorno’s Marxist outlook, he probably would consider such listening practices as forms of temporal alienation, with (at least reading him literally) pretty much all of us who listen to most music being complicit in perpetuating any number of social inequities.

Adorno respected composers whom he identified as prioritizing structure over effect, like Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). He also admired Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) for composing music whose dissonant aspects “confronted” the problems of capitalist society, rather than smooth them over with the conventions of tonality. (Funnily enough, Schoenberg was not a fan of Adorno.) Even though his music is relatively more tonal, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) also became part of Adorno’s orbit of approved composers for similar reasons.

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) also discusses those three composers in The Unanswered Question – Six Talks at Harvard. In this 1973 series, he attempts to apply Chomskyan linguistics to musical structure. Even though Bernstein provides a fair discussion of Schoenberg’s significance to “western art music,” his admiration for Beethoven and Mahler is more evident in assessing his overall career. In 1989, less than a year before he died, Bernstein came to Berlin to lead a Christmas Day concert of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Slightly altering the words to the fourth movement’s “Ode to Joy,” Bernstein changed “joy” to “freedom” (Freude to Freiheit) as a way of commemorating the monumental historical changes symbolized by the collapse of the Berlin Wall. A few years later, U2 incorporated a segment of the fourth movement into the opening of its ZooTV concert before launching into “Zoo Station,” named after the railway station at the Zoological Gardens in Berlin; put another way, a rock band made historically and culturally significant connections between one of its own songs and a classical piece.

Needless to say, especially since they used a fragment, Adorno would not have been pleased with Bono et al.

During the aforementioned Harvard lectures, Bernstein talked in great depth about the significance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Certainly, it had deep personal resonance for him. At least three audio recordings exist, from 1965, 1979 (his sole collaboration with the Berlin Philharmonic), and 1985. A 1971 film documents an interpretation with the Vienna Philharmonic, some of which is folded into Four Ways to Say Farewell (his tour de force analysis of the symphony) and The Unanswered Question. In the latter, Bernstein muses on its significance to the whole of the twentieth century, which he assesses as a “badly-written drama” of greed, hypocrisy, hysteria, genocide, and totalitarianism. The antidotes to the overarching “angel of planetary death” aren’t much better. It being 1973, he mentions a number of general and specific fads from the time, along with a “well-bred paranoia, most recently on display in the high places of Washington, D.C.” (of which Bernstein was on the receiving end). Bernstein even suggests that Mahler sensed these kinds of horrors were impending. I don’t think we can ever truly know if that was the case. Nonetheless, Bernstein found Mahler’s Ninth very much contemporaneously relevant, even if he might have projected some of his own political and personal demons onto it as well.

Returning to the opening series of questions, what do we project upon a specific musical work when we think about its roles in certain time periods? This posting does not purport to hold an answer, but the anecdotal examples herein provide some ways of pondering this idea at a tangle of personal, sociocultural, and political dimensions. It can become even more complicated when one hears a recording of a live performance with deep significance at all of those levels. With that, I’ll leave you with another Mahler 9th story entitled Poignance Measured in Digits, its compelling personal narrative stretching from 1938 to 1989.