Classical music's twentieth-century tragedy

Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise tells the story of what happened to Western classical music in the twentieth century. We all know that the invention of recorded sound around 1900 made possible an extraordinary dissemination of the riches of the classical repertoire – largely composed for the rich and powerful – to the mass of ordinary people. On the gramophone, the radio, television and, subliminally and hence more powerfully, through the movies, the classical sound in all its variants (even the supposedly rebarbative confections of the Second Viennese School) has insinuated itself into the culture at large. Never before have so many people listened to, or liked, so-called classical music. Yet this extraordinary triumph has culminated in a malaise, a feeling, widespread in the musical profession and elsewhere, that classical music is in crisis and that things have never been so bad. Classical music feels abandoned, left behind as history has moved on, sulking in its tent as the real cultural action happens somewhere else.

Ross’s book – which, in a two-pronged attack, puts the history back into music and music back into history – offers many answers to this paradox. In a book packed full of well-chosen and depicted vignettes and anecdotes, two stand out.

In 1904, Richard Strauss, the “anarch of art” as one American critic described him, visited the United States. He was received at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt. He was invited onto the floor of the Senate. How comforting this is for us besieged elitists, who grasp at such contemporary straws as the opera-loving Gordon Brown succeeding the Fender Stratocaster-wielding Blair. Once upon a time, serious music was given its due. Music does of course still have a political platform, a bully pulpit even; but it is pop musicians now who are wooed by political leaders, and classical musicians, with a very few exceptions (Daniel Barenboim springs to mind), who inhabit the margins. Whether political leverage, or cultural influence, were really good for classical music – tempting as it is to want to see the best of art appreciated and deferred to – is another question.

Thirty-eight years after Strauss’s American apotheosis (and some years after his shameful but complex accommodation with the Nazi regime in Germany, masterfully unpicked by Ross), in the midst of the Great Patriotic War, the score of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the “Leningrad”, was flown into that besieged city by Soviet military aircraft. Musicians were recalled from more straightforwardly martial duties on the front line to perform it. German commanders planning to disrupt the performance found themselves pre-empted by “Operation Squall”, a Soviet diversionary manoeuvre. The symphony was relayed over loudspeakers into no man’s land. As Ross puts it, “never in history had a musical composition entered the thick of battle in quite this way: the symphony became a tactical strike against German morale”.

If we were to ask why, at the opening of the twentieth century, and through the horrors of its first five decades, classical music retained such importance, the answer would have to be: Germany. Classical music, music which was more than entertainment, music which demanded reverent attention, and which even made metaphysical claims, was written into the very DNA of German culture. The German question, the political and diplomatic issue of how the German nation fitted into the world, dominated international affairs in the century between the 1848 revolutions and the Second World War. This was reflected in the philosophical and cultural preoccupations of the European elites, rooted as they were in German philosophical conceits and German political anxieties. Hegelianism, Marxism, nationalism, Wagnerism – love them or hate them, they all came from Germany and they framed the terms of debate in philosophy, political theory and music. If Schopenhauer put music at the centre of his philosophy as the most important art, one which uniquely traced the movements of the noumenal will, Wagner responded with music that fascinated and horrified artists in all disciplines. When it came to the great contest of the 1914–18 war, German propagandists like Thomas Mann characterized it as a conflict between the Kultur of Germans and the Zivilisation of their French-led opponents; between, in musical terms, the deep, metaphysical character of the German tradition, and the superficial joie de vivre of the French.

The price paid for classical music’s proximity to power was heavy, and the central chapters of Ross’s book lay bare the moral somersaults composers turned, the degradation into which they sank. The cultural theory which the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century had inherited from the nineteenth gave artists a dangerous potency, the all too useful capacity to become, in Stalin’s words, “engineers of human souls”. Stalin’s amateur interest in classical music – he reputedly owned ninety-three opera recordings, writing critical remarks on his record sleeves – did nothing to protect composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich from the cultural policy of a regime which saw no role for anything that smacked of autonomous art. Shostakovich’s output veered between the cryptic privacy of his chamber music, the crassness of his patriotic cantatas and songs, and the still-contested “irony” of the major public works. Ross’s analysis of the possibility of irony in music is at one and the same time sceptical and appreciative. “To talk about musical irony”, he writes, “we first have to agree what the music appears to be saying, and then we have to agree on what the music is really saying. This is invariably difficult to do.” His concluding advice is that one should “stay alert to multiple levels of meaning”, making Shostakovich’s symphonies, the Fifth or even the supposedly propagandistic Seventh, “rich experience[s]”. The consequence of Ross’s superbly nuanced historical accounts of both Prokofiev’s and Shostakovich’s music is to send one back to the music with new ears.

In any aspirant totalitarian regime, cultural producers like musicians have to be overseen, goaded, persecuted and petted. Hitler’s Germany was different only in that a musical vision of politics was uniquely central to the nightmare that was played out in the Reich between 1933 and 1945. It wasn’t that music was too important not to be politicized, more that politics was music in another form; “Politics aspired to the condition of music, not vice versa”, as Ross puts it. The threatening rhetoric of Hitler’s coded language about the Jews from the Kroll Opera speech of 1939 on the eve of war, and the speeches from the period of the exterminations themselves, are drenched in Wagner, and Ross acutely picks out the references to Parsifal in the Führer’s tirades. Hitler’s very rise to power, his acquisition of the respectability which eased his accession, were eased by the musical culture he shared with the Wagner clan, which supported him from the early 1920s on, and whose fads and tastes – vegetarianism, animal rights, dabbling in Eastern mysticism – he enthusiastically adopted.

For Ross, the Nazi infatuation with music is the crux of his story. If nineteenth-century German politics and philosophy and musical endeavour made classical music unprecedentedly momentous, its implication in the near-annihilation of European civilization by the mid-century robbed it of moral authority, a collapse with which classical music still lives, sixty years on. As Ross points out, trivially but accurately, “when any self-respecting Hollywood archcriminal sets out to enslave mankind, he listens to a little classical music to get in the mood”.

It is Ross’s dissection of the career of Richard Strauss which most tellingly encapsulates classical music’s twentieth-century tragedy. The book opens with the Graz premiere of Salomé in 1906 (it had had its very first performance earlier the previous year in Dresden), conducted by the composer, and attended by Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg, Zemlinsky and Johann Strauss’s widow, but also very probably by a little-known Austrian teenager called Adolf Hitler. By the mid-1930s, Strauss is enthusiastically hailing the new regime: “Thank God, finally a Reich Chancellor who is interested in art!”. By 1942, he is, at once brave and pathetic, demanding entrance at Theresienstadt – “I am the composer Richard Strauss” – to try and rescue his Jewish daughter-in-law’s grandmother. By 1945, he is writing the profoundly disillusioned Metamorphosen and trying to trade on his American fame – “I am the composer of Rosenkavalier and Salomé” – to gain preferential treatment from the occupying American forces. As with Shostakovich, the moral and historical complexities lead one back to the music.

Ross’s broad historical argument, and his moral tale about music and power, occupy the central chapters of the book and inform much of the rest of it. His engagement with Stravinsky, Berg, Schoenberg, Sibelius and Britten is infectious; his accounts of New Deal arts policy, US Army sponsorship of Darmstadt Modernism, or 1960s interactions between art and pop music, are revelatory. As for the music itself, Alex Ross’s brave avoidance of musical notation and brilliant use of metaphorical and descriptive language, means that The Rest is Noise grapples with the actual stuff of music as few other books have done. And if you want to hear the sounds themselves, you can always go to his website at www.therestisnoise.com, and listen.

That’s thrilling, or maybe ‘trilling’, and you started a brand new thread page, lol.

Exciting threads tonight!!

We need to kill the “Western Civ is Dying/Dead” movement.

Humanity survived the 20th Century, and so did Classical Music.

> The local classical music radiostation here, the one and only, down from two 20 years ago, won't even play complete pieces, symphonies or concertoes...

Might I suggest that you try WCLV.com, home of the “Best Band in the Land”, our very own Cleveland Orchestra. They provide four interned feeds, Windows Multicast, Ogg Vorbis 32K, Ogg Vorbis 64K and a MacIntosh friendly feed that also is iTunes capable.

Umm, I’ve been into Classical since I was 22 (39 now), and as far as I’m concerned, we’re in kind of a golden age for classical right now because of the Internet. There are so many places you can download quality classical performances for free, many of them university music departments (Johns Hopkins and Columbia have loads of good classical MP3’s available). Used to, if you wanted classical recordings, you had to join a record club, as your local Sam Goody’s couldn’t be bothered to carry any. Now the Internet has blown that wide open.

WOW!. Thanks.

I highly recommend the Brit band “Sky”, from the early 80s, not to be confused with the country band that came later. Its lineup included John Williams, the guitar virtuoso, not the film composer. Videos here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXTvj9votKg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSk4aVIR5vE

I once read that Hitler sat throught the entire Ring cycle dozens of times. It’s pretty obvious that Wagner influenced him in a big way.

Classical music is music that is sorted by composer; and as long as it's played "correctly", the performer is relatively irrelevant. Pop music is sorted by performer; and when the composer is not the performer him or herself, the composer is usually irrelevant. (If you don't believe these definitions, just look at the way the bins are labeled at the store.)

It seems to me that the "serious" vs. "non-serious" dimension is largely orthogonal to the "classical" vs. "pop" dimension. In my opinion, except for the Baroque hour on Sunday morning, most of the material played on the local "classical" radio station is only one grade above elevator music. When I want to hear highly trained musicians who are serious about what they are doing, I listen to symphonic, progressive and folk metal on the campus radio station.

The Nazis were an extreme extension of trends in conflagrating mysticism with Romantic Nationalism that Wagner was a part of.

I have also heard it argued that realistic art was killed off for half a century precisely because of the appreciation Hitler and Stalin had for it. That is why, so the argument goes, we have had to put up with dots and smears masquerading as art for so long.

I personally think the real reason is because 1.) world leaders came to view art as a weapon, not simply to raise the morale of your own people with positive images, music, etc., but to demoralize the enemy with negative, shapeless, meaningless image and music. And 2.) because of socialism which does not reward true merit but emphasizes "equality" of outcome and advancement based on seniority, cronyism or some other non-merit based criterion.

You can still find outstanding music and art being made out there. You just have to go digging for it. Don't expect our media to point you toward it.

No, sorry. Sturgeon’s Law, on its face value, applies to *everything*. The person to invoke it tacitly agrees that this is so, else they would not have invoked it.

Oddly, they’re in Hollywood and Japan, composing film scores (because the stupid elitists won’t accept any “new” classical-styled music).

Exactly. Some of my favorite 20th/21st century composers are: Richard Rogers, Ennio Morricone, John Williams, and Bill Conti.

When Hollyweird needs a stirring score for one of their propaganda pieces, the talent still exists to execute it.

I have alway thought the violin should have had a premier spot in Rock rather than synthesizers.

It does. The modern pop Country stuff uses a "fiddle" as one of its key instruments. Frankly, it's one of the things I love about Country music.

I wouldn’t say classical performers are irrelevant. Look at all the superstar pianists and violinists there have been over the years. Not to mention singers. A great piece of music can sound completely different under two given performers.

“1.) world leaders came to view art as a weapon, not simply to raise the morale of your own people with positive images, music, etc., but to demoralize the enemy with negative, shapeless, meaningless image and music. “

This certainly wasn’t the case with Hitler and Stalin who banned all ‘unpleasant’ music and wanted bland uplift. Stalin especially had this sort of taste.

I buy classical CDs from a site called Musical Heritage Society. It's like a CD Club, where you have to wave off their next shipment, if you don't want their 'Featured Selection',so you have to pay attention, if you don't want it. I've never had a problem if I forget and receive one that I didn't want, however, I simply don't open it, mark it 'Return Refused', and send it back.

I like to browse their online catalog, and I've found some real gems at the site. One of my favorite 'early music' groups is Sequentia, and I've found some lovely CDs by them at the site, including "Edda", a musical setting of the medieval Norse epic tale, and two I recently bought of the group singing the music of Hildegard of Bingen, a Medieval Abbess. The music is just ethereal.

Oddly, they’re in Hollywood and Japan, composing film scores (because the stupid elitists won’t accept any “new” classical-styled music).

My favorite is Basil Poledouris' score for Conan the Barbarian.

I have alway thought the violin should have had a premier spot in Rock rather than synthesizers.

A couple of years ago, I attended a concert of The Boston Camerata, which does a lot of Medieval and Renaissance music, and just after the Intermission, the director gave a little talk about the instruments played with the songs. One was the vielle, which was a precursor to the violin. The sound is very mellow, and is a wonderful accompaniment to the human voice. The director laughed when he said that when the violin was first invented, people considered it a vulgar sound, kind of like folks who prefer classical music considered electric guitars. ;o)

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