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Ihe New ч = -a Е
Oxford Hi istory of |
Music %

THEMODERN АСЕ -
1890-1960 "e

THE NEW T:
OXFORD HISTORY OF MUSIC |

Editorial Board
SIR JACK WESTRUP (Chairman)
DR. GERALD ABRAHAM (Secretary) 3
MARTIN COOPER DOM ANSELM HUGHES
DR. EGON WELLESZ

------

Published
l. ANCIENT AND ORIENTAL MUSIC
П. EARLY MEDIEVAL MUSIC UP TO 1300
ПТ. ARS NOVA AND THE RENAISSANCE (1300-1540)
IV. THE AGE OF HUMANISM (1540-1630)
ҮП. THE AGE OF Е NLIGHTENMENT (1745-1790)
X: THE MODERN AGE (1890—1960)
іп preparation

V. OPERA AND CHURCH MUSIC (1630-1750)

УІ. THE GROWTH OF INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC
(1630-1750)

VIII. THE AGE OF BEETHOVEN (1790-1830)
IX. ROMANTICISM (1830-1890)

ХІ. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLES, BIBLIOGRAPHIES,
AND INDEX

In conjunction with Тле New Oxford History of Music, E.M.I. Records Ltd. have
issued a series of gramophone records under the title of The History of Music
in Sound. The Handbooks to this series are published by the Oxford University
Press. Each volume of the series corresponds to a volume of the New Oxford History,
the editors of equivalent volumes are in most cases the same, and Dr. Abraham is
the General Editor. There are numerous cross-references from one series to the
other, and the student of music will find The History of Music in Sound a valuable
complement to The New Oxford History of Music.

ISBN 0 19 316310 1

NEW OXFORD HISTORY OF MUSIC
VOLUME X

. -

EDITORIAL BOARD

J. A. WESTRUP (Chairman)
GERALD ABRAHAM (Secretary)
DOM ANSELM HUGHES
EGON WELLESZ
MARTIN COOPER

THE VOLUMES OF THE
NEW OXFORD HISTORY OF MUSIC

Ancient and Oriental Music

. Early Medieval Music up to 1300
. Ars Nova and the Renaissance (1300-1540)
. The Age of Humanism (1540-1630)

Opera and Church Music (1630-1750)

. The Growth of Instrumental Music (1630-1750)
. The Age of Enlightenment (1745-1790)

. The Age of Beethoven (1790-1830)

. Romanticism (1830-1890)

. The Modern Age (1890-1960)

. Chronological Tables, Bibliographies, and Index

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СКРЯБИНА A SRRJABIN:

rlLPOMETE?R® соч60 ор PROMETHEUS”

NAA ZA 798
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URLIN: MOSKAU

SKRYABIN'S PROMETHEUS, 1911 (see p. 35)

The front cover of the score designed by the theosophist poet Jean Delville. It is
orange, the colour of fire, and shows a huge flaming sun with an androgynous face
(symbolizing the union of male and female) enclosed іп a *world-lyre' and sur-
rounded by magical and cosmic symbols—stars, comets, and spiralling clouds. The
piercing eyes ‘express the will’, according to Skryabin, and the face is surrounded
by primeval chaos ‘from which the world-will calls everything to life’, first to
material life, after which matter is dissolved into spirit and in an orgiastic dance
united with God.

THE MODERN
AGE

1890-1960

EDITED BY
MARTIN COOPER

LONDON

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK TORONTO
1974

Oxford University Press, Ely House, London W.1

GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON
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BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI LAHORE DACCA
KUALA LUMPUR SINGAPORE HONG KONG TOKYO

ISBN O 19 316310 1

(O Oxford University Press 1974

АП rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or other-
wise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
EBENEZER BAYLIS AND SON LTD
THE TRINITY PRESS, WORCESTER, AND LONDON

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

ТнЕ New Oxford History of Music is not a revision of the older Oxford
History of Music, first published in six volumes under the general
editorship of Sir Henry Hadow between 1901 and 1905. It has been
planned as an entirely new survey of music from the earliest times down
to comparatively recent years, including not only the achievements of
the Western world but also the contributions made by eastern civiliza-
tions and primitive socicties. The examination of this immense field
is the work of a large number of contributors, English and foreign.
The attempt has been made to achieve uniformity without any loss of
individuality. If this attempt has been successful, the result is due largely
to the patience and co-operation shown by the contributors themselves.
Overlapping has to some extent been avoided by the use of frequent
cross-references; but we have not thought it proper to prevent different
authors from expressing different views about the same subject, where
it could legitimately be regarded as falling into more than one category.

The scope of the work is sufficiently indicated by the titles of the
several volumes. Our object throughout has been to present music,
not as an isolated phenomenon or the work of outstanding composers,
but as an art developing in constant association with every form
of human culture and activity. The biographies of individuals are
therefore merely incidental to the main plan of the history, and those
who want detailed information of this kind must seek it elsewhere.
No hard and fast system of division into chapters has been attempted.
The treatment is sometimes by forms, sometimes by periods, sometimes
also by countries, according to the importance which one element or
another may assume. The division into volumes has to some extent
been determined by practical considerations; but pains have been taken
to ensure that the breaks occur at points which are logically and
historically justifiable. The result may be that the work of a single
composer who lived to a ripe age is divided between two volumes. The
later operas of Monteverdi, for example, belong to the history of
Venetian opera and hence find their natural place in volume v, not with
the discussion of his earlier operas to be found in volume iv. On the
other hand, we have not insisted on a rigid chronological division where
the result would be illogical or confusing. If a subject finds its natural
conclusion some ten years after the date assigned for the end of a
period, it is obviously preferable to complete it within the limits of one

vi GENERAL INTRODUCTION

volume rather than to allow it to overflow into a second. An exception
to the general scheme of continuous chronology is to be found in
volumes v and vi, which deal with different aspects of the same period
and so are complementary to each other.

The history as a whole is intended to be useful to the professed
student of music, for whom the documentation of sources and the
bibliographies are particularly designed. But the growing interest in the
music of all periods shown by music-lovers in general has encouraged
us to bear their interests also in mind. It is inevitable that a work of
this kind should employ a large number of technical terms and deal
with highly specialized matters. We have, however, tried to ensure
that the technical terms are intelligible to the ordinary reader and that
what is specialized is not necessarily wrapped in obscurity. Finally,
since music must be heard to be fuily appreciated, we have given
references throughout to the records issued by His Master's Voice
(R.C.A. Victor) under the general title The History of Music in Sound.
These records are collected in a series of albums which correspond to
the volumes of the present work, and have been designed to be used
with it.

J. A. WESTRUP
GERALD ABRAHAM
ANSELM HUGHES
EGON WELLESZ
MARTIN COOPER

CONTENTS

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME X

I. THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM:
1890-1914. Ву GERALD ABRAHAM, formerly Professor of

Music, University of Liverpool
Introduction
Central Europe
France
Spain and Italy
Russia and Poland
Scandinavia
Britain and the United States
The Musical Language of Late Romanticism
The Textures of Late Romanticism
Problems of Structure
End of an Epoch

II. THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM:
1914. By GERALD ABRAHAM

Introduction

The Impact of Bach

Busoni and Reger

Non-functional Harmony

The Evolution of Debussy’s Style
Debussy and Ravel

The Wider Influence of Debussy
The New Harmony in New Contexts
Schoenberg

III. STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918. By MARTIN COOPER
Central Europe
Italy and the New Realism
The Musical Language of Verismo
France and the Reaction against Realism
Russia and the Slavonic Periphery
Bohemia
After Verismo: Art nouveau and the Classical Reaction
Towards New Shores
Ballet
Symbolist Drama

1890-

101
105
127
140

145
146
153
159
164
174
177
182
196
196
202

viii CONTENTS
IV. MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939.

By MOSCO CARNER 208
General Characteristics 208
Stravinsky after the Rite 210
Stravinsky's Neo-classicism А DIT
The ‘Symphony of Psalms’ and Later Works 223
Sergey Prokofyev 229
The Older Generation in France 231
Erik Satie and ‘Les Six’ 236
‘La Jeune France’ 254
Italy: La generazione dell’80 256
Ottorini Respighi, Giorgio Ghedini, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco 268
Luigi Dallapiccola and Goffredo Petrassi 270
Béla Bartók 274
Zoltan Kodaly 299
Leos Janacek 301
Other Czech Composers 309
Karol Szymanowski 311
Manuel de Falla 315
Espla and Turina 317
Later Spanish Composers 318
Switzerland 319
Scandinavia and Holland 321
Richard Strauss's Last Years 322
Pfitzner and Schreker 326
Ferrucio Busoni 327)
Paul Hindemith 327
Kurt Weill and Ernst Kfenek 338
The Second Viennese School—Arnold Schoenberg 340
Alban Berg and Anton Webern 362

V. MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960.
By PETER EVANS, Professor of Music, University of Southampton 387

Igor Stravinsky and the Rapprochement 389
Paul Hindemith and the German Middle Generation 402
The Middle Generation Elsewhere 419
Olivier Messiaen 428
The New Serialism 434
Pierre Boulez 441
Karlheinz Stockhausen 454
The Avant-garde in Italy and Elsewhere 468
Music on Tape 487

Conservatism and Compromise 493

CONTENTS ix
VI. MUSIC IN BRITAIN: 1918-1960. By ARTHUR HUTCHINGS,

formerly Professor of Music, University of Durham 503
Introduction 503
Bax and his Romantic Contemporaries 504
Ralph Vaughan Williams 507
Gustav Holst ӘЛЕ
Peter Warlock and his Contemporaries 519
Alan Bush 523
Constant Lambert and William Walton 523
Edmund Rubbra 531
Lennox Berkeley 536
Alan Rawsthorne 537
Gerald Finzi 539
Michael Tippett 540
Benjamin Britten 543
Elisabeth Lutyens 556
Immigrant Composers | 557
Humphrey Searle 563
The Younger Generation 563

VII. AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960
(i) MUSIC IN THE UNITED STATES.
By RICHARD FRANKO GOLDMAN, President, the Peabody

Institute, Baltimore 569
The Background 569
Charles Ives 574
The Decade 1920-30: Gershwin and Copland 583
Radicals of the 1920s 596
Henry Cowell 597
Virgil Thomson and Others 602
International Styles—Wallingford Riegger, Roger Sessions,

Walter Piston 607
Roy Harris 614
Тпе 1930s—the Impact of European Immigrants 619
The Situation in 1950—the Decade 1950—60 622

(1) MUSIC IN LATIN AMERICA.

By GERARD BÉHAGUE, Professor of Music, University of Illinois 635
Nationalism 635
Modernism and the Avant-garde 638

VIII. MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION. By GERALD ABRAHAM 639

The Political Background 639
The Beginnings of Soviet Opera and Ballet 643
Early Soviet Orchestral Music 648

Early Soviet Music in Other Fields 657

CONTENTS

. B

Socialist Realism in Opera

Socialist Realism in the Concert Hall
Prokofyev's War and Peace

Instrumental Music, 1941—7

Vocal Music, 1941-7 ы
Political Background after 1947

Opera, 1948-60

Instrumental Music, 1948—60

The Avant-garde

Music in the non-Russian Republics

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CONTENTS OF THE HISTORY OF MUSIC IN
SOUND, VOLUME X

INDEX

660
670
676
681
684
685
686
693
699
699

701

085
737

ІШ

ПІ.

ІУ.

УТ.

Ум.

VIII.

IX.

ILLUSTRATIONS

SKRYABIN'S PROMETHEUS (1911) THE FRONT COVER

OF THE SCORE (see p. 35) Frontispiece

facing page

. STRAUSS'S SALOME (1905). THE DANCE OF THE SEVEN

MOS IN THE ORIGINAL DRESDEN PRODUCTION (see
р. 1
By courtesy of the Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection.

PUCCINI'S TOSCA (1900). A POSTER ADVERTISING THE
FIRST PERFORMANCE (see p. 156)
By courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

RIMSKY-KORSAKOV'S THE GOLDEN COCKEREL (1909).
THE STAGE SET OF ACT ONE OF THE ORIGINAL PRO-
DUCTION (see p. 176)

Designed by I. Bilibin. Reproduced from ‘Zolotoy Petushok’ (Moscow, 1909),
the sovenir booklet published after the first performance.

PALLASI THE THREE-CORNERED НАТ (1919). THE
OPENING SCENE, SHOWING THE STAGE SET BY
PICASSO, AND THE CHOREOGRAPHER MASSINE IN
THE PART OF THE MILLER (ее p. 201)

By courtesy of the Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection.

- (а) ИМОМЕССЕК”5 JUDITH (1925). А SCENE FROM THE

ОВСА ОР СТОЛ АГ ТЕГЕ РЕОРГЕ 5
THEATRE, DARMSTADT (see p. 250)

By courtesy of the Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection.

(D KRENEK'S JONNY SPIELT AUF (1927). THE STATION
SCENE FROM THE ORIGINAL PRODUCTION AT THE
NEUES THEATER, LEIPZIG (see p. 340)

By courtesy of the Theater-Museum, Munich.

STOCKHAUSEN'S ZYKLUS (1959). A PAGE FROM THE
SCORE (see p. 465)
By courtesy of Universal Edition (London) Ltd.

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS'S JOB (1931). A PAINTING BY
GWEN RAVERAT OF A DESIGN FOR THE ORIGINAL
STAGE PRODUCTION AT THE CAMBRIDGE THEATRE,
LONDON (see p. 512)

By courtesy of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

BRITTEN 5 ВШЕХ BUDD (1952). A SCENE FROM THE
ОСЛЕ РОО ЕЛИСОМ Atl THE ROYAL OPERA
HOUSE, COVENT GARDEN (see p. 554)

By courtesy of Roger Wood.

SHOSTAKOVICH'S THELADYMACBETHOFTHEMTSENSK
DISTRICT (1934). А SCENE FROM THE ORIGINAL
MOSCOW PRODUCTION (see p. 663)

By courtesy of the Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection.

148

156

176

201

250

465

512

554

663

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Associated Music Publishers Inc.: Elliott Carter, String Quartet (1951); Henry
Cowell, Tiger.

Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd: Béla Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra,
Microcosmos, Rhapsody for Piano, String Quartet No. 6, Sonata for Solo Violin;
Benjamin Britten, Holy Sonnets, Midsummer Nights Dream, Peter Grimes,
Serenade Op. 31, Sinfonia da Requiem, Winter Words; Aaron Copland, Appala-
chian Spring, Piano Fantasy; Frederick Delius, A Village Romeo and Juliet, In a
Summer Garden; Гео5 Janácek, Diary of One Who Vanished; Dmitry Kabalevsky,
Violin Concerto; Vadim Salmanov, The Twelve; Dmitry Shostakovich, 2nd Piano
Concerto; Richard Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier, Elektra, Salome, Waldseligkeit ;
Igor Stravinsky, Movements, The Rake's Progress, Rite of Spring, Symphony of
Psalms, Three Songs from Shakespeare, Threni.

Bote & Bock Verlag: Francesco Malipiero, Torneo Notturno.

Breitkopf & Hártel (London) Ltd, on behalf of Breitkopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden:
Ferruccio Busoni, Toccata and Fugue in C Major, Arlecchino.

Chappell & Co Ltd: Arnold Bax, Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3; George Gershwin,
Rhapsody in Blue; Roy Harris, Third Symphony; William Schuman, Symphony
No. IV; Arnold Schoenberg, Violin Concerto.

J. & W. Chester Ltd: Manuel de Falla, Harpsichord Concerto; Arthur Honegger,
Le Roi David; Francesco Malipiero, Rispetti e Strambotti; Arnold Schoenberg,
Serenade; Igor Stravinsky, L'Histoire du Soldat, Les Noces.

J. Curwen & Sons Ltd: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Pastoral Symphony.

Durand & Cie, Paris: Vincent D'Indy, Fervaal, L'Étranger, Symphony No. 2;
Paul Dukas, Ariane et Barbe-bleu, Piano Sonata (1901), Le Péri; Darius Milhaud,
Catalogue des fleurs; Olivier Messiaen, Visions de l'Amen; Maurice Ravel, Gaspard
de la Nuit, L'Heure espagnole; Florent Schmitt, La Tragédie de Salome.

Editions J. Hamelle, Paris: Gabriel Fauré, Green Op. 58.
Editions A. Leduc, Paris: Alfred Bruneau, Messidor.
Edition Peters: Richard Strauss, Ein Heldenleben.

Editions Salabert: Arthur Honegger, Quartet No. 3; Albert Roussel, Piano Suite;
Erik Satie, Le Fils des étoiles, Sonneries de la Rose Croix.

Editio Musica Budapest: Béla Bartók, In Full Flower, Op. 10 No. 1.

Faber Music Limited on behalf of J. Curwen & Sons Ltd: Gustav Holst, Savitri.

Franco Colombo Inc., New York: Edgard Varése, Hyperprism.

d & Cie, Paris: Pierre Boulez, Piano Sonata No. 2; Darius Milhaud, Symphony
(992

Alfred Lengnick & Co Ltd: Edmund Rubbra, Symphony No. 5.
F. E. C. Leuckart Musikverlag : Richard Strauss, A Hero's Life.
Marks Music Corporation, New York: Roger Sessions, Quintet for Strings (1958).

xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Mercury Music Corporation: Charles Ives, Anti-Abolitionist Riots, The Housatonic
at Stockbridge, Three Places in New England, Variations on “Атпегіса” (1891);
Leon Kirchner, String Quartet (1949).

Merrymount Music Inc.: Wallingford Riegger, Music for Brass Choir Op. 45.

Virgil Thomson and Mercury Music Corporation: Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in
Three Acts.

Messrs. Novello & Co Ltd: Edward Elgar, Symphony No. 2.

Oxford University Press: Constant Lambert, Summer’s Last Will and Testament;
Alan Rawsthorne, Piano Concerto Мо. 1, The Sprat, Symphonic Studies; William
Walton, Symphony No. 1; Ralph Vaughan Williams, Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5.

G. Ricordi & Co: Alfredo Catalani, La Wally; Pietro Mascagni, Iris; Italo Monte-
mezzi, L'Amore dei tre Re; Ildebrando Pizzetti, Debora e Jaele, Messa di Requiem;
Giacomo Puccini, La Bohéme, Tosca.

Schlesinger: Alban Berg, Piano Sonata Op. 1.
Mrs. Gertrude Schoenberg: Arnold Schoenberg, Die Jacobsleiter.

Schott & Co: Boris Blacher, Orchester-Ornament; Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Aniara;
Luigi Dallapiccola, Canti di Liberazione; Wolfgang Fortner, Movement for
Orchestra; Peter Racine Fricker, Elegy, Symphony No. 2; Karl Amadeus Hartmann,
Concerto for Viola; Hans Werner Henze, Drei Dithyramben, Piano Variations,
Symphony No. 2; Paul Hindemith, Das Marienleben, Das Unaufhórliche No. 4,
Kammermusik Op. 24 No. 1, Ludus Tonalis, Mathis der Maler, Philharmonia
Concerto; Luigi Nono, Canto Sospeso, Diario polacca, Incontri; Igor Stravinsky,
Concerto for two pianos, Symphony in C; Michael Tippett, String Quartet No. 2.

Schott & Co on behalf of В. Schotts Söhne: Igor Stravinsky, Firebird, Scherzo
Fantastique.

Schott & Co on behalf of Max Eschig, Paris: Darius Milhaud, La Création du monde;
Maurice Ravel, Alborado del Gracioso; Francis Poulenc, Le Bestiaire; Erik Satie,
La Mort de Socrate.

Stainer & Bell Ltd: Holst, Hymn of Jesus.
Sonzogno, Milan: Umberto Giordano, Andrea Chénier.

Universal Edition (London) Ltd: Béla Bartók, Dance Suite (1923) Finale; Luciano
Berio, Circles; Pierre Boulez, Improvisation sur Mallarmé, Le Marteau sans
maitre, Structures; Olivier Messiaen, Oiseaux Exotiques; Darius Milhaud,
Christophe Colomb; Bo Nilsson, Zwanzig Gruppen; Nikos Skalkottas, 4th Piano
Suite; Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gruppen, Kontrapunkte, Klavierstück 1.

Universal Edition (Alfred A. Kalmus Ltd) Ltd: Alban Berg, Lulu, Lyric Suite,
Violin Concerto; Alois Haba, String Quartet Op. 12; Leoš Janáček, Cunning Little
Vixen, Glagolithic Mass, Jenüfa; Arnold Schoenberg, Erwartung, Fünf Orchester-
stiicke No. 2, Kammersymphonie, Op. 11 No. 1, Op. 11 No. 3, Pierrot Lunaire,
Pelleas & Melisande, Piano Pieces Op. 33 No. 1, Quartet in A, Sechs Lieder Op. 8
No. 1, String Quartet No. 1, Variations for Orchestra; Franz Schreker, Der Ferne
Klang; Karol Szymanowski, King Roger; Anton Webern, Cantata No. 1, Drei
Gesänge Op. 23, Drei Lieder Op. 18 No. 1, Das Augenlicht, Orchesterstück Ор. 6
No. 2, Passacaglia, Piano Variations Op. 27, Zwei Lieder Op. 19 No. 1, Symphony
Op. 21.

Universal Edition (London) Ltd on behalf of Boosey & Hawkes Inc., copyright for the
USA: Béla Bartók, Bluebeard's Castle, String Quartet No. 4, Violin Sonata No. 1.

Wilhelm Hansen, Musik-Forlag, Copenhagen: Carl Nielsen, Maskarade.

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUMEX

THE precise dating of any historical period can never be more than
a convention or a convenience, and in the case of this last volume of the
New Oxford History of Music the decision has been complicated by a
further question implicit in the nature of history. If we are to date any
historical period from the first emergence rather than the full develop-
ment of its most characteristic features, it seemed reasonable to choose
1890 as one term of the modern period. The terminus ad quem was more
difficult to determine. At what remove of time does it become possible
to see events, personalities, and individual works in that perspective
which we call historical rather than as isolated points in our own
experience, or markings on a map of whose exact orientation we are
still uncertain? Those who interpret the concept of history rigorously
argue that it is still too early to obtain a balanced and objective view
of any musical events that have taken place in the last quarter of a
century; and voices were in fact raised in support of making 1950 the
end-date of the present volume. This would have been both safe and
convenient, since it would have avoided the necessity of controversial
selections among the phenomena of contemporary music and made it
possible for this last volume to maintain the same strictly objective
character as the other nine. Against this it was very strongly felt that the
tempo of change in the third quarter of the twentieth century has been
such that a gap of some quarter of a century between the latest events
considered in the New Oxford History of Music and the appearance of
the last volume would appear unreal and pedantic. Writers dealing
with the most recent musical phenomena have naturally been obliged
to content themselves with chronicling facts rather than interpreting or
evaluating; and even the interval between the writing and the publica-
tion of these latest chapters has in some cases been long enough to
alter the perspective. This is the price that must be paid for
continuing the narrative up to the comparatively recent past, a tribute
to Time whose payment has fallen particularly heavily on Peter Evans
and Richard Franko Goldman.

If the time-span of the present volume is open to question, the sub-
division of the seventy years under consideration may well seem even
more arbitrary. It was determined by two main considerations: the
emergence of an unmistakably new conception of music after the First
World War, and the very different rate at which this new conception
became general among composers in different countries. The head-
waters of the New Music were in Central Europe, that is to say within a

xvi INTRODUCTION

quadrilateral bounded by Berlin, Paris, Milan, and Budapest; so that it
seemed logical to regard the development of music in those countries as
a European mainstream. On the periphery of this central area neither
Scandinavia nor Iberia seemed to warrant separate treatment; but
musical developments in the Soviet Union, the United States, and
Great Britain have been rich enough in themselves, and different
enough from each other and from those in countries of the European
mainland, to demand individual handling.

The movement in musical thought and practice since 1890 has been
so fast and so complex, and the movements themselves so multifarious,
that it is possible to make only the broadest generalizations about the
period as a whole. Until the last ten years of the period under review, it
might have been possible to describe the transformation which began
to show in music after 1890 and became complete before 1920 as the
superseding of the idea of music as a language by the idea of music as
an architecture. In panserialism, however, architecture was itself super-
seded by a concept nearer to that of engineering, which has in its turn
been superseded by random, indeterminate, and aleatory principles
which suggest, however misleadingly, a more than cursory glance in the
direction of the higher mathematics. Even the autonomy of music, once
regarded as possibly the most hard-won of all the principles underlying
the New Music, has been surrendered; and the baroque rhetoric of
Ше composer's statements accompanying Olivier Messiaen's Et vitam
venturi saeculi or Karlheinz Stockhausen's Setzt die Segel zur Sonne
far outshine the vague cosmic pretensions of Skryabin's Prometheus or
Ives's Universal Symphony, which seemed so ludicrous to the generation
that came to maturity in the heyday of neo-classicism апа
Gebrauchsmusik.

If it was possible to trace a definite pattern in the distribution and
progress of the New Music between the wars, patterns since 1950 have
changed so quickly into each other that the effect is kaleidoscopic. The
war of 1939-45 obliterated the neat geographical demarcations which
allotted spheres of interest—Central Europe to Bartók and Schoenberg,
the rest of Germany and Northern Europe to Hindemith, Paris, and the
Latin world to Stravinsky—by sending each of these composers to the
U.S.A. When the war ended the music of Stravinsky, Hindemith, and
Bartók was comparatively well known to musicians outside Germany,
and isolated examples of their works were winning acceptance with the
public; but ‘serial’ music was still a closed book to all but a tiny
minority. When the National Socialist ban on the music of Schoenberg
and his followers was raised by the defeat of Hitler, serialism became
almost overnight equivalent to a certificate of opposition to National

INTRODUCTION xvii

Socialist ideology, and serial music was suddenly in demand in Germany
on a large scale. But frequent performance revealed in Schoenberg's
own music a deeply romantic, as well as a drily didactic vein and in
Berg's a strong post-romantic impulse alien to the mood of the younger
generation of composers, who turned their attention to the third, most
radical, and least publicized member of the Second Viennese School,
Anton von Webern. The discovery of Webern's music was the most
important of the discoveries made by composers during the 1950s; and
when Stravinsky himself admitted, on his own terms and very much in
his own manner, conversion to serialism, it looked for a moment as
though a firm new general pattern might be about to declare itself.
Instead of this, panserialism produced a predictable reaction, compli-
cated by the new presence of electronic music and by the first stirring
of what has proved to be a strong, though by definition unorganized
anti-intellectual movement, or ‘servile revolt’, directed against the
élitism inherent in all mandarin art and indeed in all art that makes
intellectual demands.

If composers since 1920 have often seemed confused by the shifting
interests and attitudes of the pioneers, this whole period has been
marked by a refusal on the part of the public, at first resolute and all
but absolute and still only cautiously yielding, to interest itself in the
New Music. This refusal has been the more marked in that the huge
expansion and technical improvement in the recording and broadcasting
of music during the second half of our period has multiplied the demand
for music to an enormous extent. Up to 1950 the New Music was accepted
by the public in direct proportion to the number of its links with the old.
The stumbling-blocks were two: constructivism (music as architecture)
and atonality. That is to say, the huge majority of music-lovers every-
where still regarded music as a language for communication and was
not prepared to accept any idiom that could not be related, clearly even
if remotely, to the diatonic or modal systems. This double barrier
explains why Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Bartók achieved partial and
cautious acceptance before Berg: Berg before Schoenberg: and
Schoenberg before Webern.

This reluctance on the part of the public to accept the New Music,
in conjunction with the new demand, accounts for the extraordinary
spate of revivals or discoveries which have been a major feature of the
last half century in every country except the U.S.S.R., where both
composer and consumer have been guided by authority along lines
determined by national and ideological exclusiveness. Elsewhere the
eclipse of Wagner, whose music embodies late nineteenth-century
romantic ideals, was followed by revivals and reinterpretations of the

xviii INTRODUCTION

operas of Mozart, Verdi, Handel, and more recently Bellini and
Donizetti. The rediscovery of Vivaldi stimulated a new interest in
baroque music generally, and Monteverdi's music has been more per-
formed in the last twenty years than in the three centuries which have
elapsed since his death. Medieval music, though still a minority interest,
has made considerable progress with the general public and exercised a
clear influence on young composers. A corollary of these revivals has
been the rediscovery of unfamiliar or forgotten timbres, most notably that
of the countertenor voice, the recorder, lute, viol family, and chamber
organ. Still more remarkable has been the growing popularity of
Oriental, especially Indian, music whose influence on composers
(Messiaen and Boulez) began earlier. Even the over-exploited nineteenth
century has yielded some unexpected novelties, and the few devoted and
indefatigable champions who sponsored the apparently lost causes of
Berlioz and Mahler have been rewarded in England by an overwhelming
public response comparable to that which during the 1930s met Olin
Downes's campaign for Sibelius in the U.S.A. and Sir Thomas
Beecham's for Delius in Great Britain.

This picture of a sharply divided musical world, in which a small
avant-garde pioneers almost out of sight of the main body of per-
formers and listeners, who concern themselves with musical archaeology
and indiscriminate truffle-hunting, is something entirely new. It
suggests a parallel with Alexandrine historicizing and eclecticism, and an
apparent falling-off in creative vitality. It should not, however, be
forgotten that an indeterminable, but certainly large proportion of the
creative power hitherto employed in the arts now finds an outlet in
science, and that the triumphs of the human spirit in the twentieth
century are likely to be found by future generations in its scientific
rather than its artistic achievements. In the New Music itself the
rejection of a heteronomous, quasi-literary art in favour of autonomy
and constructivism represented a clear rapprochement with the scientific
ideal, and one which has become increasingly close. Meanwhile the
gap between composer and public closes very slowly. Peter Evans
writes of ‘the entirely new powers of discrimination’ and ‘new aural
training’ demanded by the latest music; and although Richard Franko
Goldman considers that public hostility may be a valuable ‘teething-
ring’ for young composers, he also emphasizes the significant loss of
“ап audience that demands and rejects', while Professor Evans speaks of
works being ‘performed because no one is sure that they should not be’.

The danger of a ‘composer’s music’ developing in a vacuum (ог a
studio), which at one time seemed very real, has been countered by the
appearance of the ‘servile revolt’ against intellectual effort as a form of

INTRODUCTION xix

élitism, and by the willingness of a number of composers to abandon
the idea of music as a discipline and to regard it as a labile, poly-
morphous activity comprising social protest and black humour,
emotional 'togetherness', spiritual aspiration, and deliberate triviality
in proportions chosen by the individual listener, who may well find
himself also a part-time performer. This new form of 'concert', in
which the composer provides hardly more than a ground-plan and music
is chiefly important as a background or atmosphere, certainly owes
something not only to oriental music and theatre, but also to oriental
religion. It is perhaps as much a non-liturgy as an anti-concert.

Of all men the historian should be the least tempted to prophecy;
and since the disappearance of the old norms by which music was
formerly judged has not yet been followed by the appearance of new,
there is no historical precedent to tempt the drawing of a parallel. At
present there is no sign of any diminishing interest in the music of the
European past, and interest in non-European music is on the increase.
The future of the anti-intellectual movement, which I have called ‘the
servile revolt', is closely bound up with the future development of
today's younger generation who are its chief supporters.

Perhaps the greatest threat to music as an art comes from its increased
availability, a slowly growing inclination to regard as a kind of piped
Muzak first the small change of the minor baroque composers, then the
Tafelmusik, the divertimenti, cassations and dance suites of the masters,
and so by an easy, insensible transition the symphonies of Haydn,
Mozart, and perhaps Beethoven. The accepted institution of music as
a background to other activities, and even to no activity at all, plainly
dulls the listening faculty itself, eventually blurring the line that divides
passive hearing from active listening. The distinction between noise and
music, already much less clear than formerly, may easily become as
indeterminate as that which divides writing from literature, often a
matter of opinion and nomenclature rather than exact definition.
Certainly the future of the public concert on its present scale is un-
certain; and although music-theatre is very much alive, it seems
improbable that there will be any but sporadic additions to the
repertory of works suitable for performance in opera-houses as we
know them today. European music, which once expressed man’s idea of
what he should be, his aspirations, now reflects what in his own eye he
is; and it seems likely that this will continue to be true of music in the
immediate future.

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ШЕР АРОСБЕАМО DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM:
1890-1914

By GERALD ABRAHAM

INTRODUCTION

THE last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth
witnessed the final, though not the finest, efflorescence of all those
musical conceptions, phenomena, and tendencies that can be subsumed
in the general idea of romanticism: music as a record of the most
subtle and intimate personal emotions and impressions, music as a
rhetorical language addressed to large audiences (and, as in the cases of
Tchaikovsky’s last works and of Mahler’s in general, the two were by
no means mutually exclusive), music fertilized more richly than ever
before by literature and painting, with the vast expansion of tonality,
the complication of chromatic harmony and texture in general, and
the richness and rarefaction of orchestration that were developed by
the striving for wider and more refined expressive power. No doubt
European music would have reached this condition of highly charged
romanticism even if Wagner had never existed, but in fact Wagner had
so completely summed up the various tendencies of musical romanticism
and carried them to fresh heights—particularly in Tristan, Gétter-
dümmerung and Parsifal—that it is easy and not altogether erroneous to
regard as Wagnerian everything that is romantic in the music of the
period. The lay public of the time certainly did, thanks to his non-
musical cultural prestige as well as to the fashionableness of his music.
The romantic artist saw himself as an interpreter of the transcendental,
and consequently felt himself to be above and apart from the common
man; the musician was the ideal romantic artist and Wagner the ideal
romantic musician. Much that was not Wagnerian was tinged with
Wagner and those who resisted Wagner or reacted against him did so
very consciously. Even the fresh wind which had begun to blow from
Russia was contaminated by Wagnerian scents in the 1890s.

In the years immediately after Wagner's death his ideas were
commonly misunderstood—for instance, any operatic theme associated
with a character was regarded as a leitmotive—and the influence of his

2 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

idiom and technique was very superficial. As Romain Rolland put it,
Че musiciens frangais traduisaient dans le style de Wagner des pensées
de Gounod ou de Massenet'.! But as performances of Tristan and the
Ring outside Bayreuth became more common, filling out the imperfect
impressions gained from scores and concert excerpts—Parsifal was
legally restricted to Bayreuth until 1913 though illegal performances
were given earlier, notably in America—the influence deepened. Such
typical works as Strauss's Guntram (comp. 1893), d'Indy's Fervaal
(1895), Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (1899), Chausson's Le Roi Arthus
(1899), and Elgar's Dream of Gerontius (1900), are saturated with it.
Even composers who fought against it, as Debussy fought against Че
fantôme du vieux Klingsor,? partially succumbed. The Wagnerian
empire, the supreme embodiment of musical romanticism, was at its
heyday; like all empires, artistic and political, it bore within it the seeds
of decay. Signs of reaction had already begun to appear and their
development will be described in the following chapter. The present one
is limited to a rapid survey of the European situation and a discussion
of late romanticism and its decline.

CENTRAL EUROPE

Central Europe— Germany and Austria together with the non-German
countries ruled by the Habsburgs—had been the heart-land of romantic-
ism; consequently it was there that the crisis of romanticism was most
severely felt. Perhaps the most obvious symptom of crisis was the
exaggeration of antithetic moods: the brashness and exuberant virility
which it is tempting to relate to the aggressive confidence of Wilhelmine
Germany, and the autumnal melancholy of a culture that was drifting
away from its foundations of religious faith and finding nothing to
replace them. The first is most apparent in the work of Richard Strauss
(1864-1949) but appears also in Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)--Еог
instance in the finale of his First Symphony (completed 1888)—and in
much of the music of their lesser German contemporaries. The second
is much more characteristic of Mahler but also appears in many pages
of even the young Strauss of the 1890s and dominates the last works of
Brahms (d. 1897): the Clarinet Quintet, the piano pieces Op. 116-19,
and the chorale preludes. (Although Brahms resisted the techniques of
late romanticism, he was very sensitive to its spirit.) One finds both in
the third leading representative of the Strauss-Mahler generation, Hugo
Wolf (1860-1903), whose achievement seems so much less than theirs

1 Musiciens d'aujourd'hui (Paris, 3rd edition, 1908), p. 243.

* Letter to Chausson, 2 October 1893, ‘Correspondance inédite de Claude Debussy et
Ernest Chausson', Revue musicale, vii (1925—6), p. 120.

CENTRAL EUROPE 3

only because it was mainly confined to the miniature form of the Lied!
and terminated untimely by his mental collapse.

Beside Brahms, other older figures still played an important part in
the musical scene: his friend, the more eclectic and progressive Dvorak
(d. 1904), the Wagner-worshipping Bruckner (d. 1896) whose sym-
phonies are very much less influenced by Wagner than they appeared to
his contemporaries who knew them only in versions doctored by well-
meaning admirers, and such representatives of genuine conservatism as
Josef Rheinberger (d. 1901) and Max Bruch (who lived on till 1920).
For some time these, even Brahms, seemed to have no artistic progeny
of any importance; even the other progressive composers of the
Strauss-Mahler-Wolf generation (Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek, Eugen
d'Albert, Georg Schumann, Max von Schillings) were very secondary
musicians, distributaries rather than tributaries of the Wagnerian
mainstream. Only Hans Pfitzner (1869-1949), a Wagnerian but a very
conservative Wagnerian who in later years became a pugnacious
defender of conservatism, and his older contemporary Engelbert
Humperdinck (1854—1921) stand out of the ruck—the latter mainly on
the strength of a single work, Hänsel und Gretel. Most of them were
first and foremost opera-composers and their work is dealt with else-
where in this volume.?

In the climate of the period it was natural that every progressive
musician should think first of writing for the stage and that even his
instrumental compositions should be saturated with extra-musical ideas.
Absolute music and its ideal medium, chamber music, were abandoned
to the conservatives. In the orchestral field the dominant figure was
Richard Strauss, who had built his reputation on programmatic works—
Aus Italien, Macbeth, Don Juan, Tod und Verklürung—and extended it
during the 1890s with four more tone-poems: Till Eulenspiegels lustige
Streiche (1895) and Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), Don Quixote (1897),
and Ein Heldenleben (1898).3 With these scores, works of extraordinary
inventive exuberance and virtuosity of scoring, he established himself
as the outstanding German composer of the end of the century. The
thematic orchestral polyphony of the mature Wagner style is not only
employed with complete, confident mastery but with heightened
brilliance and with a lightness and vivacity rare in Wagner and the
Wagnerians. The range and sweep of a melody such as the opening of
Ein Heldenleben, which does not really draw breath until the seventeenth

1 Wolf's songs and instrumental compositions, which date mainly from the pre-1890
period, are discussed in Vol. IX.

? See chap. 3.

3 Strauss's symphonic poems, as such, are discussed in Vol. IX.

4 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE ОЕ ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

bar, would be as difficult to match in earlier music as would the incessant
battering rhythm of the *battle' section, where rhythm for its own sake
anticipates the admittedly more subtle rhythmic triumphs of a decade
or so later. If the structures of Zarathustra апа Heldenleben are too
sectional to be satisfactory, they are more daring than those of any
earlier symphonic poems, and the conceptions of programmatic
variations in Don Quixote and condensed symphony in the later
Symphonia domestica (1903) were equally striking. And music was no
longer only a language of emotion; it was now, more than with any
earlier composer, a language not capable of describing concrete objects
but offering acceptable symbols for them. Only in his normal harmony
did Strauss usually fail to overtrump his contemporaries or even his
immediate predecessors: when he did so, as at the end of Zarathustra
and in some passages of Elektra, it was for a special effect of
shock:

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([wipe the eternal] blood of murder from the floor)

A typically rich-sounding passage, such as that at figure 24 in Ein
Heldenleben, consists of four melodic strands:

CENTRAL EUROPE 5

Bes 42
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embroidered on a solid and, for the period, unadventurous harmonic
background:

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[ж ge —— ГЕ

filled in by clarinet tremolos, horn chords, and the tremolo of divided
violas, with harp or trombones at points of emphasis. The points where
the part-writing sometimes momentarily breaks out of the harmonic
frame, as at the starred B in bar 3 of Ex. 2, pass unnoticed because of the
difference of timbre.

During the period of Till, Zarathustra, and Heldenleben, Mahler pro-
duced three symphonies, no. 2 in C minor (1894), no. 3 in D minor
(1896) and no. 4 in G (1900), equally involved with extra-musical
conceptions but in a very different way. Strauss was an extrovert,
technically self-confident, and fascinated by the musical depiction of
characters and events; he was a born dramatist and as his powers
matured he passed in Don Quixote from brilliant and sympathetic
external characterization to something more profound, that inner sym-
pathy with another character which is the mark and indispensable
property of a true dramatic composer. Conversely, when he attempted
avowed autobiography in Ein Heldenleben and the Symphonia domestica,
he dramatized himself—and his wife—without revealing his inner

6 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

self; these works are over-concerned with external circumstances.
Although his first essays in opera, Guntram (1893) and Feuersnot
(1901), had not been particularly successful, he must now have recog-
nized that the dramatic and descriptive powers of purely instrumental
music could be carried no further and, with the single exception of the
superficial and pictorial Alpensymphonie (1915), he abandoned it for
his true métier, musical drama. On the other hand Mahler, despite his
life-long occupation with the conducting of opera, culminating in his
directorship of the Vienna Court Opera from 1897 to 1907, never wrote
an opera at all—other than a youthful Ernst von Schwaben, which he
destroyed.! His most dramatic work is the cantata Das Klagende Lied,
which dates substantially from 1880.? A profound and complicated
introvert, he composed hardly anything that was not autobiographical.
With all his experience as a conductor, he lacked self-confidence as an
orchestral composer, as is manifest from his innumerable revisions and
other changes of mind and by the nervous meticulousness of his detailed
instructions for performance.

Mahler's symphonies are no more absolute music than Strauss's
tone-poems but they are at the same time both more and less explicit.
Whereas with Strauss the external world nearly always plays a vivid
part in his conception, with Mahler it exists only as indeterminate
‘nature’, symbolized by bird-song and cowbells and posthorn calls, as a
setting for the poet's subjective brooding. For his First Symphony, a
purely orchestral composition, Mahler had written, and then suppressed,
a literary programme ;? in the three symphonies of the 1890s he found it
necessary, as Beethoven had done in the Ninth, to call in a poet's
words. As he wrote to Arthur Seidl in 1897* *When I conceive a great
musical creation, I always come to the point where I must draw on the
“word” as bearer of my musical idea.’ We have it on his own authority?
that the first movement of the Second Symphony is a funeral ceremony
for the hero of the First—who 15 perhaps his own youth; that the
second movement, innocent as Schubert or Dvořák, is a happy recollec-
tion of a sunny day in this hero's life; that the third represents a return
to the senseless and repellent hurly-burly of everyday life (it is based on
his song-setting of ‘Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’ from Des
Knaben Wunderhorn, just as the First Symphony is partly based on
themes from his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen); and that the finale is
an answer to ‘the great question “Why have you lived? Why have you

1 Gustav Mahler, Briefe, 1879—1911 (Berlin, Vienna and Leipzig, 1925), p. 8, n. 1.

? See Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Early Years (London, 1958), pp. 152-3.

3 Printed іп full in Paul Stefan, .Gustav Mahler (Neue, vermehrte und veränderte

Ausgabe; Munich, 1920), p. 113.
* Briefe, p. 228. 5 Ibid., pp. 188-9.

CENTRAL EUROPE y

suffered? Is that all merely a huge and frightful joke?” ’. The answer is а
grandiose choral setting of a slight adaptation of Klopstock’s Resurrec-
tion ode, *Auferstehen, ja auferstehen’, which Mahler had just heard
sung at Hans von Bülow's funeral, to which the transition from the
bitter humour of the third movement is made through another Wunder-
horn poem, ‘Urlicht’, sung by a solo voice, one of the most Brucknerian
things Mahler ever wrote. He had already, with this distension of both
the form and media of the symphony—the Third is scored for an
enormous orchestra—reached the point when he could say, 'Symphony
means to me the building up of a world with all the technical means
available' (“Міг heisst Symphonie: mit allen Mitteln der vorhandenen
Technik mir eine Welt aufbauen.) Mahler regarded his Third Sym-
phony, to which the Fourth may be considered an epilogue, as “а
musical poem embracing all the stages of development step by step.
It begins with inanimate nature and rises to the love of Сой.” It was
originally conceived with a title derived from Nietzsche, “Меше
fróhliche Wissenschaft’; later it became “Рап, not only as the god's
name but as the idea of ‘allness’; then again it became ‘A Summer
Morning's Dream', the big initial movement in sonata-form being
called “Рап awakes; the summer marches іп” and followed by shorter
ones: ‘What the flowers in the field tell me’, ‘What the animals in the
wood tell me' (based on one of the earliest of his Wunderhorn songs,
*Ablósung im Sommer’), ‘What Man tells me’ (the midnight song from
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, which Strauss was suggesting in his tone-poem
almost at the same time, but composed by Mahler for alto solo), ‘What
the angels tell me’ (“Es sungen drei Engel’ from the Wunderhorn, set for
alto and boys’ choir), and ‘What love tells me’ (an Adagio for orchestra
only). But these titles were suppressed before publication, leaving the
naive listener with an impression of a heterogeneous suite not even
unified by a key-scheme, since the movements are respectively in D
minor, A major, C minor, D major, F major, and A major. (Mahler
once suggested that his unconventional key-schemes were motivated by
the pursuit of innovation for its own sake; nevertheless they underlie all
but two, nos. 6 and 8, of his later symphonies.) The exquisitely naive
finale of the Fourth Symphony, yet another Wunderhorn setting, was
to have been the penultimate movement of the Third: ‘What the child
tells me’, and the Symphony is, for Mahler, remarkably free from darker
shades; only in the second movement does Death with his fiddle (a solo
violin tuned up a tone) cast his shadow—and by no means over the
whole of that.

These three symphonies, naive in almost everything but their irony,

1 Tbid. p. 161.

8 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

gangliated in structure, closely akin to song even when they do not
actually break into it, are much more truly romantic both in musical
substance and in their programmes than the symphonic poems of
Strauss, where beside the genuine romanticism of such wonderful
passages as the death of Don Quixote one finds much that is only
superficial romantic gesture and the exaggeration of romantic language
in conjunction with a realism (Quixote's bleating sheep, the battle-
section in Heldenleben) that, as in opera of the period, is downright
anti-romantic. And after the turn of the century, when Strauss soon
withdrew from the symphonic field while his rival went on to produce
first a trilogy of purely instrumental symphonies, no. 5 (1902), no. 6
(1904), and no. 7 (1905), then a gigantic totally choral symphony, no. 8
(1907), and yet another for orchestra alone, no. 9 (1909)—as well as the
torso of a Tenth—Mahler's position as the leading Central European
symphonist was uncontested. He had markedly developed. In the three
symphonies of 1902-5, which are as definitely related to each other as
the four Wunderhorn symphonies, he not only found it possible to
dispense with ‘the word’; they are—particularly nos. 6 and 7—much
less disconcertingly naive, more closely knit; the orchestral polyphony
rivals Strauss's in its mastery while the massive effects (above all, in the
finale of the Sixth and opening of the Seventh) recall the granite monu-
mentality of Bruckner. Only the Adagietto of no. 5 seems to belong
to the earlier group. But the music is no less romantic in essence—the
funeral-march first movement of no. 5 with the Wagnerian cello
cantilena of both this and the slow sections of the following Allegro, the
autobiographical suggestions of no. 6 (which according to his widow!
has elements of a symphonia domestica) with the hammer death-blows
of its finale, the three ‘inside’? movements—the two pieces of ‘night
music’ and the ‘shadowlike’ scherzo—no less subjective and secretly
programmatic. The Eighth Symphony, monumental both in proportions
and in the forces employed, also struck out in a new direction despite
an obvious affinity with the finale of the earlier giant, no. 2; a symphony
іп two movements, one а setting of ‘Veni creator spiritus’, the second
(embracing elements of Adagio, scherzo, and finale) of the closing scene
of Goethe's Faust, employing eight vocal soloists, double chorus, and
boys' choir, as well as an orchestra of unprecedented size, demanded
and was given a more impressive power of coordination than the
earlier, partly vocal symphonies. This was the last of the colossi of
musical romanticism, a line stretching from the outdoor compositions

1 Alma Maria Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Amsterdam, 1940);
English trans. by Basil Creighton (London, 1946); enlarged and revised edition (London,
1968), p. 70.

CENTRAL EUROPE 9

of the French Revolution through Berlioz, and Mahler followed it with
two works which express with exceptional poignancy the autumnal
mood and sunset colouring of musical romanticism itself: Das Lied von
der Erde (1908), a song-cycle for alto, tenor, and orchestra that he
himself styled a ‘symphony’, and the closely related but purely orchestral
Ninth Symphony. In sharp contrast with the Eighth, these last scores
are remarkable for the almost chamber-musiclike finesse of the orches-
tral writing, a finesse already adumbrated in the accompaniment of the
cycle of Kindertotenlieder (Dirges for children) (1904) and the second
Nachtmusik of the Seventh Symphony.

In this as in the influence of Bach, which is apparent in the fugal
elements in the finale of his Fifth Symphony and the feats of invertible
counterpoint in the Eighth, Mahler showed himself sensitive to the
spirit of the decade, for of the Central European composers born in the
seventies who came to the fore after the turn of the century, the two
most important—Max Reger (1873-1916) and Arnold Schoenberg
(1874-1951)—both were under the spell of Bach and both were
attracted to chamber music. This was a generation of reconcilers; the
days of partisanship were coming to an end; musicians could, and
commonly did, admire both Wagner and Brahms. And often Dvorak
as well: Schoenberg's early D major String Quartet (1897) shows particu-
larly in its texture and in the opening subject of the finale that he too
came under the influence of the Czech master. Schoenberg's leaning to
Brahms was strengthened by his teacher (and later brother-in-law)
Alexander von Zemlinsky (1872-1942), who was also drawn to chamber
music though he became better known as a composer and conductor of
opera. Franz Schreker (1878-1934) began as a Brahmsian and evolved
into a full-blooded eclectic, though his really notable works, mainly
operas, appeared only just before the First World War, while the more
conservative Franz Schmidt (1874—1939) was even slower in finding a
creative personality. The young Hungarian Brahmsian Ernó Dohnányi
(1877-1960) and Dvorák's two most talented pupils, Vitézslav Novak
(1870-1949) and Josef Suk (1874—1935), all developed into complete
eclectics, sensitive to Strauss or Tchaikovsky, following the will-o’-the-
wisps of impressionism or nationalism, and thus freely and often
eloquently employing the /ingua franca of late romanticism without
extending it. The older and far more original Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
remained in obscurity throughout this period; even his most successful
opera Лей pastorkyňa (better known as Jenůfa), was performed only in
the provincial city of Brünn (Brno) in 1904, and then forgotten until
1916, when it was followed by all his major works.!

1 See pp. 179-82 and 301-4.

10 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

Some of the slightly younger men, Béla Bartók (1881—1945) and
Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) in Hungary, and Schoenberg's disciples
Anton von Webern (1883-1945) and Alban Berg (1885-1935) in Austria,
were much more significant figures, still romantics when they first
appeared on the scene; Bartók's Kossuth Symphony (1903), for instance,
was very closely modelled on Ein Heldenleben and the Portraits,
Elegies, and Dirges (1907—10) were autobiographical in essence, even
though the nature of his musical language was changing. These were the
composers who, with Schoenberg and Reger, were to succeed Mahler
when he died and Strauss when he began to repeat himself. It is sympto-
matic that, unlike most of the true romantics, none of them was in a
hurry to write his first opera and that, when they did, both Bartók's A
kékszakállú herceg уйға (Duke Bluebeard's Castle) (1911) and
Schoenberg's Die glückliche Hand (1913) were short and highly experi-
mental works, reaching out in entirely new directions.! Berg and
Kodály—ultimately more important as a teacher and stimulator in his
native country than as a creator—were even later in entering this field,
while Reger and Webern never entered it at all. On the other hand they
all cultivated chamber music, both in the usual sense of instrumental
ensemble music and in the wider one of intimate media generally,
including solo piano music and the solo song with piano.

A great chapter in the history of chamber music closed in 1895 with
Brahms's compositions for clarinet and other instruments and Dvorak’s
last quartets. Wolf might have opened a new one if he had remained sane,
but Strauss, who turned away from chamber music and piano music
after his youth, and Mahler, who was never interested in either, were too
intoxicated with the possibilities of the post-Wagnerian orchestra to
find modest, more or less monochrome media congenial. It is true that
Strauss, unlike Mahler, continued to write songs with piano after his
youth; indeed most of the songs by which һе is best known—‘Cacilie’,
*Heimliche Aufforderung’, ‘Morgen’, “Traum durch die Dammerung’—
date from the 1890s, while the songs of the new century, from Op. 48
onward, include such masterpieces as ‘Blindenklage’, Op. 56, по. 2.2
That they should show the influence of Wolf in their often declamatory
voice-parts and their rich, almost more important piano-parts was only
to be expected. No important German song-composer of the period,
neither Reger nor Schoenberg nor that gentler talent, Joseph Marx
(1882-1964), a latter-day Robert Franz, completely escaped Wolf's
influence. They might begin song-writing in emulation of Brahms or
the earlier nineteenth-century masters of the Lied, but they inevitably

1 See pp. 202-3 and 206.
? Recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x.

CENTRAL EUROPE 11

passed deeply through the experience of Wolf before they found their
true selves, Strauss through the sheer exuberance of his creative per-
sonality, Reger in the series of Schlichte Weisen begun in 1904 by
deliberate simplification. Reger's ‘Maienbliiten’, Op. 66, по. 5, and the
opening of his *Morgen', Op. 66, no. 10 (1902), show his debt, even in
maturity, to Wolf:

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12 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

Reger's greater harmonic sophistication, compared with Strauss's in the
latter's much better known composition of the same poem (1894), is
again apparent in the settings of Richard Dehmel’s ‘Waldseligkeit’
which both composers made in 1901:

Ex. 5 (i) STRAUSS (Ор. 49, No. 1)

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CENTRAL EUROPE

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14 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

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(The wood begins to rustle, night draws near the trees;)

As an instrumental composer Reger, pupil of the musical polymath
Hugo Riemann, began his career with two violin sonatas, Opp. 1 and 3,
a trio, Op. 2, and a cello sonata, Op. 5, all published before he was
twenty. He first attracted wider notice through a Suite in E minor for
his own instrument, the organ (1895), dedicated “То the Manes of
Johann Sebastian Bach' which includes a highly ingenious fugue, a
canonic intermezzo, and a baroque passacaglia. In one fundamental
respect, his view of music as a craft rather than a language of sub-
jective expression, Reger was not a romantic at all; he was a leader
in the reaction against romanticism, and his work will be considered
under that aspect in the following chapter. But as an artist of his time
he could not escape romanticism in the form of Wagner's harmonic
heritage, for he was one of those who could accept Brahms and Wagner
--апа also Strauss, whose orchestral technique was not without its
effect on his own. His conception of Bach, common to his contem-
poraries, was a romantic conception and his own organ compositions
on chorales, above all the three Phantasien, Op. 52 (1900), are highly
romantic, not to say programmatic. The C major Violin Sonata (1903),
the first movement of which spells out his enemies as ‘sheep’ and “аре”
(Eb =S, C, Bh = H, A, Е, E and А, Е, Е, E), is as frankly auto-
biographical as Ein Heldenleben. Nor was the composer of such
orchestral works as the G major Serenade (1906), which so impressed
the young Prokofyev, the Sinfonischer Prolog zu einer Tragódie (1908)
and the Vier Tondichtungen nach Arnold Bócklin (1913), a pure crafts-
man, certainly not a simple one. Even his chamber music, which is
greater in bulk than his orchestral and organ music put together, is
sometimes romantic in the broader sense; Guido Bagier! justly speaks of

! Max Reger (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1923), p. 256.

CENTRAL EUROPE 15

the C minor Piano Quintet, Op. 64 (1898) as “а masterpiece of Sturm und
Drang'. He goes on to describe it as “ап uncompleted symphony in the
guise of chamber music’. Reger never did write a symphony; the
Sinfonietta (1905), originally conceived as a serenade and scored for
what at the beginning of the century was a ‘small’ orchestra, that is,
one of classical size with the addition of a harp, was a failure and the
Sinfonischer Prolog, the first movement of a projected symphony, was
left on its own. As Bagier puts it, ‘each chamber-music work is a
preliminary step toward this goal'. But chamber music was a much
more congenial medium? and Reger's intensive cultivation of it accords
with this basic preference for the forms of absolute music.

Yet the earliest major work of Schoenberg, a more fundamental
romantic then Reger, was a bold essay in programmatic chamber
music, a string sextet inspired by а poem of Richard Dehmel, Verklärte
Nacht (1899). Schoenberg knew his Wagner really thoroughly at an
early age, much earlier than Reger had done, and as his next composi-
tions show he was also familiar with both Mahler and Strauss. The
Gurrelieder, poems by Jens Peter Jacobsen? set for colossal vocal and
instrumental forces, were composed by May 1901 though the instru-
mentation was not completed till ten years later; the work would hardly
have been planned in that form without the Mahlerian precedents,
although the Eighth Symphony was still to come. The symphonic
poem, Pelleas und Melisande (1903), too, was clearly written in emula-
tion of Strauss, who actually suggested the subject to him, though for
operatic treatment: it portrays a series of episodes from Maeterlinck's
play, with themes for Golaud, Mélisande, and Pelléas (the two latter
combined at against a picturesque background when Mélisande
lets fall her hair from the tower-window); the dense orchestral poly-
phony, often bursting out of the harmonic framework, is very
Straussian and the climax of the love-scene from onward is
closely related to the love-music of Ein Heldenleben (cf. Exs. 2-3). On the
other hand, Mélisande’s playing with the ring |6) is painted in a Mah-
lerian Lündler. The sequence of Schoenberg's early chamber compositions
is equally significant in a different way. First after Verklürte Nacht came
the String Quartet in D minor, Op. 7, which was published as “Хо. Г
(1905), a thematically dense score in which, it has been claimed without
too much exaggeration,‘ ‘there is not an inside part or a figure that is
not thematic’, then the Kammersymphonie, Op. 9 (1906) for fifteen solo

1 Tbid., p. 266. ? Witness the String Trio, op. 776 (1904), of which the slow movement
is recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x.

3 Translated from the Danish by R. F. Arnold.

* Egon Wellesz, Arnold Schónberg (Leipzig, 1921), p. 101; English translation by W. H.
Kerridge (London, 1925 and 1971).

16 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

instruments, some of its material again oddly Straussian in outline—
Strauss distorted by the whole-tone scale. In both of these, as indeed in
Verklürte Nacht and Pelleas und Melisande, the elements of the four-
movement sonata are compressed into a single, very long movement,
scherzo and slow movement being inserted before and after the main
development, and reprise understood in the freest sense. But whereas this
was the complete antithesis of Mahler's practice of expansion, in the
Second Quartet (F sharp minor, Op. 10) (1908)! Schoenberg, like
Mahler, ‘drew on the “ууога” as bearer of the musical idea’; in the
third movement, adagio con variazioni, the soprano sings Stefan
George's ‘Litanei’, in the finale the same poet's ‘Entriickung’ with its
peculiarly apposite first line, ‘Ich fühle Luft von anderen Planeten’
(‘I feel air from other planets’). And, as Dika Newlin has pointed out,
‘the spirit of Mahler hovers even more persistently over the scherzo,
with its bizarre quotation (in the trio section) of “Асһ, du lieber
Augustin”. ? The dedication of the Harmonielehre (1911) speaks for
itself; in later years too Schoenberg often ‘expressed indebtedness to
Mahler? and during 1907-8 their personal relationship was at its
closest. Yet there were profound differences, even greater differences
than between Schoenberg and Reger, in whose music he also ‘admired
many things’. Mahler’s art was ап end, Reger's seemingly a dead end,
Schoenberg’s at once an end and a beginning. The upward-leaping horn
theme in perfect fourths at the beginning of the Kammersymphonie is,
taken by itself, more anti-tonal than anything in Mahler or Reger, who
took wild liberties with tonality but always left its pillars standing. And
here, too, the Schoenberg passage stands between buttresses of F major
and E major. But in the finale of the Second Quartet Schoenberg arrived
at full atonality.

With the fanatical courage that was the predominant strain in his
character, he did not shrink from the consequences and turn back.
Atonal music presented many problems, of which the most difficult
was that of structure in general and the construction of extended
instrumental compositions in particular. Hence the works of the next
few years which lean on drama—the monodrama Erwartung (1909) and
the music-drama Die gliickliche Hand (1913)—and those with poetic
texts, the George song-cycle Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (1909), the
Maeterlinck Herzgewdchse (1911), the melodrama Pierrot lunaire (on
Otto Erich Hartleben's translation of Albert Giraud's poems) (1912),
and the four songs with orchestra, Op. 22 (1913-14)—are more assured

! First movement recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x.
2 Bruckner—Mahler—Schoenberg (New York, 1947), р. 235.
3 Ibid., pp. vii and 241-2. abid. p. 275.

CENTRAL EUROPE 17

than the purely instrumental pieces, the Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 111,
and Fünf Orchesterstücke, Op. 16,? of 1909, epoch-making as they were,
and the Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19, of 1911. This group of
compositions, in which both the romantic conception of music as a
language of expression and the musical techniques of romanticism are
carried to their ultimate extremity, was written under the sign of the
avant-garde movement that was leaving its mark on all forms of
European art at the time: expressionism, the antithesis of impression-
ism, the morbidly intense expressive content of concentrated particles of
speech or line or sound, content with the minimum of matter and form.
Representational painting was reduced to geometrical relationships
such as the cube, dramatic characters to dreamlike abstractions from
the subconscious like “Тһе Man', “Тһе Woman', and “Тһе Gentleman'
in Die glückliche Hand.? Тп such music as Op. 11, no. 3, each thematic
idea was self-sufficient, unrepeated, not balanced symmetrically by a
following phrase; repetition was at all tolerable only in the form of
constructive, developing variation. With tonality mortally strained by
late-romantic techniques and undermined by those of impressionism,*
chords had finally lost their functional significance. With the *emancipa-
tion of dissonance',* which Schoenberg adumbrated in his Harmonie-
lehre,® cadence no longer had meaning as a point of relaxed harmonic
tension. Atonal music was, in fact, also athematic and, apart from the
supports of text or drama, nearly amorphous.? The crucial element in
Pierrot lunaire was not the Sprechstimme of the reciter, speaking at
approximate musical pitches, which attracted so much attention at the
time—it had already been used in the Gurrelieder and Die glückliche
Hand—but the means by which Schoenberg attempted to counter
amorphousness: the devices of canon and inversion which were to lead
him to the note-row and twelve-note serialism. Yet the decadent, sado-
masochistic subject of Pierrot lunaire is, as Stuckenschmidt has pointed
out,? typical of late romanticism, with origins reaching back to Parsifal
and coming to a climax in Salome and Elektra. Even at this point
when Schoenberg's music had become totally un-Wagnerian and

1 Бог an intensive study of Op. 11, and the works leading up to it, see Reinhold Brink-
mann, Arnold Schénberg: Drei Klavierstücke Op. 11 (Wiesbaden, 1969); on Das Buch der
hängenden Gärten, see idem, ‘Schönberg und George’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, xxvi
(1969), p. 1.

2 There is a good study of Op. 16 in Anthony Payne, Schoenberg (London, 1968), pp. 20-8.

з On Schoenberg and expressionism, see Karl H. Wörner, Neue Musik in der Entscheidung
(Mainz, 1954), pp. 58-9.

4 See p. 90. 5 Schoenberg, Style and Idea (New York, 1950), p. 104.

$ Leipzig and Vienna, 1911, e.g. pp. 370, 433, and elsewhere.

7 Cf. infra, pp. 140-1.

8 Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Arnold Schónberg (Zürich, 2nd ed. 1957). English trans-
lation by E. T. Roberts and Humphrey Searle (London, 1959), p. 65.

18 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

anti-romantic, the underlying ideas are often romantic and Wagnerian.
Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand are conceived in the image of the
Gesamtkunstwerk; one, at least, of the Five Orchestral Pieces had a
poetic connotation—the changing chord-colours of no. 3 were ‘com-
parable, as Schoenberg says, with the ever-changing colour-impression
of the lightly agitated surface of a lake’;! and the funeral bell tolls for
Mahler in the little piano piece, Op. 19, no. 6.

Webern had written atonal, non-thematic miniatures, the Fünf Sütze
for string quartet, Op. 5 (1909) and the Sechs Stiicke for orchestra,
Op. 6 (1910), before Schoenberg’s Op. 19; but although expressionism
may be considered the final convulsion of romanticism, and despite the
alla marcia funebre of Op 6, no. 4, and the suppressed titles of his next
orchestral work, the Fiinf Stiicke, Op. 10 (1911-13), Webern was not—
after Im Sommerwind and the other juvenilia of 1904-5--а genuine
romantic. His earliest acknowledged composition, the orchestral
Passacaglia of 1908, already manifests a Regerian love of construction
for its own sake. Its very large orchestra, like that of Op. 6, is character-
istic of the period, just as the chamber orchestras of Op. 10 and the
Vier Lieder, Op. 13 (1914-18), are characteristic of the reaction from it.
Even the extreme condensation of expressionism lasted only until
Schoenberg showed him a way of escape from it. But if Webern was
never a romantic, his friend Berg was never—to the last—anything else.
The majority of the still mostly unpublished early songs? and some of
the published ones (such as the beautiful *Traumgekrónt" of 1907) are
in the true tradition of the romantic Lied; the expressionistic Vier Lieder,
Op. 2 (1909-10)? mark the end of that tradition. Berg’s early instru-
mental works follow closely the curve of development traced by the
Schoenberg pieces on which they were to some extent modelled: the
Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (1908) on the Kammersymphonie, the String
Quartet, Op. 3 (1910) on Quartets nos. 1 and 2, and the Vier Stücke for
clarinet and piano Op. 5 (1913) on the aphoristic piano pieces of
Schoenberg's Op. 19, while the Drei Stücke for large orchestra, Op. 6
(1914) shows a curious affinity with Mahler.* But the romantic vein in
Berg remained fairly constantly obvious in the music of his maturity,’
and never more so than in the final Violin Concerto.

The early course of Bartók's evolution was not dissimilar. Turning
from Schumann and Brahms to Wagner, he was overwhelmed in 1902

1 Webern, 'Schónbergs Musik’, in the symposium Arnold Schónberg (Munich, 1912), p. 44.

2 Nicholas Chadwick, ‘Berg’s Unpublished Songs in the Österreichische National-
bibliothek’, Music and Letters, lii (1971), р. 123.

3 Nos. 2 and 3 recorded in Тйе History of Music in Sound, x.

4 Оп this see particularly Hans Е. Redlich, Alban Berg—Versuch einer Würdigung
(Vienna, 1957), pp. 93ff., and its condensed English version (New York, 1957), pp. 65—72.

5 See infra, pp. 362 ff.

FRANCE 19

by the discovery of Strauss, particularly of Also sprach Zarathustra! and
Ein Heldenleben. What set Bartók apart from his Austrian contem-
poraries was his passionate nationalism, conventionally Hungarian in
the Rhapsody for piano, Op. 1 (1904) and the first Suite for orchestra,
Op. 3 (1905), but soon given a fresh direction by his discovery, in
Kodály's footsteps, in 1905-6 of the authentic, un-gypsified folk-music
of the Hungarian peasants. A belated acquaintance with Debussy's
music іп 19072 was the second most important factor in guiding him
away from tonality and the Central European mainstream toward
simpler, less dense textures and new melodic modes, and his Bagatelles
for piano, Op. 6 (1908) constitute a miniature thesaurus of the new
harmonic and tonal devices of the period: counterpoint of chord-
blocks (no. 4), bitonality (no. 1), fourth chords (no. 11), a foreshadowing
of 12-note composition (no. 3),? the non-functional side-slipping of
dissonances.* Schoenberg quoted (inaccurately) from no. 10 to illustrate
the last of these, side by side with excerpts from Webern and Schreker's
Der ferne Klang, in his Harmonielehre.? Bartók got to know Schoen-
berg's music only in 1910; it affected both his harmony and the boldness
of his line-drawing, and he wrote of it with warmth, though even in
1937 he had still not heard Pierrot lunaire. Yet the last two of the
Bagatelles are cryptically autobiographical quite in the Schumann
manner, belonging to the group of works (including the First Violin
Concerto and Ше Két arckép (Two Portraits), Op. 5) associated with
the violinist Stefi Geyer; and in the piano Elegies, Op. 8b (1908-9) and
the Két kép (Two pictures) for orchestra, Op. 10 (1910), Bartók reverted
to romantic or impressionistic textures. It was only in 1911 with Blue-
beard’s Castle and the Allegro barbaro for piano that Bartók achieved
a satisfactory and highly personal synthesis of these diverse elements.

FRANCE

Except in the earlier works of Berlioz and the mature ones of César
Franck, romanticism had never penetrated French music very deeply.
Fruitful contacts with literature and the pictorial are characteristic of
romantic music, but they had been characteristic of French music long
before the romantic movement. Chopin left his mark. Liszt influenced
Saint-Saéns, the oldest French composer of any significance during the

1 Bartók, ‘Selbstbiographie’, Musikbldtrer des Anbruch, iii (1921), p. 88.

2 Ibid., р. 89.

? Oliver Neighbour, “Тһе Evolution of Twelve-Note Music', Proceedings of the Royal
Musical Association, \xxxi (1954—5), р. 53.

4 See, particularly, Edwin von der Null, Béla Bartók (Halle, 1930), pp. 3-14.

5 p. 469.

6 See his article, ‘Arnold Schönbergs Musik in Ungarn’, Musikblatter des Anbruch, ii
(1920), p. 647.

20 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

1890s, and Franck and his followers, particularly in their use of theme-
transformation in major instrumental works. French opera from
Chabrier’s Gwendoline onward abounds in leitmotives and other
Wagnerian properties—even Massenet was not totally unaware of them
— but d'Indy rightly held that the Wagnerism of Gwendoline is ‘more
apparent than real’ and that Chausson's Roi Arthus, ‘the most complete
specimen of a work influenced by the Bayreuth master’, is saved by ‘the
intervention of our French nature’ from ‘exaggerations which no
German writer would have known how to resist’,1 a judgement which
is equally true of his own Fervaal. The romanticism of French orchestral
music is often only picturesque and superficial, as with Dukas’s
L’Apprenti sorcier (1897). It is not surprising that France began to
reject romanticism before Germany, but it is typical of the period
generally that two of the most effective agents of the rejection were
composers who had fallen heavily under the spell of Wagner: Vincent
d'Indy (1851-1931), by his foundation in 1896 of the Schola Cantorum
which had as its main objects “а return to the Gregorian tradition of
performing plainsong' (i.e. the Solesmes tradition) and ‘the rehabilita-
tion of the music known as Palestrinian’,? and Claude Debussy (1862-
1918) by his rejection of functional harmony and his obedience to
Verlaine's command? ‘Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui son cou!”

Despite the antagonism of their ideals and temperaments, an antagon-
ism which did not preclude a limited amount of mutual admiration and
even influence,’ d'Indy and Debussy had more in common than ап
early enchantment with Wagner—from which the older man finally
escaped only much later, after the other's death. Both preferred to work
with small units of sound rather than long-breathed melody; both had a
distaste for clear, symmetrical rhythmic patterns, though d'Indy
vigorously distorted them whereas Debussy gently dissolved them;
both orchestrated generally with characteristically French restraint and
clarity. But the differences went much deeper, as deep as the personal
difference between devout, even bigoted Catholic and free-thinking,
free-living faun. Debussy was the very ideal of the late-nineteenth-
century artist, all sensuality and sensibility; d'Indy, like Reger, was
essentially a cerebral craftsman. Paul Landormy quotes his *peremptory
affirmation’ that ‘une oeuvre d'art se fait? and the analyses of his own
compositions in his Cours de composition musicale make amply clear

1 Richard Wagner et son influence sur l'art musical frangais (Paris, 1930), pp. 69 and 75.

? Prospectus of La Tribune de Saint-Gervais, i (1895).

3 т Jadis et naguére (Paris, 1884).

4 See Léon Vallas, Vincent d’ Indy, ii (Paris, 1950), pp. 195-6, 255, 319-21.

5 La Musique française de Franck à Debussy (Paris, 1943), р. 77.

6 Paris, three vols., i, 1903; ii, premiere partie (1909); ii, seconde partie (1933); iii (1950).

FRANCE 21

his concern with structural ingenuity for its own sake. Even his attitude
to harmony was the complete antithesis of Debussy's; he wrote that
‘chords as combinations of sounds appear only as the effect of a halt in
the movement of the melodic parts . . . musically chords do not exist and
harmony is not the science of chords. .. . The study of them for their
own sake is an absolute aesthetic еггог.’! His approach to texture in his
mature works was primarily contrapuntal, culminating in the polyphony
of the Second Symphony (1903).?

The conflicts of the romantic crisis are much more strongly marked in
d'Indy's orchestral music than in his operas, in which can be traced a
gentle decline from the strongly Wagnerian Fervaal, through L'Étranger,
to the unsuccessful Légende de Saint Christophe to which he devoted
most of the years 1908-15.? His earlier instrumental music had been
almost entirely programmatic;* after the death of his master Franck in
1890 there was a marked turn to absolute or relatively absolute music.
In that very year he wrote his First String Quartet, and in the Second,
in E major (1897), written in deliberate emulation of Franck, he carried
the principle of essential thematic unity almost to its last extreme eight
years before Schoenberg's Op. 7, all its themes being generated by the
four-note motive which stands as its ‘epigraph’.* The same thematic
density and tightness of construction mark the Second Symphony and the
Piano Sonata in Е (1907).9 Yet the spirit of romanticism was not
completely extinct even in these. The programmatic Istar of 1896 had
been cast in the form of fairly strict ‘symphonic variations’; conversely
the seemingly ‘absolute’ B flat Symphony is a struggle between two
basic themes, symbols of darkness and light or evil and good, and the
Piano Sonata, though profoundly different from the programmatic,
Schumannesquely autobiographical piano compositions of the 1880s—
the Poéme des montagnes and the Tableaux de voyage—is not without
remains of romantic rhetoric. Moreover the Symphony was followed in
1905 by the ‘symphonic triptych’ Jour d’été a la montagne: picturesque,
romantic in essence and expression, even based on a detailed pro-
gramme." Like so many of d'Indy's mature compositions Jour d'été
introduces folk-tunes, which he had collected from the late 1880s
onward, and is crowned by a melody derived from plainsong, the two
elements which—particularly plainsong—played in his work a role

! Cours de composition, i. p. 91. Schoenberg repeats this almost exactly in his Harmonie-
lehre: in polyphony “Ше Akkorde entstehen nur also 7и/ е der Stimmenführung und sind,
da die Verantwortung für das Zusammenklangliche vom Melodischen getragen wird, ohne
Bedeutung für die Konstruktion’ (p. 348). But he adds, ‘That is naturally only half true... .’

? See Ex. 46 on pp. 108—9.

з On the operas, see infra, pp. 169-71 and Cours, iii, pp. 201 ff.

4 See Vol. IX. 5 Analysis in Cours, И?, pp. 267-70.
$ Tbid., pp. 175 and 429. ? [bid., pp. 327-30.

22 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

comparable with that of peasant-song їй Bartók's in freeing it from
Germanic ways of thought.

D'Indy was the most doctrinaire and the most influential of the
Franckists, but his pre-eminence is partly due to the early silence of
Duparc, who ceased to compose in 1885, the early death of Ernest
Chausson (1855-1899), and the still more premature death of the
brilliant young Belgian, Guillaume Lekeu (1870-1894). More individual
than the other actual pupils of Franck, such as Guy Ropartz (1864-
1955), were their allies: Albéric Magnard (1864-1914), Paul Dukas
(1865-1935), and Albert Roussel (1869-1937). The operas of this group,
above all Chausson's Roi Arthus and Dukas's Ariane её Barbe-bleue
(1907), were more authentically Wagnerian than those of Massenet's
so-called 'realis pupils, Alfred Bruneau (1857-1934) and Gustave
Charpentier (1860-1956) but in Ariane the Wagnerism is strongly
modified by Debussy's influence and both Dukas and Chausson
were primarily instrumental composers; it is in their instrumental
music that the crisis of romanticism is more perceptible, particularly in
the way they treat their heritage from Franck. Duparc said that,
*Chausson comes more directly from Franck than any of us'? and his
В flat Symphony (1890), his Poéme for violin and orchestra (1896), and
his chamber music are certainly Franckian in style though marked by a
very individual vein of refined lyrical poetry. Magnard's symphonies,
particularly No. 3 in B flat minor (1896), are subjectively, even rhetori-
cally romantic, but reject his master d'Indy's cherished ‘cyclic form’.
The open fifths that begin the Third Symphony:

Ex. 6

Modéré

dq
ту

) (|

6
|

|
TR
|

$
(|

D.B. (div.) ди

1 On French opera of this period, see infra, pp. 164 ff.
? Quoted by Landormy, op. cit., p. 89.

FRANCE 25

actually seem to stand between the openings of La Damoiselle élue and
Pelléas. Dukas's Ariane also betrays an awareness of Debussy (see Ex. 7)

Ex. 7
[Assez lent]
Animez insensiblement

Woodwind Ef
Bs

02 m
| E Осо С с; =
() „Шаг! ee E e

| aa A EE шше eee
Vlas. T Т! ЕЕ ЕЕ:

poco cresc.

- tran - ges! Pour-quoi re-cu-lez -vous quand je m’ap-pro-che?

24 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

+ СА. 6507655.

А-уе2-уоив peur еп-сог?

(How strangely you look at me! .. . Why do you draw back when I approach?.. .
Are you still afraid?)

in its vocal writing, its harmony, and its texture and of Strauss in its full-
bodied orchestration. In sharp contrast to the earlier programmatic
Apprenti sorcier, his C major Symphony (1897), his Piano Sonata in
E flat minor (1901), and the Variations, interlude et final sur un théme
de Rameau (1903) are first and foremost musical structures. Although
the conception is often more academic than romantic, Lisztian or
Franckian romanticism comes to the surface in the finale of the Sonata:

Ex.8
Animé (d = 146)

‚ „> ЖЯ ый ан кк E

espress. | ==

SS
ез —1—.
E

FRANCE 25

and there are picturesque suggestions in the slow movement of the
Symphony (e.g. where flute and clarinet call ppp, lointain). On the
contrary, Roussel’s early work, with the exception of some d'Indyish
chamber music—particularly the Divertissement for piano and wind
quintet (1906) closely modelled on d'Indy's wind Divertissement of
1898'—is frankly picturesque romanticism. His so-called First Sym-
phony, Le Роёте de la forét, is an impression of a specific place, like
d'Indy's Jour d'été, and consists of four pieces written independently:
Forét d'hiver (1906), Renouveau (1905), Soir d'été (1904) and Faunes et
dryades (1906). Stylistically it answers completely to his too modest
description of all his music of the period 1898-1913: ‘marked by the
weak influence of Debussy but above all by the struggle with the tech-
nique learned from d’Indy’.? Evocations for soli and chorus (in the last
movement) and orchestra (composed 1910-11) are avowedly impres-
sions of travel in India; the ballet-pantomime Le Festin de l'araignée is
naturally programmatic; and the opera-ballet Padmdvati, mostly
composed before the outbreak of the 1914-18 war though the scoring
was not completed till after it, is in the same vein as Evocations. All
three reveal an individuality that by no means rests on the Indian
elements in two of them. Roussel would have been the last to deny their
romanticism; for him even Debussy was ‘a romantic in the best sense
of the term'.? Yet he had already in 1906-8, in the Divertissement and
parts of the D minor Violin Sonata, made essays in a much more spare
and quasi-classical style and it was to this that he turned more and more,
finally almost exclusively, in the post-war years. As for Dukas, after his
ballet La Péri (1912) he remained almost completely silent.

Chausson has been described as ‘un trait d'union non négligeable entre
Franck et Debussy'.* Substitute ‘d’Indy’ for ‘Franck’ and the same could
be said of Dukas and Roussel, but Chausson might be more truly
described as a link between Franck and Fauré. Gabriel Fauré (1845-
1924), an older man, was a pupil of Saint-Saéns more original than his
master, more French than Franck. His music—mostly songs, piano
music, and chamber music—is finely polished, classically restrained in
expression yet saturated with a warm tender lyrical poetry which must
be called romantic unless we are prepared to deny the epithet to Chopin
as well, though Fauré has more often but less aptly been called the
French Schumann. Fauré's earliest published works had been songs,
and in the 1890s he reached his apogee as a song-writer with the

1 See Basil Deane, A/bert Roussel (London, 1961), pp. 102-4.

? Octave Séré, Cinquante ans de musique francaise (Paris, 1925) ii, p. 398.

3 See Arthur Hoérée, Albert Roussel (Paris, 1938), p. 108.

4 Hoérée, ‘Chausson et la musique française’, in Ernest Chausson, special number of
La Revue musicale (December 1925), p. 193.

26 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

Mélodies, Op. 58 (1890), and the cycle La Bonne Chanson (1892); both
consist entirely of Verlaine settings—indeed nearly all Fauré's Verlaine
songs date from about this time, as do most of Debussy's.

Even before 1890 Fauré's role in the history of the French mélodie!
was comparable with that of Wolf—perhaps one should say “оҒ Brahms
and Wolf'—in the history of the Lied: the songs of Duparc, Chausson,
and the young Debussy were all in some degree affected by him. The
poetry of Verlaine and the other symbolists, which Debussy discovered
earlier than Fauré, was the catalyst which precipitated some of his best
work—and of Debussy's in this field. Fauré’s earlier songs are marked
by a lyrical expansiveness which is almost invariably saved from the
commonplace or sentimental by some subtle touch of melody or
harmony or both, as in the first eight bars of ‘Les Présents’.? A suggestion
of modalism is conveyed less often by actual flattening of a leading-note
than tacitly by the omission of the seventh altogether, as at the end of
the same song or at the end of ‘Green’, Op. 58, no. 3:

Ex. 9 Allegretto con moto (J = 72) sempre dolce
D

р Ат ШУГЕ coal
ME U pe e^ xe || == == da, НИТ е ысынан
12, күл

De. p Dd. з
(And let me sleep awhile, since you are resting.)

1 On Fauré's songs see particularly Vladimir Jankélévitch, Gabriel Fauré: Ses mélodies—
Son esthétique (revised edition, Paris, 1951).
? Recorded in The History of Music in Sound, іх.

FRANCE 27

The parallel passage in Debussy's setting of two years earlier has a
romantic warmth that reminds one of Fauré at his less subtle.

Ex. 10

Nee aaa a f
шаһ шағар 3м е E
еее / т ут eee E
кеске pa iS pa жаа ы i a
-

But when Debussy came to compose “Еп sourdine’ іп 1892 һе had
arrived at both a more personal piano style, as at the beginning of the

Ex. 11
G) Andante moderato (4 — 63) dolce

28 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

souf - fleber - ceur

song, and a much less melodic way of setting words which, even when
he is closest to Fauré's general style, as at ‘Laissons-nous persuader’
(Ех. 1101), is in marked contrast with Fauré's own setting in Op. 58,
йо. (Ех d

Réveusement lent
Intimement doux

Бартел реа
Қамы D сата D аштан A жет i et [ut

FRANCE 29

(Let us be persuaded by the gentle lulling breeze.)

There is less lyrical expansiveness in the songs of La bonne chanson and
an exquisite sensitivity to every detail of the text which makes this cycle
an outstanding masterpiece. In the later song-cycles, from La Chanson
4’Ёуе (1907-10) onward, this lyrical restraint is more and more noticeable;
voice-part, harmony, general texture become ever simpler. The same
increasing austerity is apparent in Fauré’s later instrumental music.
In his own way he too turned his back on romanticism.

Debussy had done so long before. Although ‘old Klingsor’s ghost’
was still haunting him in 1893 he had already been touched by two
influences which played some part in laying it: a Javanese gamelan and
the music of the Russian nationalists, both heard at the Paris Exposition
Universelle of 1889, although he had already encountered the Russians
in 1881-2. He continued to employ some of the techniques and outward
forms of romanticism—‘cyclic’ form in the String Quartet (1893) and
leitmotives in Pelléas, programmatic or picturesque orchestral and
piano music, even a suggestion of Franck's strident urgency in the
‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’ of La Mer (1905)—long after his music
had been drained of romantic emotion and romantic eloquence. This
was only the Debussyan form of the dualism common to most of his
musical contemporaries; in the Douze Études and En blanc et noir for
piano (1915) and the three chamber sonatas (1915-17) he finally
resolved it. The younger musicians who grew up under Fauré's wing,
such as Charles Koechlin (1867-1951), Florent Schmitt (1870—1958),
Roger-Ducasse (1873-1954) and Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) never
formed a ‘school’ comparable with the d'Indy circle but all shared their
master's romantic-classic dualism, with classical tendencies gradually
gaining the upper hand; all came to a greater or less degree under the
influence of Debussy. The most romantic of them was Schmitt whose
large-scale Piano Quintet, the composition of which was spread over the

30 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

years 1901-8, is held together by the cyclic principle and whose Рзаите
XLVI (1904) for soprano, chorus, organ and orchestra is ‘monumental’
in the sense of Strauss and Mahler. (Schmitt was, as Calvocoressi
remarked, “тоге directly influenced by the German romantics than
any other French composer of any standing’.) In the case of Ravel, by
far the most important, one catches him in the very act of ‘wringing the
neck of eloquence' in his String Quartet (1903); while the picturesque-
objective dualism of the piano works of 1905-8—the Miroirs, the
Sonatina, and Gaspard de la nuit (which Ravel himself described as
‘trois poèmes romantiques")?—is still manifest in the ballet Daphnis et
Chloé, composed during the period 1906-11. The scales were tipped
more and more in the direction of absolute music in the Valses nobles et
sentimentales (1911), the Trois Poémes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913), the
Piano Trio (1915), Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917), the Sonata for violin
and cello (1922), and still later works.?

SPAIN AND ITALY

Apart from Italian opera, neither Italy nor Spain had contributed
significantly to musical romanticism. Indeed Spain had contributed
nothing but the violin compositions of Pablo Sarasate (1844—1908) and
the folk melodies that were borrowed or imitated by various Frenchmen
and Russians. Even her opera had not developed beyond the zarzuela
and the género chico (the petit genre) exemplified by the Verbena de la
paloma (1894) of Tomás Bretón (1850-1923) and the Revoltosa (1897) of
Ruperto Chapí (1851—1909), until Felipe Pedrell (1841-1922) composed
his ambitious but unsuccessful Catalan trilogy Els Pireneus (1891)
which characteristically had to wait till 1902 for its first performance—in
Italian. Pedrell gave a much greater impulse to Spanish musical nationa-
lism by his writings and musicological publications, though the first
volume of his Cancionero musical popular español appeared only in
1919, while Conrado del Campo (1876-1953) belatedly imported
Central European romanticism in his symphonic poem La divina
comedia (1904) and his Bocetos fantásticos for string quartet (1908).
Thus romanticism reached Spain only as it was dying, and mainly from
France and therefore heavily diluted. It was under the influence of
contemporary French piano-writing that Pedrell's pupil, Isaac Albéniz
(1860-1909), crowned an undistinguished creative career with his
four sets of remarkable piano pieces Jberia (1906-09), and under that of
Albéniz, modified by Domenico Scarlatti’s, that Enrique Granados
(1867-1916) wrote his Goyescas (1912-14). Granados lived in Paris

1 Musicians Gallery (London, 1933), p. 56.
? *Esquisse autobiographique', Revue musicale, xix (1938), p. 213. See р 235

SPAIN AND ITALY 31

during the late 1880s and both Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) and
Joaquín Turina (1882-1949) were there for six or seven years until the
1914 war drove them home again. Of these two, Turina always remained
a romantic in essence but Falla, much the more gifted, evolved from a
glorified zarzuela, La Vida breve (1905; prod. 1913 in French), through
the romantic impressionism of the Quatre piéces espagnoles for piano
(1908): and the much less romantic impressionism of the orchestral
Noches en los jardines de Езрайа (begun in 1909, completed in 1915),
El amor brujo (1915), and El sombrero de tres picos (1917), to the classic
austerity of the Fantasia bética for piano (1919) and the other post-1918
works.?

Whereas Wagner left Spanish music totally untouched, at least the
superficial features of his technique—more or less continuous orchestral
texture and what were supposed to be leitmotives—were appropriated
by Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) and the lesser composers of verismo,
Ruggiero Leoncavallo (1858-1919), Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945), and
Umberto Giordano (1867-1948) whose work is discussed in Chapter 3,
while Italo Montemezzi (1875—1952) penetrated a little more deeply into
Wagner's style in L'amore dei tre re (1913). Outside the theatre, the
orchestral, chamber, and piano music of Giovanni Sgambati (1841-
1914) and Giuseppe Martucci (1856-1909), disciples of Liszt and
champions of Wagner, neither a very strong artistic personality, is very
much poorer in genuine romantic sensibility than the scores of Puccini,
while Leone Sinigaglia (1868—1944), a disciple of Dvořák, was important
mainly as a collector and utilizer of Piedmontese folk-music and Antonio
Scontrino (1850-1922) can hardly be considered a romantic at all.

The only outstanding instrumental composer of the Puccini genera-
tion, Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), elected as early as 1886 to leave his
native land for Germany, Finland, Russia, and America before finally
settling in Berlin in 1894. A great pianist and outstanding conductor,
champion of every variety of contemporary music that needed a
champion, Busoni seemed a reincarnation of Liszt, whose music he
greatly admired. A true internationalist, he belonged to Italy no more
than Liszt to Hungary and his own music has stronger affinities with
Germany—he had some German blood—than with Italy. But the
musical Germany that attracted him was not romantic Germany but the
Germany of Bach (above all), Beethoven, and Brahms, and the Italian
elements in his make-up which lighten the Violin Concerto (1897) and
shine out in the Lustspielouvertüre (1897), the fourth movement of the
Piano Concerto (1904), the suite inspired by Gozzi's Turandot (1904),

1 No. 3, ‘Montafiesa’ is recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x.
? On these, see infra pp. 200-1 and 315-17.

32 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

and the opera Arlecchino (1917) belong to the world of Verdi's Falstaff
(1893) and have nothing of morbidezza in their melody. Busoni's music
is by no means devoid of romantic traits, both technical (the Lisztian
organization of the Violin Concerto; the colossal scale and choral finale
of the Piano Concerto) and in spirit (the Symphonisches Tongedicht of
1893, the tragic third movement of the Piano Concerto). His first opera,
Die Brautwahl (1912) was based on E. T. A. Hoffmann and his final
masterpiece on the most characteristic of all romantic subjects, Doktor
Faust (begun 1914; prod. 1925).! But the ideal which he constantly
strove to realize was that which toward the end of his life he designated
‘young classicism’ (junge Klassizitdt) and defined as

the mastering, the sifting and turning to account of all the gains of previous
experiments and their inclusion in strong and beautiful forms. This art will at
first be old and new at the same time. The definite departure from what is
thematic and the return to melody ... as the bearer of the idea and the
begetter of harmony, in short the most highly developed (not the most
complicated) polyphony. ... The renunciation of subjectivity ... and the
re-conquest of serenity. ... Not profundity, and personal feeling and meta-
physics, but music which is absolute, distilled, and never under the mask of
figures and ideas borrowed from other spheres. Human feeling, but not
human affairs ... not assigning to an art tasks which lie outside its nature.
Description in music, for instance. ?

He belongs therefore to another chapter as do for one reason or another
the best of the younger composers of the generazione dell’ 80.

RUSSIA AND POLAND

Wagner was relatively little known and less admired by Russian
musicians until 1889, when Angelo Neumann's opera company brought
the Ring to St. Petersburg and Moscow. The impact of mature Wagner
impressed Rimsky-Korsakov and was perhaps responsible for his
conversion from an occasional to an almost exclusive opera-composer;
yet, beyond an enrichment of his already extremely colourful orchestral
palette and a more systematic use of leitmotives, it had no marked
influence on his style. With the very important exception of Tchaikovsky,
the romanticism of Russian composers had seldom taken the form of
expression of exclusively personal emotion. Modelled on Berlioz, Liszt,
and Glinka's Ruslan (and thus on Weber at second hand instead of
Wagner at first), it adopted the forms and picturesque gestures of
romanticism and entered into the romantic cult of past ages and the
magical and exotic, but seldom with deep personal emotional involve-

1 See infra, pp. 194—5.

? Open letter to Paul Bekker, Frankfurter Zeitung, 7 February 1920. Reprinted in Гоп
der Einheit der Musik (Berlin, 1922) p. 276-9; trs. Rosamond Ley, The Essence of Music
(London, 1957), pp. 20-2.

RUSSIA AND POLAND 33

ment. It was Tchaikovsky who was the supreme Russian romanticist
and, after his death in 1893, while much in his style and technique
passed into common usage, only three or four composers of any
significance followed him in his employment of music as an emotional
language: Sergey Rakhmaninov (1873-1943) most closely, Sergey
Taneyev (1856-1915) and Nikolay Metner (1880-1951) whose romanti-
cism was of the restrained nature of Brahms's, and Aleksandr Skryabin
(1872-1915) who must be counted among those who attempted to push
the aesthetic of the Gesamtkunstwerk to its farthest consequence. The
surviving members of the former Mighty Handful continued and
extended its tradition of colourful, Russian-flavoured music. Rimsky-
Korsakov (d. 1908) in a series of operas three of which, Kashchey
bessmertny (Kashchey the Immortal) (1902), Kitezh (1905; prod. 1907),
and Zolotoy Petushok (The Golden Cockerel) (1907: prod. 1909), mani-
fest a further deepening of his veins of mysticism and satire and a
further development of his pungent but highly artificial harmonic
vocabulary, Balakirev (d. 1910) creating new works in his old vein.
(Cui (d. 1918), the third survivor, had always lived mainly on glory
reflected from his colleagues.) Their numerous pupils, Anatoly Lyadov
(1855-1914), Sergey Lyapunov (1859-1924), Aleksandr Glazunov
(1865-1936), and others less talented, produced syntheses of the idiom
inherited from the Handful with a highly polished, euphonious style
in which technical fluency often outran the flow of creative ideas. AII
were overshadowed by Rimsky-Korsakov's last notable pupil, Igor
Stravinsky (1881-1971), who in three full-length ballets, Zhar-ptitsa
(The Firebird) (1910), Petrushka (1911), and Vesna svyashchennaya (The
Rite of Spring) (1913), enriched and extended the old ‘nationalist’ idiom
with harmonic and rhythmic conceptions drawn partly from late
Rimsky-Korsakov and Skryabin, partly from the West, and more and
more from his own fertile inventiveness, but also drained away from it
the last hint of the romantic.

The concentration on craftsmanship in the music of the nationalist
epigones and the emotions and philosophical ideas underlying the
equally highly polished music of Rakhmaninov and Skryabin are both
attributable in part to the intellectual climate of Russia at this period.
The optimistic positivism of the third quarter of the nineteenth century,
when artistic truth mattered much more than beauty, had long since
lost its force. Under an increasingly reactionary political regime only
the revolutionary extremists preserved the energy that comes from
despair; and in the general atmosphere of futility which Chekhov
derided, the creative artist tended to take refuge in a sterile cult of

1 See below pp. 174-7.

34 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

*Parnassianism', of *pure' beauty, in symbolism and mysticism. Music-
ally this took the form of the *miévre lyrisme’ of Tchaikovsky’s imita-
tors, which Stravinsky derided.! Rakhmaninov's pessimism is much less
anguished and personal than Tchaikovsky's or Mahler's, and often
shows itself in flaccidity of invention rather than positive expression.
His most successful essay in actual programme-music, the tone-poem
inspired by Bócklin's painting Die Toteninsel (1908), is typical of the
polished superficiality of his elegiac art. Fine craftsmanship is also a
distinctive quality of Skryabin's music, but almost from the first, in
the piano Preludes, Opp. 11, 13, 15, 16 and 17 (mostly 1894—5), it
was informed by a poetry more individual than Rakhmaninov's and
expressing a much wider range of moods. Quickly absorbing and out-
growing the influence of Chopin and Schumann, he developed from an
exquisite piano-miniaturist into a musical mystic,? increasingly obsessed
with a pathological belief in his own Messiahship. His early piano
sonatas, nos. 1—3 (1893-8), are normal late-romantic compositions, but
from 1900 onward he became more and more deeply drawn into a
mystical philosophy of art and his First Symphony, completed in 1900,
ends with a setting for mezzo-soprano, tenor, and chorus of a poem of
his own in which art is nearly equated with religion. Whether he had
first-hand knowledge of Mahler's first three symphonies is uncertain
though he must have known of them by hearsay. In any case, he
followed neither Mahler nor earlier composers of partly choral sym-
phonies, for in effect his vocal finale is an epilogue in E major, partly
based on one of the themes of the purely orchestral first movement, a
lento also in E major:

Ех. 12
Lento (4 = 66)

3 Flutes

() 8 g
ГУ uia
[Fury W wj
I fan’

Strings
Vc. pizz.

NU]

! Poétique musicale (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), p. 65.

2 Martin Cooper, ‘Aleksandr Skryabin and the Russian Renaissance’, Studi musicali, i
(1972), p. 327, shows the relationship of his ideas to those of the Russian thinkers and poets
of the day.

RUSSIA AND POLAND 35

These two slow movements in E major frame a conventional four-
movement symphony in E minor. The catastrophic failure of the
experiment was caused by Skryabin’s inability to devise anything better
than a square-cut diatonic fugue, of a type more often written by
students than by full-fledged composers, for the chorus. After the purely
orchestral Second Symphony (1901), showing the influence of Liszt and
Wagner (and perhaps also of Nietzschean philosophy, which obsessed
him for a time) but also drawing nearer in style to his own far more
individual piano music, he began to dream of “а fusion of all the arts,
but not a theatrical one like Wagner’s’. ‘Art’, he said, ‘must unite with
philosophy and religion in an indivisible whole to form a new gospel,
which will replace the old Gospel we have outlived. I cherish the dream
of creating such a “mystery”. For it, it would be necessary to build a
special temple—perhaps here, perhaps far away in India. But mankind
is not yet ready for 17.1 Skryabin's Third Symphony, Le divin poème
(1904)—preceded by the harmonically advanced Fourth Sonata (1903)
—is in three movements, ‘Struggles’, ‘Delights’, ‘Divine Play’, and,
according to the programme written by his mistress, Tatyana Schlézer,

represents the evolution of the human spirit which, torn from an entire past
of beliefs and mysteries which it surmounts and overturns, passes through
Pantheism and attains to a joyous and intoxicated affirmation of its liberty
and its unity with the universe (the divine ‘Ego’),

The one-movement Poem ekstaza (Poem of Ecstasy) (1907), for very
large orchestra with, for instance, quadruple woodwind, eight horns,
and organ, and the Fifth Piano Sonata (1908) which quickly followed
it? elaborate similar ideas with a further intensification of post-
Wagnerian harmony. In his next and last orchestral work, Prometheus
(1910), ‘for full orchestra and piano, with organ, [wordless] chorus, and
clavier à lumiéres’, Skryabin carried his harmonic language a stage
further still to the very brink of atonality;* this was a preliminary study
for the long contemplated but never written ‘mystery’, a ‘liturgical act’
combining dancing, music, poetry, colours, and scents, which would
induce ‘a supreme, final ecstasy’ in which ‘the physical plane of our
consciousness would disappear and a world cataclysm would begin'.*
The part for the clavier à lumières is in normal musical notation, but

1 Yuly D. Engel, “А. М. Skryabin. Biografichesky ocherk’, Muzikalny Sovremennik
(1916), no. 4—5, p. 56.

? Skryabin published the verbal poem, the first part of which (lines 1—224) provided the
programme of the orchestral poem, at Geneva in 1906; lines 227-35 were printed as an
epigraph to the Fifth Sonata. The whole poem (original text and German translation by
Ernst Moritz Arndt) is printed as an appendix to Clemens-Christoph Johannes von Gleich,
Die sinfonischen Werke von Alexander Skrjabin (Bilthoven, 1963), p. 113.

3 See infra pp. 136-7, and the Frontispiece of this volume. 4 Engel, op. cit., p. 89.

36 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

Skryabin intended that the pressure of each key should produce not a
musical sound but an intense light, coloured in accordance with his
associations of sound and colour (e.g. C — red, C sharp-D flat —
violet, D — yellow, and so on), and flooding the concert-hall; mere
projection of colours on a screen was a compromise which he rejected as
‘trivial’. The Sonatas Мо. 6-10 (1912-13) and the other post-
Promethean piano-compositions probably—Opp. 71-4 (1914) certainly
—originated as music for the *mystery'. Thus Skryabin's Gesamtkunst-
werk was never realized and his nearest approach to it, Prometheus,
fell short of Schoenberg's Die glückliche Hand, even—most ironically—
of the ballets of the outstanding anti-Wagnerian, Stravinsky.

The mélomimiques of Vladimir Rebikov (1866—1920), short dramatic
studies of psychological situations for one or two characters, with piano
accompaniment, and his ‘musico-psychographic dramas’, attracted a
good deal of attention during the early part of the century; but like his
harmonic experiments with chords of superimposed perfect fourths,
they were foredoomed to failure by the weakness of his musical
invention. Nevertheless they were known to Janaéek and may have
suggested the form of his Zápisník zmizelého (Diary of one who
vanished).?

Although traces of Skryabin's stylistic influence are perceptible in
The Firebird and the early works of Myaskovsky and other Soviet
composers of the early post-Revolution period, even in the young
Prokofyev, only one important non-Russian composer was deeply
affected by him, the Pole Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937),?? who
towered above the other members of the *Mlada Polska' (Young
Poland) group, Mieczysław Karłowicz (1876-1909), Grzegorz Fitelberg
(1879-1953), Ludomir Rózycki (1884-1953), and others. The common
aim of these fyoung Poles' was a renaissance of Polish music to be
effected by the reconciliation of the national idiom with more or less
contemporary forms and harmony; all were influenced by Strauss. But
Szymanowski, after a First Symphony (1907) in which the shadow
of Reger also appears, a symphonic colossus typical of the period,
went on to write a Second (1909) and a partly vocal Third (1915-16)
in which Skryabin and French music played a liberating role. The
influence of Skryabin's style is still more marked in Szymanowski's
Métopes (1915) and Masques (1917) for piano and his Mythes (1915) for
violin and piano, while the blending of the mystic, the erotic, and the

! Leonid Sabaneyev, Vospominaniya o Skryabine (Moscow, 1925), p. 61.

? See infra, pp. 307-8.

? бес particularly Józef Chominski, ‘Szymanowski i Skryabin' in Igor Вега (ed.),
Russko-polskie muzikalnie svyazi (Moscow, 1963), p. 375.

SCANDINAVIA 37

orgiastic in his later opera Król Roger (King Roger) (1926) also smacks
strongly of Skryabin.!

SCANDINAVIA

Those countries which may, more conveniently than accurately, be
called Nordic and Anglo-Saxon, were most strongly influenced by
Germanic techniques and idioms, less by French, and hardly at all by
Slavonic even after Dvorak and Tchaikovsky had become familiar and
even popular. But there was an affinity with the Slavonic lands in that
clinging to national idioms which has always been associated with
musical romanticism although the impersonality of such idioms is in
direct conflict with the subjectivity that is the essence of romanticism.
The Norwegian Christian Sinding (1865-1941) and the Swede Wilhelm
Stenhammar (1871—1927) are typical of the German-orientated com-
posers of the period who yet managed to infuse national qualities—and
in Stenhammar's case an element of neoclassicism—into their later
works. But it was the older Grieg (1843-1907) who still dominated the
Scandinavian scene, ever a thoroughbred romantic but in some respects
a new Grieg as in the Haugtussa Sang-Cyclus (1898) and the piano
arrangements of Norske Folkeviser, Ор. 66 (1896) and Slåtter (1902),
the harmony of which last is influenced by a folk instrument, the
hardingfele or ‘Hardanger fiddle'.?

Grieg was hardly ever completely successful when he attempted
large-scale composition; even the so-called Symphonic Dances on Nor-
wegian folk-tunes (1898) are essentially compilations of miniatures.
But the two Scandinavians who came to the fore during his later years,
the Finn Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) and the Dane Carl Nielsen (1865—
1931), were both masters of the larger forms, particularly of the sym-
phony. Both were markedly individual talents and, although it is not
difficult to detect the influence of Bruckner's ostinati on Sibelius or to
trace this or that melodic turn in his earlier works to Borodin or
Tchaikovsky, his mature idiom is strikingly unlike that of any of his
predecessors or contemporaries. It is always clearly diatonic, as is
Nielsen's. Although Sibelius anticipated Mahler in employing the
chorus in a very large-scale symphonic work (Kullervo, ‘symphonic
poem for soloists, chorus and orchestra', 1892),? he was the antipode of
Mahler, reacting in his symphonies—even in the First (1899)—against
all those procedures in the nineteenth-century symphony which Mahler

1 On Szymanowski's later works, see infra, pp. 311-15.

2 See John Horton, ‘Grieg’s “Slaatter” for Pianoforte’, Music and Letters, xxvi (1945),
p. 229.

3 See Robert Layton, Sibelius (London, 1965), pp. 107-14.

38 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

developed further. Structures are tightened; transitions are from the
first most skilfully made; and the thematic work is severely dialectical
so that, while theme-transformation goes on continually, a totally
organic web of sound is woven without need of such mechanical devices
as the motto-theme to give it a sense of unity. In the Fourth Symphony
(1911), which the composer himself described as “а protest against the
compositions of today',! compression is carried so far that the first
subject consists of only 25 adagio bars, the second of only 8; but this
compression and the chamber-like treatment of the orchestra, if a
*protest' against elephantiasis, was very much in line with the other
tendencies of that date which have already been remarked on. Com-
pression led to actual fusion of the movements in the Seventh Symphony
(1924). Although Sibelius's earlier symphonies are romantic in tone,
they are not programmatic and he protested vigorously against attempts
to interpret them so.” The strong romantic element in his make-up was,
as it were, siphoned off in a series of tone-poems from En Saga (original
version, 1892; revised 1901) to Tapiola (1926) and other works. On the
other hand Nielsen, after a First Symphony (1892) chiefly remarkable
for its unconventional treatment of tonality, went on to write a com-
pletely programmatic Second, De fire Temperamenter (The Four
Temperaments) (1902),? and others with suggestive titles: no. 3 Sinfonia
espansiva (1911), no. 4 Det Uudslukkelige (The Unquenchable) (1916),
no. 6 Sinfonia semplice (1925). His justification for such titles was that
‘while a short hint or title can illuminate the music in many ways . . . the
programme or title may indicate a mood or emotion but not an idea or
concrete action'.*

BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES

Music in the English-speaking countries remained until the end of the
nineteenth century, and after, under influences that were not only
German but rather conservatively German. It was Brahms rather than
Wagner who attracted Alexander Mackenzie (1847-1935)—whose best
work, like Sullivan's, was all done before 1890—Hubert Parry (1848-
1918) and Charles Stanford (1852-1924). The American talents of
Edward MacDowell (1861—1908) and Horatio Parker (1863-1919) were
initially fostered by Raff and Rheinberger. But the strongest and most

! Harold E. Johnson, Sibelius (London, 1960), p. 126.

? See, for instance, Karl Ekman, Jean Sibelius (Helsinki, 1935; English translation by
Edward Визе, London, 1936), pp. 191-2 (English edition).

3 For Nielsen's own explanation see Robert Simpson, Carl Nielsen, Symphonist (London,
1952), pp. 42-3.

4 Nielsen, Levende Musik (Copenhagen, 1925), p. 41.

BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES S9

individual Anglo-Saxon of their period, Edward Elgar (1857-1934),
after a long slow development in the debilitating climate of the English
provinces, discovered for himself the real fountainheads of later
romanticism, Schumann, Liszt and Wagner, and applied their tech-
niques of harmony, orchestration, and leitmotive first in the dead forms
of the Victorian cantata and the dying one of the oratorio, most
successfully in The Dream of Gerontius (1900), and then in a series of
intensely personal orchestral works—the Enigma Variations (1899), two
symphonies (1908 and 1910), the symphonic study Falstaff (1913), the
concertos for violin and for cello (1910 and 1919)—which constitute
the high-water mark of English musical romanticism. Elgar really stands
alone; the work of the only comparable figure, Frederick Delius
(1862-1934), English merely by the accident of birth, has nothing in
common with any English tradition and little with the mainstream of
Continental romanticism. Delius was an isolated cosmopolitan like
Busoni, poetically far more and technically far less gifted. (A compar-
able, though less individual, character was his almost exact contem-
porary, the Alsatian-born Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935), an
American from 1881 onward.) He stands nearest to his colleagues not
in his musical style but in his sources. Like Schoenberg he was attracted
by the poetry of Jens Peter Jacobsen (the opera Fennimore and Gerda
(1910), the Arabesk for baritone, chorus and orchestra (1911), and a
number of songs); like Strauss and Mahler, he came under the spell of
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (A Mass of Life, 1905); like his younger English
contemporaries, he set Walt Whitman (Sea Drift, 1903) and based
compositions on folk-melodies: Appalachia (1902), Brigg Fair (1907),
and On hearing the first cuckoo in spring (1912). But his borrowed folk-
melodies were American Negro and Norwegian as well as English and
he used them merely as catalysts for his ultra-romantic nostalgia,
embedding them in his personal dialect of Griegian harmony, whereas
the best of his younger English contemporaries sought in English folk-
melody for the basis of a musical style that should be independent of
the German tradition.

These were Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) and Gustav Holst
(1874-1934), both pupils of Stanford who had himself written a
symphony and orchestral rhapsodies on Irish tunes. But Stanford
treated folk-music as ‘material’ for traditional composition, while for
his pupils it was the principal—though not the sole—instrument of
emancipation from the heritage of both Brahms and Wagner, from the
forms and idioms of the European mainstream altogether. Although

1 See pp. 507-19.

40 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

there are plentiful traces of romanticism in their extra-musical thinking,
their suppression of subjective emotion and rhetoric was almost as
complete as their rejection of chromaticism and rich, complicated
textures. In Holst's directness of expression and fresh approach to the
essentials of music, and in his vein of transcendentalism, itis possible to
find hidden affinities with his American contemporary, the Horatio
Parker pupil, Charles Ives (1874-1935) 1 but Holst was never as radical
as Ives and he achieved general recognition with the performance of
The Planets in 1918; Ives had to wait considerably longer. The more
conservative Vaughan Williams made his mark more quickly; before
the choral Sea Symphony (1910), his name was already well known to
his fellow-countrymen.

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF LATE ROMANTICISM

It is significant that Vaughan Williams, Holst, and Ives rejected not
only the idioms of their European contemporaries but their sophis-
ticated techniques. To say what they wanted to say, more idiosyncratic
homespun techniques were not so much adequate as necessary. But
Holst's ostinati and static basses, Vaughan Williams's fumbling with
the methods һе had learned from Parry and Stanford, Ives’s ‘collisions
of musical events', seem embarrassingly naive beside the harmonic and
orchestral refinements of the Continental composers of the period.
Even the Europeans who were turning back to sound-for-sound's-sake
and away from the concept of music as a quasi-language were still often
employing the techniques which the late romantics had evolved in their
striving to catch and communicate the subtlest nuances of complicated,
even perverse, emotion and mystical or ironic ideas. The erotic oriental
mysticism of Szymanowski struggles in the song 'Smutna wiosna’,
Op. 24, no. 6 (1911) to express simultaneously the sense of spring
returning and sorrow for a dead love throughtypical romantic harmony
and a plethora of meticulous markings. ‘Where art thou?’ his lover
cries (Ex. 13). Three years earlier Holst had set the same words, in
nearly the same sense, in his oriental-mystical chamber-opera Savitri,
with the utmost austerity (Ex. 14). And although Holst's voice-part
outlines an F minor triad, the typical ostinato bass shows that he has
really parted company with tonality, while the Szymanowski song is in
D major despite the constant sound of minor sorrow in the harmony
and despite the fact that only one phrase in the voice-part—the last—is
in D major and floats down to a piano cadence which perfectly illustrates
the final stage of functional harmony in dissolution (Ex. 15).

1 See pp. 574-83.

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF LATE ROMANTICISM 41

Ex. 13 (Poco meno)

Andante dolcissimo Holt express.
---+---<

е molto espressivo фр

Moderato
(Solo) PPP

Via.

eT
-е 0
ep ПЕТ,

Vc.
(2 Soli) ES =A p

1890-1914

42 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM:
SATYAVAN

ENTE
il T | | | —
|

шш 3 | M.
| К (о 1-1 avuc
а M "Nh

dim.

N
"

|н
41

(+ FI. П)

ии
[—— smi
|- cr md
are
a
ia
———
DD

Mine eyes
V

morendo
rallent.

ay me жан
aaa
Ерос
aes
Есен
E
т
pe |
Z
iz
ES
peu]
ОФ. Бе
(2
[Rr
Ба ар
ГЫ

where art thou?

[———— 1
үс шект р == ырк зис | шиш)
ЕЕ ЕЕ ЕЕ ee Ee =]
Tc {7 V
=
© 25 ря
pem 424
2
dolciss.

| | Е: M
É -
+ .
Jh T ЬЯ +
ІШСЕ T =
1 ыш S
; |
Ш 0 ДҮ
| і ( m 82;
RG со C 55% 4 А < ы
ML SE eum s c

(loveliest flower of spring!)

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF LATE ROMANTICISM 43

This process of dissolution had certainly been protracted. It had already
reached an advanced stage in the opening of Act Ш of Parsifal which
was written in 1879, but its progress must be measured not so much
by its intensity in certain passages as by the extent of its cancer-like
spread through entire movements and works. lt was essentially a
harmonic process and fundamentally affected melody only in so far
as melody is the surface of harmony; much seemingly chromatic
melody, even in Tristan, is no more than a rippling of the surface with
chromatic appoggiaturas and passing-notes. But basically diatonic
melody, even purely diatonic melody, with its tonal associations and
implications was still an important feature of the late romantic sound-
language and few composers discarded it entirely. Strauss, Elgar,
Dukas, Rakhmaninov were but a few of those who often employed
clear diatonic harmony and melody; these provide the language for

Ех. 16
Stürmisch bewegt (4 = 60)
ен
[и «ре у] -——
п [EE EE
0 257
[e
PERS == == =
in pj 0t fa
Cl. in D ЕЕЕ

(actual
sounds)

Б
|
;

СІ. г; Ggs
Basset

Horn
>
ав м
ЕД =)
Я дя 2
IEEE. лан

|
|

е Ex L
Р aure Е] р
А очи. жс еі 5
dy
Strings
Vc. pizz. arco Jf
Ley dun —— ===
Ус 3

44 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

фт тт
жой
FI.
tri--—— tr
- be b bæ
Ob. д - - = =
JU Неда 0,
CL in D = =
си ==
267 b
aq = ir i :
Basset = i
Horn ie ( C =
Bn. is = 6 E
Б) а=. Da
mf 3 > 3 3
I
ІШ
E >
НЕН ДЕ 1
IV ве |
JP
o COR REM тысты
H T a
= > 7
RA = >
Strings 3
= WIL = Г
= ; rip ji

Delius (Songs of Sunset, 1907), Elgar (end of the Second Symphony,
1910), and Mahler (‘Abschied’ of Das Lied von der Erde, 1908) to sing
their saddest farewells. Diatonic melody was often treated as the core
of otherwise deliquescent or tonally uncertain or obscure harmony, or
deliberately contrasted with tonally disturbed passages, as in Parsifal,
Ein Heldenleben, The Golden Cockerel, to suggest antitheses of good
and evil or real and unreal. Even the purely diatonic could be subjected
to strange juxtapositions and dislocations like the flattening of the
second and third degrees of the scale in the seventh bar of Ein
Heldenleben and the expanded ‘Neapolitan’ interpolation of bars 11-12,
which is logical and almost orthodox by comparison with the Introduc-
tion to Rosenkavalier where E major is dazzingly expanded by purely
diatonic means (Ex. 16).

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF LATE ROMANTICISM 45

There is a close technical parallel to the *Neapolitan interpolation' of
Heldenleben near the beginning of the Andante of Mahler's Sixth
Symphony:

Ex. 17
Andante moderato

= eee _| ____ a
i : Ес жЕ = жс ыы сш]
Ob.I В 5
Woodwind
CI Р--Е-7-
р ЕН

Ey, (iS тарда жаманға ы ВЕТ un "a |
рм ГГ с ж] zm. Еж)
a руд D <)
QS Ez c x cA 5
Во LII P ~
Emo San Jus, [m]
ju NOD x — ad Reese, ш

Ey cepe
EL асны ШШ ШЕЕ жеу”

Еш дао Bea WALD o Е | Ж „ш
[Ew ы TS p p or wee]
Dc»

Strings
= m. L— Бы
ить раа рааны ча]
АЕ raro ЖШ. ЖҰБЫН ШШЕН ГУЧИ гелін eet ге [eme кш e]
(р ГР УТ тағу д 2221-0-26 oe БЕН.
BN SS aS Um mgr DE es а ee ви = СІ ыса mE]

— m! ше 1—5 Ы
(з= e
KA CU sr.
Бес ee] b
[me — P-]

Ta an сс“ D? SS re ee ПЕЕВ pa те ТЕН) текше |
[9 )--105——*9| aay тр ———
ре. Hz Se
— ——————— " =
ss M = —
() (tacet)
El em атту — 4 =
amb Ne ушы х= x] K | |
НХ cj ae 1
my ра DS
p > Е
— —À
f Dp

Жош: em SPESA
P =

1890-1914

46 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM:

ee шеше

у= ==
Se! ГТ р Лнан пази

motivated by some extra-musical purpose,

though this seems to be

Strauss's by sheer musical exuberance. Even while Mahler was working
on the Sixth Symphony in 1904, Schoenberg was opening the first
of his Sechs Lieder, Op. 8, with a succession of common chords equally

disruptive of the tonic key, E major:

‚Ех. 18

Mässige J

(XX

== ©]

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF LATE ROMANTICISM 47

C
pom wi
a
5

е z >
{ew es Re Se

(Night flows into day, day into night,)

Thus, even in diatonic contexts, functional key-relationship remained
no more than an outworn convention which, as we have seen,! Mahler
had already discarded in his Third Symphony; the E major coda to the
very G major Fourth Symphony, a master-stroke of imagination, is
motivated by no law of tonal gravity but by its contrast of key-colour.
Or rather it is used as a means of suggesting the unearthly radiance of
angelic music, just as the tonal aberrations of the Rosenkavalier Intro-
duction convey the orgiastic turbulence of Oktavian and the Marschallin.
Such passages can often be justified by extra-musical considerations;
indeed they usually originate in them; but by this time they had become
part of the normal language of music.

If rapid harmonic change could weaken key-sense even in essentially
diatonic music, it could destroy it completely when the harmony is
chromatic. A mere veil of chromatic appoggiaturas and passing-notes
can totally disguise the most familiar of chords, as Wolf showed in the
opening of the twenty-seventh song of the Italienisches Liederbuch,
‘Schon streckt’ ich aus’ (1896), where he broods on a single chord of the
diminished seventh for the best part of two bars before revealing at the
very end of the second bar that the key is A flat:

Ex. 19

Sehr langsam (4 = 42) D"

48 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890—1914

When the basic harmonies are less familiar and succeed each other more
quickly, tonality may still be discovered by painstaking analysis but it
has lost any real significance. The following passage from Schoenberg's
Kammersymphonie, ten years later than the Wolf example, is preceded
by a G major chord and it cadences in G major (with a parenthesis
between dominant—x—and tonic) :1

Ex. 20

Woodwind

Strings
(all except
Vn. I muted)

but recognition that it is in a strongly modified G major is of slight
importance in that context, or in relation to the total architecture of the
composition. Yet this passage still has a recognizable cadence and
symmetrical inner structure; recognizable cadences and obvious

1 The original dynamic markings of the Symphony, given here, were considerably altered
in later editions.

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF LATE ROMANTICISM 49

periodicity became ever less frequent in the language of late romantic-
ism, giving way to a species of opaque musical ‘prose’. At the other
extreme, Strauss, Mahler, and Reger—to say nothing of such conserva-
tives as Pfitzner—sometimes revert to a provocatively naive, sym-
metrical and diatonic type of melody.

The old drives and tensions of harmony and key having, by
over stretching, been weakened almost to non-existence, the energy of
music was mainly concentrated in line: melody, motive, or more often
something less easily definable. ‘Prose’ lines of great flexibility, angu-
larity, and sensitiveness are brought into relationship through, or
sometimes against, somewhat lymphatic harmony of various kinds:
chromatically modified diatonic, experimental (for instance, based on
superimposed fourths instead of thirds) or purely empirical. In the
first decade of the century one can still often detect a family likeness
among the melodic lines of very different composers, traceable to their
common filiation from Wagner—which is naturally most obvious in
the passages from d'Indy and Mahler, the earliest of the seven quota-
tions grouped in Ex. 21.

Ex. 21
(1) D'INDY (1895)

Un peu moins lent

Woodwind

Solo
Viola

poco sfz tres soutenu

50 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

DON = йт. p ж
Ц
| Ә.Н ІЛ ТЕР ы SS кете NIS Е аа
М LI ]-- 18m 2m sema ig и к ш et P» | d
[7
| Ob. Sclo - | CO
Woodwind 2 trés expressif
стезс.
2 — 67656 КИЕ я.
НЕТ НН =—
Sj ЧЕНЕ

Gep
Violins | а
BAS) So VET типа ЕЕС)
Г] ку л ene 1 oH Р
Dp
Violas
Cellos

Woodwind

Фр poco rit.
MU CENT mec
тиди ИШ mc

Strings

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF LATE ROMANTICISM 9i

(iii) BARTÓK (1903)
Allegro moderato

2р Ob.I = р

Tay ee Se eT
майса |

БОЛ СЕ Т ЕЕ ЕЕ
2p

Cellos (div.)

+ IRA

1890-1914

52 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM:

Yar
па Ц
Ае

E
Woodwind| -foe

| |

ШШ ГЛ? КЪ.

Кое

жууш ee илиш” сос шиш ы Жаы ЕЕ
. ..

|
УЕ

Fau

Cellos (div.) =E E

(+ Ob. I & Ш)

#1.42

Cl. I, II & Eb

|
RU
В

чей

< TE

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF LATE ROMANTICISM

(iv) SCHOENBERG (1906)

ЕЕ
bd
b
=
—
Пеене: Е

E |".

атасы меу шет уш ск С ти —— g

pem

E в
С ош Ира Т -- ЭШ
л ые — —— хш

Sehr rasch (J = ca. 104)

Ut — — — Lo ДЕ ОТ И

a? “ча |
кс | ill |
ГІЗІ
и: ij | FHA чү
1. db A jj
Nisi “ТЕЙ MN. STER

иар ee f

Е - 1 2 li { |

3 Е 5 Е 3 3 i X

E КР, "i Ц, Ж
ET П

54 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF LATE ROMANTICISM 55

v) SKRYABIN (1907
е) ( ) 4D espressivo SS ===

Ob.
СА.

factual sounds)

Вп.

Horns НА
(actual sounds)

Cur of mm

d "PM T
А gp се E MEILE

D)
ланат тад: F oF | Elgi ERAN

Violins
0 = b
an : =
Ц

ЕЕ ЕЕ
CSV

РЕ ы: в VI ЖЕЕП а а a 1 за
(div.)

GE on лае ТЕА

Е-Е НЕЕ Нн Ее НЕ Еа

GERE | RS СВЕН CD ee eS 1 -[9^ Se ea)

1890-1914

56 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM:

ү c
ПТА LH

; а

E 55

dim.

4
Е@5

Дъ

-ASD

a.
(actual sounds)

9
ЕА
S—-s
Dp

(actual sounds) ЕК6

Horns

Violins

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF LATE ROMANTICISM

sehr zart

Т ЕЕЕ
( i [Е |
| | m
^g M И
ШЕ В Ш

Таен еее леті, ey легі
[p ЕТ Cen ee
Е-е: тазға [n атала)
ves
Be e]
ЕЕ cH т. ЧЫГЫ
eee осла над!
p]
44
Il
ІП
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mit Dampfer

58 THE

Woodwind

Horns
(actual sounds)

Harp

2nd Vins.

Violas

Cellos

APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914
Fi. I. =. +

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[nec yum eem: mae onm TREE Rr ЧГ жй БЫН Pe лысы праи чау Ам]

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(+ Ю.В.) pizz.

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF LATE ROMANTICISM

(vii) STRAUSS (1909)
Sehr schnell (2 — 176)

Woodwind

Violas

Cellos

agitato

OCTAVIAN
(hesitating):

Wenn er mich dort

1890-1914

60 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM:

MARSCHALLIN
(pleading):

ПИ
ШЕТІ
ИҢ
шы |

| g
|

The - res?

wird aus Dir,

Was

er-wischt,

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF LATE ROMANTICISM

=
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[jum
ganz
ye

Selmer

(stamping impatiently):

MARSCHALLIN:

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ЕЕ!
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The - res!

OCTAVIAN:

mein Schatz!

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ІТ есен)
2 а
- steck Er sich,

гр"

62 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

Ob. I,

пеш

Же TIE] Ише;
=== =
Но. I & И =>
()
[ =a
EY «nS ұста eee eee ey eel НЕТ
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still! Das
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3 ПЕ” à»
һа Т^ о ара г)
raam; vs Не Ы
as ет са
Е Б =
CKESC ж м E
[-3153— —— = мс.
LECT eee eee. cnr
IL BI D рас ae & ee c I 3 (сте ДЕ.
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de. а
Gey Е Е 190 gl
г eS SS
Ea: 5
RIA 2—7
Себет" SS а -
“а Ю.В. pizz. & Титр.)

(Oct.: And don't move! If he catches me there, what will become of you, Theres?
Mar.: Hide, my darling! Oct.: Theres! Mar.: Keep quite still!)

THE TEXTURES OF LATE ROMANTICISM 63

These passages are characteristic of the musical language of what may
reasonably be called the main stream of late romanticism, ‘language’ not
merely in the sense of ‘technical idiom’ but in the sense of conveying—
essentially in the initial dropping interval with its suggestion of a
caress—a definite emotional significance. In all but two of them, the
composers tell us we are correct in understanding his music as an
expression of love or tenderness: (1) is from the Prologue to Fervaal,
where the wounded hero first turns his eyes to the princess Guilhen; in
(ii), from the first movement of Mahler's Fourth Symphony, the Wagner-
ian melodic language is clear beyond doubt; (iii) opens the section in the
Kossuth Symphony headed ‘What sorrow weighs on your spirit, dear
husband?'; (iv) is from the first section of the Kammersymphonie; in
(v) from the Poem of Ecstasy the theme has just been played by a solo
violin, with the marking dolce espress. carezzando; in (vi), the thirteenth
variation of Webern's Passacaglia, the markings also speak for them-
selves, as does the anxiety of the lovers in (vii) from the opening scene of
Rosenkavalier. In each case the sharply defined initial motive generates,
or dissolves into, a more or less indeterminate non-motivic continua-
tion. A more motivic continuation of the same basic idea occurs in the
second movement of Roussel’s D minor Violin Sonata, Op. 11(1907-8)
which comes particularly close in some of its later appearances, such as
Ex. 22, to the Skryabin version.

THE TEXTURES OF LATE ROMANTICISM

These passages also repay study from the point of view of texture:
the harmonic bases, the warp and woof of the music, and the instru-
mental colouring of the strands. Although selected in the first place
solely on the basis of similar emotion expressed melodically, they have a
number of common characteristics beneath their very obvious differ-
ences.

The harmonic pace is moderate and equable, usually changing with
the bar. And the basic chords, considered simply as agglomerations of
sounds, are generally unremarkable; even Bartók's ‘Hungarian’
melodic line is borne on very ordinary harmonies before it collapses in
the Wagnerian cadence at the end of bar 4. But these basic chords are
thickly overlaid with passing-notes, appoggiaturas, and less easily
explicable ‘foreign’ notes, and they are more easily related to each other
as a simple concatenation than functionally and with reference to a firm
tonal centre. ‘Key’ is obvious enough from point to point but is seldom
orientated to a more distant horizon-mark. Only d'Indy's F sharp
minor and Mahler's G major have any real meaning; Strauss's B
minor and the D major to which it leads are only passing incidents, as

64 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914
Ex. 22 b

Assez animé (J = 120)

the one-flat key-signature suggests—yet that one-flat signature is really
valid only for two passages, each of a dozen bars or so, separated by
nearly three hundred bars of non-F major. Webern's 8-bar variation is
a miniature version of the same thing; it begins and ends with tonic
chords, buttressed by augmented triads which function as substitute
dominant sevenths (F natural replacing E-G), but the intervening
harmonies can be related to D major only by ingenious sophistry.
In itself the chord of superimposed fourths in bar 5, F-B-E flat-A flat,
is an instrument of tonal dislocation, as are the augmented fourths/
diminished fifths of Skryabin's bass. Compared with these passages of
Webern and Skryabin, that from Rosenkavalier is strikingly conserva-
tive, but it should be remembered that Rosenkavalier in general is
harmonically more conservative than its predecessor, Elektra; Strauss
was an older man, and Rosenkavalier marked the beginning of his
creative climacteric.

Despite this contrast of harmonic vocabulary and of Strauss's al
fresco writing, such as opera demands, with the jewellers’ work of

THE TEXTURES OF LATE ROMANTICISM 65

Mahler, Skryabin, and Webern, the basic texture is the same in all
four—and in the other examples: through or over the harmonic
background are drawn one or two horizontal strands which may or
may not be related to each other. But, except in the Schoenberg passage,
these lines do not interact on each other and propel the music forward,
any more than the harmonic successions give a sense of progression
toward a goal. The vitality of the music lies in the nervous energy of the
individual lines themselves; it is thus easily exhausted and climaxes tend
to be achieved artificially, not to say mechanically, by *7ristan-
Steigerungen’ and mere volume of sound and elaboration of texture.

The finest craftsmanship of the late romantics was expended on the
dovetailing and instrumental colouring of the horizontal lines, whether
of primary or secondary importance—Hauptstimmen or Nebenstimmen,
as Schoenberg was to distinguish them some time after the Kammer-
symphonie. Indeed dovetailing and colour-shading are often part of the
same process, as may be heard at its most subtle in Skryabin's wood-
wind writing in Ex. 21 (v) or in Elgar's shattering tutti in Ex. 27 (on
pp. 76-7). The amount of line-drawing entrusted primarily to the wind,
whether or not supported by strings, is very characteristic of the period.
And not only woodwind or horns: eighteen bars after (v) Skryabin gives
his principal melodic line to two trumpets in unison, f та dolce (and
the secondary line to solo horn and cellos). Egon Wellesz has traced this
way of employing the trumpet melodically, in the later Strauss, early
Berg, and elsewhere, not only ‘at moments of heightened brilliance,
power and solemnity’, from the example of Mahler.! He goes оп
perceptively:

This is connected with the endeavour to heighten the intensity of the sound
without drawing on the full orchestra, with the need to give the melodic line
the highest degree of emotion without interfering with the clarity of the
line-drawing. In this tendency ultimately one can see a romantic element,
that of over-playing one's hand (Uberpointierung). The romantic musician—
as one may already observe in Liszt—is not content to state objectively the
values latent in the musical substance but, through the instrumentation, adds
to it from his own subjective—one might almost say /iterary—feeling a
wish-idea more complete, richer, more fulfilled than the apparent sound.
With Mahler this conflict between will to represent and what is represented,
typical of all romantic creativity, is partially resolved by his ability to extend
the limits of invention through the colour of the orchestra.

And he illustrates this with a passage from the first movement of
Mahler's Fifth Symphony:

! Die neue Instrumentation (Berlin, 1928), i, pp. 106—7.

66 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

Ex. 23

Piótzlich schneller. Leidenschaftlich. Wild

Vins. I only

Trumpet I
Trombones
Violins

Horns І, И, Ш (+ 3 Ob.)

gestopft г-3--

(+ Vins. II)

|
В
|
|

THE TEXTURES OF LATE ROMANTICISM 67

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Ше а! fresco scoring of which is as far removed as possible from
Skryabin's exaggerated finesse. But Mahler and Strauss, indeed Sibelius
and Elgar and the more conservative composers of the period generally,
thought directly in terms of the orchestra, while their slightly younger
contemporaries were not only affected by Debussy's pointillisme—
Skryabin had a score of La Mer at his elbow, as well as Ein Heldenleben,
when he was orchestrating Prometheus‘—but tended to translate
pianistic textures. The instrumental refinements of Ex. 21 (v) reflect the
exquisite refinements of the composer's piano-playing. The lay-out of
Webern's variation reminds one of some late Brahms piano-piece, and
that of the Schoenberg passage, Ex. 21 (iv) corresponds to a great deal of
nineteenth-century piano-music: a vital top and bottom, with a filling-in
of conventional figuration.

Nevertheless, although orchestral writing did not always originate in
purely orchestral thinking, this was perhaps the last great age of
orchestral composition, distinguished by the hectic colouring of
decadence. The orchestra—often a giant orchestra, even for tiny pieces
such as Webern's Op. 6—was the favourite medium of the later
romantics, including such doubtful romantics as Ravel. It was the
medium through which they—and their half-brothers the impressionists
—depicted with the utmost possible realism the adventures of Don

1 Sabaneyev, Vospominaniya, p. 54.

68 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

Quixote and Falstaff, painted seascapes and erotic fantasies, expressed
immortal longings, and exposed the tragic secrets of their tormented
souls. It dominated their operas! and influenced even their chamber-
music and piano-music. Their characteristic chamber works are those
which seem to aspire to the condition of orchestral music: Reger's C
minor Piano Quintet, Florent Schmitt's Quintet, Verklärte Nacht which
Schoenberg himself afterwards arranged for string orchestra, just as he
made two quite different full-orchestral versions (c. 1914 and 1935) of
the first Kammersymphonie. The string quartet, in spite of its adaptability
to almost every change of stylistic fashion, denied them not only wide
range of colour but full, saturated sound. Most of them ignored it and,
after the César Franck (1889), the Debussy (1893) written to some
extent under its influence, and Dvorák's last two masterpieces, the
form was almost totally neglected by significant composers until Bartók
and the Schoenberg group turned to it—and, as Schoenberg himself
admitted,? his First Quartet (1905) was written in too ‘thick’ a style,
from which he found his way back to a true chamber-music texture
only gradually. (Webern made a string orchestral version of his
own Fünf Sätze for string quartet (1909).) Even the exceptions, of which
the most notable is Ravel's, have many passages that strain toward the
orchestral.

The attitude to solo piano music was also symptomatic. No other
composer was as wholesale as Ravel in the later orchestration of his
own piano pieces, but there was a widespread tendency, stemming more
from Liszt than from Brahms, toward quasi-orchestral effects. Some-
times this amounts to little more than a full romantic sound; sometimes
it shows in dense and complicated textures which, like those of their
orchestral counterparts, are not always necessitated by dense and
complicated thought, but which, when examined in detail, often reveal
more subtlety and acute sensibility than the listening ear can readily
take in. This tendency toward very full, quasi-orchestral piano-writing
is the highest common factor of otherwise totally different styles?
(Ex. 24) and is fatally deleterious when reflected in organ-music.

It appears also in the overloaded piano-parts of songs, though in this
field the quasi-orchestral was now often replaced by the really orchestral.
Wolf orchestrated the accompaniments of three of his Mórike-Lieder in
1889, at least fifteen songs the following year, and others later. At about
the same time Rimsky-Korsakov began to orchestrate songs originally
composed with piano; Grieg followed suit in 1894; and in 1897 Strauss

Ис Сар. 9: ? Newlin, op. cit., pp. 215-16.
з Cf. also Exs. 28 and 29 on pp. 82-4.

THE TEXTURES OF LATE ROMANTICISM 69

Ex. 24
(i) SKRYABIN: Satanic Poem, Op. 36 (1903)

Allegro (4. = 92—108)
a R
Е. * x.

AR г.
[ege o =e
-—— Пр

с=с
Pg. | ЕЕЕ на
por neun Д p o - 4 3

= 234535 = —
ee

p es

ІШ
[үр

|
Mia

1890-1914

70 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM:

(ii) SCHOENBERG: Op. 11, no. 3 (1909) _

ТЕ
1 ^

кектене im

ып а Ур

mentre
таңына |
р

Ses

T ms
жин ш

кесер»:
Wwe wg | #1
WU те

ус]; ез)
Miri

THE TEXTURES OF LATE ROMANTICISM

(iii) GRANADOS, 'Coloquio еп la reja’ (Goyescas) (1911)

Andantino allegretto

i |
E
'

rinf. e sosten.

bebe 2 ue

DE |
[к=

72 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

orchestrated ‘Cäcilie’ and “Могреп” and composed the Vier Gesänge,
Op. 33, the first of his ‘songs with orchestra’, the genre with which he
took so touching a farewell to life in the Vier letzte Lieder half a century
later. But it was Mahler who won recognition as the supreme master of
the Orchesterlied with his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (with piano,
1884; orchestrated in the early 1890s)!, Lieder aus ‘Des Knaben Wunder-
horn’ (1888-99), Kindertotenlieder (1904), Fünf Lieder nach Riickert
(1904), and above all Das Lied von der Erde (1908) in which the song-
cycle with orchestra is expanded to symphonic proportions and actually
styled ‘symphony’. In the same year as the Kindertotenlieder and Rückert-
Lieder Schoenberg wrote his Sechs Orchester-Lieder, Op. 8 (including
two Wunderhorn settings, one of which, ‘Sehnsucht’, sounds oddly like
distorted Mahler). It is significant that Ravel, despite his mania for
orchestration, never scored any of his songs; that Debussy did so only
once (a late version, in 1907, of a very early song); and that, whereas
Alban Berg wrote his Altenberg-Lieder (1912) for voice and large
orchestra, his friend Webern abandoned piano-accompaniment only in
favour of small chamber ensembles. The Orchesterlied had a romantic
ancestry in Berlioz and it was essentially a late romantic phenomenon.

PROBLEMS OF STRUCTURE

The opulence of sound which is the most characteristic symptom of
romantic texture in its last phase was paralleled by cultivation of
grandiose structure, and the organization of compositions on a vast
scale presented problems even more difficult than usual to a generation
that was in the process of devaluing by inflation the tonal and harmonic
currency it had inherited. Coherence of detail was carried further than
ever before, but it was a coherence which generally lacked that vitalizing
quality which may be grotesquely compared with the muscular activity
of the gut: the tiny thrusts and pulls of appoggiaturas and inter-
dominant chords, the magnetism of local tonics and vestigial cadences.
The outward appearances of all these remained but they had lost their
tension-relaxation effect through over-use and through the general
raising of the norm of dissonance. The effect of dissonance could be
achieved only by further intensification of dissonance or by ‘illogical’
progressions, in which it appeared that any chord might follow
any other and which consequently disrupted inner cohesion. Infra-
structure still depended either on the weakened remains of the familiar
small-scale symmetry of lyrical phrases, which in Skryabin’s totally
thematic miniatures sound mechanical, or on asymmetrical ‘prose’,

+ СЕ. Donald Mitchell, introduction to Alma Mahler, op. cit., pp. xviii-xxi.

PROBLEMS OF STRUCTURE 73

which in Webern's non-thematic miniatures sounds incoherent. And
these were the two master-miniaturists of late romanticism.

АП the same, miniature forms can exist as aurally comprehensible
forms without key. The weakening of key-sense was much more serious
in its effect on large-scale forms. Indeed very large forms in themselves
weaken key-sense so far as the listener is concerned, even if he possesses
absolute pitch. But a key-plan remained important, or at least useful,
to composers in laying out music on a vast scale, even if the central key
no longer exercised any gravitational pull and no normal listener could
recognize that the composition ended in the key with which it had begun.
Few listeners notice that Debussy's Nocturnes begin in B minor and end
in B major, that the Symphonia Domestica is ‘in’ Е major and the Poem of
Ecstasy ‘in’ C major; that Salome begins in C sharp minor and would
have ended in C sharp major if Herod had not commanded Salome's
execution eleven bars before the end. Key-organization of this kind is
so unreal as to deprive the so-called ‘progressive tonality’ of Mahler
and Nielsen! of all meaning or impact; but it was a practical con-
venience in architectural planning rather than conformity to an
obsolescent convention. So, when all but the last vestiges of key had
disappeared, a composer would bring back his second subject at a
different pitch in the recapitulation (as Berg does in his Piano Sonata,
Op. 1):

Ex. 25

Ex. 26

1 See pp. 7 and 38.

74 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

though neither stands in any realistic functional relationship to the
nominal tonic key of the movement (B minor).

When key had become nothing more than a point of reference on a
blue-print, the only structural element apparent to the listener was
theme, and musical architecture became more and more a matter of the
treatment of thematic material, even of texture. The quasi-spatial
conception of musical form began to decay, not as the immediate
consequence of the decay of tonal feeling but as a later consequence.
In the end form might almost be defined as no more than ‘essential
relationships of material’. Distinctions of nomenclature, as between
‘symphony’ and ‘symphonic poem’, often became as meaningless as
key-names: the Symphonia Domestica, though it includes slow move-
ment and scherzo, is indistinguishable from a Tondichtung. The real
difference was now not so much between symphony and symphonic
poem as between one kind of symphony and another. The very term
‘symphony’ had long before the twentieth century become as loose a
term as ‘novel’, which can include A /a recherche du temps perdu as well
as Madame Bovary; and the basic distinction has little to do with
general lay-out. A symphony might be as taut and compressed as
Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie or as loose and sprawling as one of
Mahler’s symphonic *worlds'—or as superficially conventional as one of
Elgar’s. The fundamental distinction between one kind of symphony
and another lay in the presence, and degree of presence, of a quasi-
dialectic element—the processes by which musical ideas generate each
other, not by obviously mechanical transformation, but by seemingly
organic growth of tissue. These were the processes, sometimes compar-
able with those of the logical syllogism, sometimes in the nature of
what Schoenberg called ‘developing variation’ (entwickelnde Variation),
which had constituted the main tissue of instrumental musical thinking
since the Viennese classics; its presence in nineteenth-century music had
been considered a strength, its absence a weakness. In the decade before
1914 it suffered its final crisis.

In the hands of the out-and-out romantics musical consequence and
contrast became less important than emotional, or otherwise extra-
musical, consequence and contrast. In the vast area of a Mahler
symphony all kinds of disparate and disconnected material could be
employed to record and communicate successive states of mind. At the
other extreme, composers as different as Schoenberg and Sibelius (whom
Schoenberg recognized as having ‘the breath of a symphonist’)? by
tightening thematic procedures as the one did in his Third and Fourth
Symphonies (1907 and 1911) and the String Quartet (Voces intimae)

1 Style and Idea, p. 185. ? [bid., р. 195.

PROBLEMS OF STRUCTURE 75)

(1909) and the other in the Kammersymphonie (1906) and the first two
numbered string quartets (1905 and 1908), were either consciously or
unconsciously gradually sacrificing emotional meaning and consequence
to musical constructivism. At the same time, by packing more and more
intense significance into confined musical space, they brought instru-
mental coherence to the edge of a precipice from which Sibelius turned
back in his Fifth Symphony but from which Schoenberg boldly leapt
in the K/avierstücke, Op. 11, no. 3 (1909). In these pieces, as Webern
wrote, ‘Once stated, the theme expresses everything that it has to say;
it must be followed by something new.’

The dilemma posed by intense concentration of expression may be
illustrated by a passage from an extremely different, intensely romantic,
work completed eighteen months later: Elgar's Second Symphony. Here
into two bars of the Larghetto (Ex. 27), sketched seven years earlier
under the immediate impact of great sorrow, Elgar compressed an
overwhelming expression of naked and quivering grief. Everything is
said, musically, in two bars; but Elgar, an expansive and improvisatory
genius rather than a great musical architect or thinker, can only
repeat them with different scoring and then let them run down in
a feeble continuation. The whole passage remains an incident in the
movement, though an incident repeated later with heightened hysteria
but no intensification of musical expressiveness. As a large-scale
instrumental composer, in his symphonies and concertos, Elgar repre-
sents the typical conservative late-romantic compromise, submitting
autobiographical expression to the discipline of at least the appearance
of more or less traditional form and integrating improvisation by the
Franckist devices of theme-transformation, sometimes very subtly,
sometimes with mere mechanical ingenuity, as in the transformation
of the Allegro molto semiquavers of the scherzo of the First Symphony
into the main theme of the Adagio.

Elgar’s conservatism is equally apparent in his oratorios, which were
‘modern’ only in relation to the form itself. Neither his creative gifts nor
his technical innovations could save oratorio from the death that
overtakes all outmoded art-forms, as he recognized by abandoning the
third part of the trilogy begun with The Apostles (1903) and The
Kingdom (1906). The only comparable works of any importance in this
period were two nearly contemporary ‘monumental’ compositions for
vast forces: Delius’s Mass of Life (1905)—the much shorter Sea-Drift
would have been described as a Ballade half a century earlier—and
Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (composed, though not orchestrated, in 1900)
where even the triple male chorus is not heard until Part III and the

1 *Schónbergs Musik’ in Arnold Schónberg (symposium), (Munich, 1912), p. 41,

76 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

Ex. 21 ч
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meae Ier E EE Be
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Tbn ШК раи a eS Eee
СА И 2528 OESS EAEN, OE eR КЕ c
rro E

Tuba |2

Timp. 264—7

=
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GN PAS жн ы Ге ЕЛІН аа. елени

Vc.

D.B.

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P molto cresc.

-------------

ЕР rp
Г’ АТО НЕЕ ыы ссср т т-тү Әр ue - Ro]
сл ил uM — 3 — .—— а) |
NU cu m к т ЖЧ

[ 477 Ф "1 In M edis

78 THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

full chorus only at the very end ofthe work. (The two works have а
certain stylistic affinity; not only the orchestral introduction and final
chorus of the Gurrelieder but such passages as Tove's “О, wenn des
Mondes Strahlen leise gleiten’ could easily belong to A Mass of Life.)
The relative unimportance of the chorus in the.Gurrelieder is character-
istic of the period; large-scale works involving chorus, with or without
vocal soloists, tend to be fundamentally orchestral. The chorus is
incorporated into symphonic or quasi-symphonic frameworks, as in
Sibelius's Kullervo and Mahler's Second, Third and Eighth Symphonies;
or, as in the Gurrelieder—following the precedent of Liszt's Faust
Symphony rather than Beethoven's Ninth—composers bring in the
chorus to clinch the finale: Skryabin's First Symphony (1900), Delius's
Appalachia (1902), Busoni's Piano Concerto (1904), the last section of
Roussel's Evocations (1911). It was perhaps the example of Mahler's
Eighth (1907) which suggested the employment of voices throughout
symphonies organized in the conventional four movements: Vaughan
Williams's Sea Symphony (1910) and Rakhmaninov's Kolokola (The
Bells) (1913). Even more symptomatic was the more and more frequent
use, after Debussy's Sirénes (1899), of a wordless chorus simply as
a part of the orchestra either for the sake of its sound-colour—as in
Ravel’s Daphnis and Delius’s Song of the High Hills (both 1911) and the
end of Holst’s Planets (1917)—or merely to add to the volume of sound,
as seems to be the case in Skryabin’s Prometheus (1910).

END OF AN EPOCH

The period that began with Falstaff and Hänsel und Gretel, the New
World Symphony and the Pathétique, Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet and
the Spanish and Italian Liederbiicher of Hugo Wolf, and ended with
Rosenkavalier and Petrushka, Prometheus and Das Lied von der Erde,
the period which includes practically all the best work of Strauss, Mahler,
Reger, Elgar, Delius, Puccini, Rakhmaninov, Skryabin, Debussy,
Busoni, appears heterogeneous enough when one examines it in detail—
still more heterogeneous if one draws in other names and works—yet,
seen in historical perspective, shows an over-riding aesthetic unity.
It was an over-ripe art that, so far as it has been examined in this chapter,
owed almost everything to the past. Its sumptuous operas and sump-
tuous orchestral scores were composed for a public that was wealthy
enough to support large orchestras and great opera-houses, and that
was also musically intelligent enough to appreciate superb singing
not only of opera but of polished Lied and mélodie and to enjoy the
refinements of instrumental chamber-music. It was possible for the
composer of the period to use music as a language because he could

END OF AN EPOCH 79

count on his hearers’ understanding the language evolved particularly
during the previous century, with all its sound-symbols and associations
and conventions; he could also count on their making some effort to
follow him so long as he could be seen to be logically extending and
enriching that language. Conversely the real innovator knew that he
must be prepared to face not merely misunderstanding, but the accusa-
tion that his music was nonsense.

Yet, for all its close correspondence to the relatively stable and
prosperous European civilization that nourished it, its decline cannot be
attributed to the war which dealt that civilization such a staggering blow.
The social and economic conditions would never again be so favourable
to music of that kind, but the symptoms of decay and exhaustion were
already apparent years before 1914. Sumptuousness of sonority,
hypertrophic harmony, emotional intensity, music-as-a-language could
be carried no farther. The future of music lay in other directions, which
other composers—indeed sometimes the late romantics themselves—
had long been pointing to and exploring.

THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM:
1890-1914

By GERALD ABRAHAM

INTRODUCTION

THE forces which revitalized music during the rich and colourful
decadence of romanticism were in appearance and in origins totally
opposed to each other. One was conservative, the other radical. One
had always held out against romanticism, though romantic composers
such as Schumann had sometimes been fascinated by it and given it
play in their music; the other came into existence actually as a form of
romanticism. One was concerned with musical pattern and structure
for its own sake, the other with sonority for its own sake, but even this
was not really a common factor. However, the rejection of music as a
rhetorical or autobiographical language ultimately brought them
together; and the musician who wished to be a pure craftsman, applying
seemingly outworn techniques of composition to the treatment of
“ршеіу” musical ideas, found that the musician exploring new sonorous
effects could provide him with new materials for the exercise of his
craft. The aesthetic of the nineteenth-century conservatives was that
expounded by Eduard Hanslick in Vom Musikalisch-Schónen:* ‘а
complete musical idea . . . is an end in itself and by no means medium
or material for the representation of feelings and thoughts' and composi-
tion is not “һе translation of an imagined material (eines gedachten
Stoffs) into sounds; the sounds themselves are the untranslatable
primitive language (Ursprache) .?

THE IMPACT OF BACH

The conservatives were saved from technical stagnation less by the
borrowing of devices associated with romanticism (such as theme-
transformation) for purely musical ends than by the revival of baroque
methods, largely as a result of the cult of Bach. But the impact of Bach,
as he changed from a rediscovered historical figure to a living influence,
was ambiguous. When Schumann composed Bachian fugues in his

! Leipzig, 1854; sixth, enlarged and improved edition, 1881.
? Sixth edition, pp. 65 and 194.

BUSONI AND REGER 81

Opp. 60 and 72, he was temporarily denying his essential romanticism,
and the fugal ideas he acquired in these technical exercises enriched the
musical vocabulary of his later years! more than they affected his
technique. Many composers who were not 'absolute' musicians or
conservatives in any sense learned technical lessons from Bach and even
the idea of fugue could be used as a symbol—of science—in Strauss's
Zarathustra. Indeed Bach himself was claimed as a romantic by the
Alsatian Wagner-disciple Albert Schweitzer in his J. S. Bach, le
musicien-poéte,? which, as Charles Marie Widor put it in his preface,
revealed the chorale-preludes as not merely ‘modéles de contrepoint pur’
but a ‘suite de poèmes d'une éloquence, d'une intensité d’émotion sans
pareilles’. In fact Schweitzer mistook the baroque symbols of Affekte
for quasi-Wagnerian 'motifs de la démarche, de la quiétude, de la
douleur . . . de la lassitude, de la terreur’. But it was Bach's demonstra-
tion that ‘contrepoint pur’ could be living musical tissue, neither empty
sound-patterns nor precise ‘langage musical’, which did so much to
revitalize absolute music at this period.

It was not from Bach but from Wagner, the Wagner of Meistersinger
and Górterdámmerung, that Strauss and Mahler and the other late
romantic masters learned their kind of polyphony: the polyphony of
thematic lines, or thematic and subordinate lines, controlled by
harmonic progressions. But there is a world of difference between the
counterpoint which consists of the combination of themes all based on
the same chord and the 'contrepoint pur' which, equally secure in its
harmonic basis, propels itself by the thrusts and stresses of suspension
and friction and resolution, between free polyphony employed to
romantic ends and disciplined polyphonic thinking for its own sake.
The practice of fugue or quasi-fugal writing not only lowers the romantic
temperature—as Mahler demonstrates in the finale of his Fifth Sym-
phony (1902)—but provides a firm bone-structure in place of flaccid
tissue, just as the passacaglia technique provides an element of formal
discipline. Nor was this merely a matter of structure, important only to
the composer himself; he wished the listener to listen to the details of
the music instead of allowing himself to be immersed in washes of rich,
emotional sound.

BUSONI AND REGER
The two masters of the generation after Brahms mostly deeply

1 Wolfgang Boetticher, Robert Schumann: Einführung in Persönlichkeit und Werk (Berlin,
1941), p. 572.

2 Leipzig, 1905; later vastly expanded in a German version (Leipzig, 1908) which was in
turn revised and expanded for the English translation made by Ernest Newman (London,
1911).

82 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

impressed by Bach were Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) and Max Reger
(1873-1916), the first a Germanized Italian, the second the most
Teutonic of Germans. Neither was by any means free from romantic
strains.1 Busoni was a passionate admirer of Liszt; Reger's harmony is
often hypertrophied to the last degree. Indeed: their Janus-faces have
given them an historical importance beyond that of their original
creative powers. They met in 1895, became close friends and ‘exchanged
their compositions and piano-arrangements of Bach organ-works’,? but
to what extent there was any real mutual influence, it is difficult to
determine. Both adopted the contemporary attitude to Bach, as a
master who must be rescued from the dry-as-dust academics and pre-
sented to the public in contemporary terms with all the resources of
contemporary instruments, an attitude which led to such inflated
transcriptions as the conclusion of Busoni's piano version of Bach's
organ Toccata in C major (BWV 564):

= ш
2542)

1 See supra, рр. 14-15 and 32.
2 Fritz Stein, Max Reger (Potsdam, 1939), p. 20.

BUSONI AND REGER 83

They naturally carried this monumental style of piano-writing over into
original compositions in which they paid homage to Bach: Busoni's
Fantasia contrappuntistica (1910) and Reger's Variationen und Fuge
über ein Thema von J. S. Bach, Op. 81 (1904). Near the end of the
latter, a double Monumentalfuge,! Reger presents both first (right hand)
and second (left hand) subjects not simply combined but with typically
thick harmonies:

1 An apt term coined by Emanuel Gatscher, Die Fugentechnik Max Regers in ihrer
Entwicklung (Stuttgart, 1925).

84 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914
Ех. 29 TN

(4-60

(4-72-76 poco a poco

үй sehr breit = А. ЕЕ
~ >> оты =з d

sempre ти. Te iz 1
y ЕР ЕА + кН РЯ
ГА те 4 s Nea” oe T. i
=: 2.8242 8424 ЗГЕ

Adagio (4 = 30)

Ae)
ER РЕ 3

But an excerpt from the exposition will show Reger's genuine, if always
rather harmony-bound, linear feeling:

Ex. 30

BUSONI AND REGER 85

espress.

a severe style which is maintained until the third section of the fugue and
which represents the Reger who influenced his younger contemporaries,
including Schoenberg. (‘Schoenberg had always been interested in the
music of Reger and had admired many things in it ;! when Schoenberg
wrote of ‘the great masters of our time’ he habitually included Reger
among their number.) Reger’s sets of variations—Op. 81, the Beethoven
Variations, Op. 86 (1904), the Telemann Variations, Op. 134 (1914) for
piano, the Hiller and Mozart sets for orchestra, Op. 100 (1907) and
Op. 132 (1914)—all end with fugues, as do a number of his other works,
and nearly all, like Op. 81, with fugues whose dynamic plan reflects his
own way of playing Bach. He would begin a fugue almost inaudibly and
end with a triple forte; his own fugue in the Bach Variations begins
pp (una corda) and ends ffff, and those of the Beethoven, Hiller and
Mozart sets, after a mf or sfz call to attention, begin pp and proceed
to a massive, heavily reined-in conclusion. There are highly romantic
changes of tempo, and almost every entry of the subject is marcato in
accordance with the common way of playing Bach at that period.

Not all Reger's very numerous fugues lean so heavily toward the
romantic, though even the less monumental often preserve the basic
conception of an overall crescendo. Near the very end of his life in the
Preludes and Fugues, Op. 131a, for solo violin and Drei Duos ( Kanons
und Fugen im alten Stil) Op. 131b, for two violins (1914), he did achieve
mastery of pure and classical line-drawing. Yet the lasting significance
of Reger's copious fugue-writing lay not in his romanticizing of the
fugue—he had begun, in the organ pieces of Op. 7 (1892) by imitating
Bach without harmonic inflation—but in the fugal discipline he imposed
on romantic music. Here the intellect reasserted its power to think in
music rather than about music; and his later works in general, notably
the Telemann Variations and the Clarinet Quintet (1916), recapture
genuine classical feeling as well as classical techniques. This was no

! Dika Newlin, Bruckner—Mahler—Schoenberg (New York, 1947), p. 275.

86 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

more than a personal achievement, however. It was reached too late to
affect Reger's contemporaries, among whom classical feeling—balance
and textural clarity, emotional restraint, and the other qualities com-
monly subsumed under the idea of Ше classical—was cherished by
composers, particularly Ravel and his compatriots, who were little
concerned with the techniques of polyphonic discipline and harshly
intellectual harmonic schemes, and in any case knew nothing or little
of Reger. (When Honegger went to Paris in 1911, “ёги de Richard
Strauss et de Max Reger, he found the latter completely unknown
there.) On the other hand, those who were so concerned showed little
sense of classical ideals, despite their increasing preoccupation with
music and its technical devices for their own sake.

NON-FUNCTIONAL HARMONY

The cultivation of composition-techniques for their own sake was
fecundated only by contact with the cultivation of sonorities for their
own sake, which originated not in any conception of absolute music
but in typically romantic attempts to extend the expressive and sugges-
tive or descriptive language of music. A characteristic example is the
added note: two notes, a minor or major second apart, are sounded
together instead of only one of them, as at the end of the voice-part of
Wagner's song ‘Im Treibhaus’ (In the hothouse) (1858). The piano
suggests the ‘heavy drops’ by minor seconds, D-E flat, which can be
explained in terms of tonal harmony in conjunction with the G-B flat
of the left hand but which the listener irresistibly hears as irrational
sounds, a blurred Naturlaut as Mahler might have called it:

Ex. 31

Langsam und schwer

(On the green edge of the leaves.)

1 Је suis compositeur (Paris, 1951, p. 128; English translation by Wilson О. Clough,
London, 1966).

NON-FUNCTIONAL HARMONY 87

And Wagner proceeds to resolve the E flat on to E natural, producing a
normal added-sixth chord. Similarly, ten years later, in the ninth of his
Romanzen aus Tiecks * Magelone', “Ки е, Süssliebchen', Brahms evoked
the magic indistinctness of woods at night by a soft syncopated major
second, persisting for five slow bars, but immediately explained by its
context as part of a dominant seventh and soon given an orthodox
resolution. By an extraordinary coincidence Borodin had already, in
1867, also composed a song about a fairy-tale princess sleeping at night,
surrounded by forest, 'Spyashchaya knyazhna’ (The sleeping princess).
His song also is in A flat and it also begins with the same syncopated pp
major second, D flat-E flat, casting the same drowsy spell; but the
major second is not part of dominant seventh harmony and instead of
being resolved it moves to another major second:

Ex. 32
Andantino

su glu -khom,

(In the dense forest sleeps,)

Syncopated major seconds, constituting a single ‘line’ of the piano part,
continue uninterruptedly for fourteen bars and are only briefly and un-
conventionally resolved; major or minor seconds continue to play an
extremely important part throughout the song. This is something
fundamentally different from Brahms; it is often possible to analyse

88 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

Borodin's individual chords in terms of conventional harmony and the
first sixteen bars are in the purest A flat, except for a couple of flattened
leading notes; but it is impossible to hear the chords in that way. The
harmony is not functional harmony. Every chord is blurred by the
added note in the highest part; the two G flats neutralize the faintest
suggestion of a dominant pull. It is sound without conventional musical
sense, sound relying on its purely sensuous impact to produce a quasi-
mesmeric effect; the seconds ask not to be resolved but to be savoured.

In the setting of the next stanza, which tells how the noisy rout of
witches and wood-demons flies over the princess without wakening her,
Borodin even more thoroughly destroys the functional property of
harmony by a powerful whole-tone scale descending through two
octaves:

Ex. 33

f) Я. dim. rallent.
E e ----- Dre mE ==
И 7 22 [De

ved'm ile -shikh shum-niy roy i pro-mchalsya nad

ш a uy PR
та

ЕО

Dr БАРНА a аа

L—D «p ПЕ ПЕНН Е ТЕЧ
== | DD dp Аве 90

although the firmly outlined subdominant chord prevents any feeling of
atonality and only the first four notes of the scale (and their repetition)
are harmonized in the whole-tone mode. Here again the intention is
suggestive: from Glinka's Ruslan onward, the descending whole-tone
scale has in Russian music been associated with evil magic, harshness,
and cruelty. But even without whole-tone harmonies, like those in the
first bar of Ex. 33 or the music of the avenging statue in Dargomizhsky's
Stone Guest, it destroys the functional sense of harmony, which
depends ultimately on gravitation toward points defined by the semi-
tones in the scale and by the rise or fall of the perfect fourth or fifth in
the bass.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century functional
harmony was being weakened, through its melodic surface, by modal

1 See Vol. EX:

NON-FUNCTIONAL HARMONY 89

influences from folk-song, as in Russia, and plainsong as in France, to
say nothing of pentatonic influences from the music of the Far East,
such as that which impressed Claude Debussy (1862-1918) at the Paris
Exposition Universelle in 1889. Fauré's flattening or evasion of the
seventh degree of the scale, very characteristic of his style, has been
mentioned in the previous chapter.! Chabrier has flattened sevenths;
and Debussy in his early songs thought nothing of preceding a final
tonic chord by a chord with no dominant function. In ‘Beau soir’
(1878), in E major, the penultimate chord is a G major triad; indeed the
whole song is marked by juxtapositions of unrelated diatonic chords.
‘Mandoline’ (1882) is still bolder. The suggestion of strumming on the
open strings of the instrument, G D A, is unmistakably dominant, but
the C major triad has hardly been heard when at bar 8 the composer
breaks into a succession of unrelated triads and inversions:

Ex. 34

Allegr etto ---------- -----

(Exchange idle chat under Ше whispering boughs.)

1p. 26 and Ex. 9.

90 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

This is followed by another kind of unconventional succession, held
together by the common notes, À G, but giving the ear the impression
of consonances enriched by added notes. Near the end of the song the
tonic chord alternates constantly with a 4/3 chord the dominant force of
which is eliminated by the flattening of the B; in the last seven bars the
two superimposed fifths of the opening become three—C С D A—of
which the A is finally silent and the D moves to E. Every one of these
procedures is in total opposition to the doctrine d’Indy was to enunciate
later: that ‘chords as combinations of sounds appear only as the effect
of a halt in the movement of the melodic parts е... musically chords do
not exist . . .^;! Debussy’s chords exist purely as combinations of sounds
for their sonorous effect, and are related to their neighbours often as
much by contrast as by connection. The constitution, colour and
lay-out of the chord are more important than its context; concord or
theoretical discord, it is treated as a single unit to be manipulated as
earlier composers had used consecutive thirds or sixths.? (It should be
added that Debussy employed major seconds, possibly suggested by
Borodin's, as early as ‘Ге Jet d'eau' (1889) and ‘Les Angélus’ (1891)—as
indeed d’Indy did later, with no obvious poetic justification, in the
prologue to Fervaal: Guilhen’s ‘Au nom du soleil, roi du monde’.) The
fabric of classical harmony was thus being gently eroded on the diatonic
side at the same time that it was disintegrating under the more violent
strains of constantly intensified chromaticism. And it was the gentler
process that was the more revolutionary, for while it originated as a
symptom of romanticism it was by its very nature a denial of romantic-
ism.

THE EVOLUTION OF DEBUSSY’S STYLE

It is natural to attribute Debussy’s exploitation of sonority for its own
sake to the influence of current aesthetic ideas. No musician has been
more sensitive to his cultural ambience;? and Rimbaud’s ‘Alchimie du
verbe’ (1873)— J'inventai la couleur des voyelles!—A noir, E blanc,
I rouge, O bleu, U vert.—Je réglai la forme et le mouvement de chaque
consonne, et, avec des rythmes instinctifs, je me flattai d’inventer un
verbe poétique accessible un jour ou l'autre à tous les sens. Je réservais
la traduction'—had opened the door to the Symbolists and their
poetry of subtly suggestive non-sense, a play of sounds and images and

! See p. 21.

2 On Debussy's non-functional harmony, see Ilse Storb, Untersuchungen zur Auflösung
der funktionaler Harmonik in den Klavierwerken von Claude Debussy (Cologne Diss., 1967).

? On the relationship of Debussy to the artistic and literary tendencies and theories of his
day, see Andreas Liess, Claude Debussy: das Werk im Zeitbild (two vols., Strasbourg, 1936)
and Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: his Life and Mind (two vols., London, 1962 and 1965).

THE EVOLUTION OF DEBUSSY'S STYLE ӨЛІ

rhythms that should act on the reader as music acts on the listener.
Similarly Debussy rejected those musical procedures in which the
intelligence intervenes at the expense of simple perception:

One combines, constructs, imagines themes intended to express ideas; one
develops them, modifies them in conjunction with other themes which
represent other ideas; one makes metaphysics but one doesn’t make music.
Music should be registered by the listener’s ear without his having to discover
abstract ideas in the maze of a complicated development.

In 1909 Monet was to acknowledge an affinity between Debussy’s
aesthetic and his own when he spoke to Roger Marx of his ‘harmonies
and concords of colours which are sufficient in themselves and which
succeed in touching us, as a musical phrase or chord touches us .
without the aid of a more precise or clearly enunciated idea’.?

АП the same, it is possible to exaggerate Debussy's impressionability
to cultural fashions. The pentatonic flute theme which opens his
orchestral Printemps (1887):

Ex. 35
'Trés modéré

PP — poco =_= PP

was written two years before he heard the gamelan at the International
Exhibition, and it is very likely that he was introduced to pentatonic
and other unusual scales by his theory teacher at the Paris Conserva-
toire, Albert Lavignac, who also introduced him to Wagner.?

Debussy's continued employment of Wagnerian and Franckian
techniques, in music very different in substance and ethos from theirs,
has been mentioned in the previous chapter.* Such dual nature was not
uncommon in the music of that period; but whereas with most com-
posers it consisted of real symbiosis, with Debussy such devices as
theme-transformation were only the least disagreeable means of saving
his music from deliquescence. Not only is his harmony in quite early
compositions *weightless', without sense of tonal gravity, but even his

! Léon Vallas, Les Idées de Claude Debussy, musicien francais (Paris, 1927), р. 30.

2 Roger Marx, ‘Les Nymphéas de M. Claude Monet’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, i (1909),
p. 523; quoted in George H. Hamilton, Painting and Sculpture in Europe: 1880—1940
(London, 1967), p. 19.

3 An impressive catalogue of pentatonic motives and segments in Debussy's music has
been compiled by Constantin Brailou, *Pentatony in Debussy's Music' in Studia Memoriae
Belae Bartók Sacra (3rd ed., London, 1959), p. 377. But the first and earliest example, from
the song ‘Fleur des blés' (1877), is only part of a phrase which is not completely pentatonic,

4 See р. 29.

92 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

melody floats, as Ex. 35 does, and tends to return to the same note,
beautiful but lymphatic and listless, outlining shapes in which—as in
the filigree detail of background texture—it is impossible to deny а
close affinity with what was, a little later, to become known as art
nouveau.* When he wished to construct an extended piece of absolute
music in the String Quartet (1893) he was obliged not only to employ
the romantic technique of theme-transformation but to lean heavily on
an actual model: Grieg's Quartet in the same key.? He goes through
many of the motions appropriate to a large-scale work of this kind:
sequence, pseudo-imitation (раписшапу in the finale, the most clumsily
made movement of the four), the return of themes in different keys.
But the motions are meaningless and distract one from that exquisite
mosaic of motives constantly shown in fresh harmonic lights and from
fresh tonal angles, which constitutes the real essence of the music.
Key-organization is of even less importance than in the work Mahler
was composing at the same time, his Second Symphony.

In the compositions of the period between the String Quartet and the
completion of the score of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902—the Prélude à
l'aprés-midi d'un faune (1892-4) and Nocturnes (1897-1901) for
orchestra, the Proses lyriques (1893) and Chansons de Bilitis (1897) for
voice and piano, ‘Jardins sous la pluie’ (1894) (the other two Estampes
seemingly came eight or nine years later) and Pour le piano (1894-1902)
—he completed the establishment of an extraordinarily personal style
and harmonic vocabulary which he was more or less content to work
and re-work and refine during the following decade, until it was nearly
exhausted. In L’aprés-midi there are still traces of Balakirev or Rimsky-
Korsakov (the flute triplet-figure three bars before fig. 3) and Massenet
(the section in D flat), but after that the various influences that con-
tributed to the formation of his idiom were fully absorbed. Some of
these have been greatly exaggerated. The unorthodoxy of Mussorgsky's
empirical harmony, for instance, is quite different in nature from
Debussy's, even if it was known to him earlier than c. 1896; and it
would be difficult indeed to isolate any element in Debussy's music
which he could have picked up only from Erik Satie (1866-1925)? and
not from the common stock. In 1897 he orchestrated two of Satie's
three Gymnopédies* (1888) for piano but they made no impression on
his own work except perhaps in Ше unimportant ‘Danse profane’ for

1 On Debussy and art nouveau, see Lockspeiser, op. cit., i, pp. 116 ff. and infra, pp. 166 ff.

? See Gerald Abraham, Grieg : a Symposium (London, 1948), p. 8.

? On the early personal relationship between Debussy and Satie, see Lockspeiser, op. cit.,
i, pp. 145-9; on his early knowledge of Russian music, ibid, pp. 47-52, and André Schaeffner,
*Debussy et ses rapports avec la musique russe', in Musique russe (ed. Pierre Souvtchinsky)
(Paris, 1953), i.

а The Greek Yopyozatóto was a festival marked by the dancing of naked youths.

THE EVOLUTION OF DEBUSSY'S STYLE 93

harp and strings (1904); it was Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) who came
near to plagiarizing them in ‘Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Béte’ in
Ma mére l'Oye (1908). As for Satie's three Sarabandes (1887), it is
impossible to see any connection between them and the Sarabande of
Pour le piano beyond one insignificant motive and the fact that both
revive an old dance-form. (The revival of old dance-forms was in any
case fashionable in France at the time, witness Chabrier's Bourrée
fantasque (1891), Chausson's Quelques danses (including sarabande,
pavane and forlane) (1896), and Ravel's Menuet antique (1895) and
Pavane pour une Infante défunte (1899).) Chabrier had introduced series
of unresolved ninth chords in several passages of Le roi malgré lui
(1887). (To fill out an impression of French harmony at this period it
should be remembered that such relatively conservative composers as
Saint-Saéns and Bruneau wrote passages melodically and harmonically
in the whole-tone mode, in the Scherzo, Op. 87, for two pianos (1890),
and Le Réve (1891) respectively.) Satie's Gnossiennes (1890), his three
preludes for Sar Péladan's Le Fils des étoiles (1891), his Sonneries de la
Rose+Croix (1892) and Prélude de la Porte Héroique du Ciel (1894),
all for piano, did open up new ground—unbarred and rhythmless
successions of unrelated chords—but Debussy did not follow him on to
it. Admittedly the chords themselves are sometimes interestingly
experimental, as is the case with the piled up fourths at the beginning
of the first Fils des étoiles prelude (1); but although the passage of
common chords that opens the Sonneries (ii) may have sprung from
mystical emotion, it could hardly communicate it:

Ex. 36

En blanc et immobile

94 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

Highly romantic conceptions are reducéd to nullity by extremely anti-
romantic musical devices. Romantic symptoms—pictorial and literary
affinities—are neutralized by non-expressive music in Debussy also; but
Debussy’s music, while it does not seek to express directly the emotion
aroused by contemplation of an object, is nevertheless a vivid reaction
to the object in terms of purely sensuous sound, which evokes an
imprecise but delightful response akin to that produced by Rimbaud’s
verbal alchemy or Monet’s visual harmonies.

The apparent paucity of Debussy’s output during this period is easily
accounted for by his preoccupation with Pelléas, which is discussed in
the next chapter, and with other projects which never came to fruition.
Few as they are, these compositions reveal significant tendencies.
Following the String Quartet, Debussy experimented further with
‘absolute’ music in the Sarabande and two later pieces of Pour le piano:
the side-slipping of triads, sometimes augmented (whole-tone) triads,
and complete whole-tone passages in the Prelude, side-slipping of
chords of the seventh and added-note chords in the Sarabande, penta-
tonic patterns in the Toccata (to which ‘Jardins sous la pluie’ is a faintly
pictorial counterpart). Despite the non-functional nature of the
harmony, the pieces are given very clear definition by the nature of the
piano writing, by diatonic sequences, and by the recurrence of patterns
and sections. In the Proses lyriques and Chansons de Bilitis, settings of
prose-poems by Debussy himself and Pierre Louys respectively,
Debussy moved even further from lyrical song than in the Verlaine sets
of 1891 and 1892 (the Trois mélodies and the first set of Fétes galantes);
the piano is often the more important partner and the voice only
comments, though the Bilitis songs approach the exquisite subtlety of
the near-parlando style of Pelléas. The sense of the texts and the use of
all-pervading patterns in the piano-part, in the traditional manner,
brush aside that problem of form which Debussy still handled clumsily
and somewhat perfunctorily in his instrumental music. It was in the
orchestral Nocturnes that Debussy first perfected his instrumental
technique, not in the tarantella-like ‘Fêtes’ with its echoes of Balakirev’s
Tamara nor even in the drifting, changing cloud-shapes of ‘Nuages’,
but in ‘Sirénes’ which is a pure sound-mosaic of fragmented, subtly
coloured chords and tiny motives, moniliform and athematic except
that some minute pattern may appear briefly as an ostinato and re-
appear lightly transformed and in ever-changing harmonic and
orchestral lights:

THE EVOLUTION OF DEBUSSY'S STYLE 95

- СО BM И 3 5 М
ОШ ПОДОВЕ жеке кет Е ен ССД Са 2-2 ағы (а-г ІІ ЕСІГІ ер қ

А EL Е Иа if Вот? жартас алты „Биша Гр ees... ERE

ee сек ы Дл fpem је pp eee

pee he] SO [ш 1 ШЕШ 9 ——— —H

BEIM — | Г
КЕ Идора ар |
CIERRE m mem SS
ЕЕ TET AM m]

‘Sirènes’ begins with a ‘dominant’ chord in B major and ends with a В
major triad, and here and there the ear catches other familiar harmonies;
but they bring no sense of tonal unity or contrast, of modulation, or of
tension and relaxation. The distinction of consonance and dissonance
had been obliterated long before this in Debussy; each chord has its
isolated value as sound-effect only.

These techniques were exploited exhaustively in some of the works
of the next decade, La Mer (1903—5) and the Images for orchestra
(1906—12) and the two sets of Images (1905 and 1907) and two books of
Préludes (1910 and 1910-13) for piano. The sustaining of low bass-
notes on the piano necessitates suspension of the damper action and
further enriches and blurs the sonorous effect. Equally idiosyncratic is
the treatment of the orchestra, in which doubling between groups is
extremely rare: a figure is usually limited to woodwind or horns or
strings only, and set against an equally complex pattern in another
instrumental colour. When doubling between groups does occur, it is
employed to produce effects of great subtlety, as in the section ‘Les
Parfums de la nuit’ in ‘Ibéria’ (1908), the second orchestral Image
(p. 69), where a ‘distant’ melody (lointain et expressif) is played by a
solo violin, muted, and a solo bassoon in its ‘pinched’ highest register;
or a little later in the same score (p. 72) where a melody characteristically
thickened out in 6/4 chords is played by two flutes, two piccolos, three
trumpets (two of them muted), two solo violins, and two solo cellos, the
main strand being delicately outlined:

96 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914
Ex. 38 — dE

s TN Е
(d= 80) re. REN

= ЫШТЫ Sp LS PIANI оо |
Сред ч ке ко тул aram ux ee [ЕН

Œil,
(+Bn.

Зое lower)

oye
7—8 gite да
ТАП

шаш ЕЕ

Horns
ЕР СЕ. ЖӨ T >
Oe арии Е
Babe Je 2
НН пара
тү 2
"Tpts НИИ тави es
- [= ==
=.

Sere ey =

шай) te th ME men, A чат а
“Ой аз

P oix et soutenu dans lexpression

()
ети : Өсе ж-е
eae іш” шеші ра ана аашаа) че =й Шы дет

2 Solo Vins. Bie SS еще | = EE
= eree eee БЕН Шетен | И е |

P doux et soutenu dans l'expression ————
І
sur la touche vins, sur la touche
йй:

Vins Шау Ee) Ен са еу се СӨ с = =ч гү:
& Vlas. фу, | mfi p Ее

Уаз. = —
Jp trés légerpp trés léger

() a
ED 48°) it a ЕЕ ae ae 1)
2 Solo Cellos Cis ETE m

p
doux et soutenu dans l'expression

D.B. = EARN р ==
7225, LZ 7 Hi gpz -----

doux mais soutenu F

sur la touche

THE EVOLUTION OF DEBUSSY'S STYLE 97

„Н-0101,

и apiy aa сев

FI.
GI. =
(+ Bn. еее ее м
дое lower) |t— Ага ДФ s MeL. —H
f)
РУ ан
а 1
1 ey ==.
EAS
Horns
га € с. П
[-9 eerie 07 —)
| oum НА
ГИ
Tps = = | Pu
(П & Ш LASER ats HS а 5 =a n == Hag же
muted) ЕЕЗ ELE GE So ae oe E JX E E
p ENT са " 77-4 >.
SSS = ae

2 Solo Vins, ЕЕЕ ЕЕ ЕЕ

Vins. II div. |99950 о
Ку. div. | — np
. өл ЕТ nc Lo ee [95 Е ВАА

()
[—4 4 mmu ВИ eem — — — ee

УТИ HII emm — em T Remp em ADIRE RT]
2 Solo Cellos уа Е

An equally subtle blend of sonorities, this time accompanimental as
background to a horn solo—the same melody which is soon to be heard
in quicker tempo, lointain et expressif —occurs a little earlier:

98 THE REACTION AGAINST dd. 1890-1914

ба a ()=92) LEES wx

[ Зин Lu Т.а [43 - 22

к. DS RR RE = Ia
— еее

Ib ul Ра EI ©
Solo Horn -Е-ҢЕ-4--- Eg ————————3

() Т т
Д-р ер ұғ Oo бағ Е
Сен ГОА ------- а
Е еее) -

еи ЗЕЕ ЕЕЕ ЕЕЕ КЕН
е Eg ERE == те
рр doux et léger
"Ims „ша тъ Lo ras
Енн [pg e aa]
Vu Б ИН .— == —— ЕЕ

Ус.

= НИ б=——============ :
d iT ездері = т ee

p Gy 441—1 4 = аа ий
н. luere а а

EA вао == = > Я = га аи ая =
dier ru IN EE)
НО Вы rd
Solo Horn ЕН | E d >
(53
< -
за ж ст. T = y 2
а-а-а E cA DEDE с
Pr 4 — rr тс.
0 Еде = Е af Bocas eis Е Se esses
РАНЕН EE ве aaa =
c к= тсе то

THE EVOLUTION OF DEBUSSY'S STYLE 99

In all these compositions, orchestral or pianistic, which may justly be
described as impressionistic or (better) pointilliste, the basic methods are
the same: whether modal or pentatonic or whole-tone, the melodic
fragments are often thickened out into parallel seconds, simple or
augmented triads or higher-powered chords with or without added
notes, to form variegated patterns. The fabric is held together not by
thematic logic or rhetoric, though sometimes by relationships between
the various tesserae, but by pedals or ostinato figures. Rhythmic
patterns are also used for the same purpose, though rhythmic impulse—
sometimes vigorous enough, as in the first and third section of ‘Ibéria’
or ‘Golliwogg’s cake walk’ from Children’s Corner for piano (1906-8),
or even quasi-mechanical as in ‘Mouvement’ from the first set of piano
Images—is frequently feeble to the point of near-extinction. (On the
other hand, Debussy’s micro-rhythms can be exquisitely subtle.)
Sometimes whole sound-complexes аге the binding agents as in ‘Voiles’
from the first book of Préludes:

Ex. 40
Modéré (2) = 88)

(ИБИ 2 ———— — — — .. ii bars 22-3
4 > “Ашы: 1 ИР г

which becomes

(iii) bars 27—8 os M 7
LE SS ACE „m енені

or the right-hand figure of the section Un peu animé et plus clair of
‘Cloches à travers les feuilles’ from the second set of Images.!

Yet side by side with his purely impressionistic compositions Debussy
never ceased to write others, almost equally non-tonal but hovering on

1 ‘Cloches’, a compendium of Debussyan technique, is recorded in The History of Music
in Sound, x.

100 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

the edge of the diatonic and employing simpler harmonies and textures
and more sober colouring: the settings of Charles d'Orléans for voice
and piano (nos. 1 and 3 of the Trois chansons de France, 1904) and
unaccompanied chorus (Trois chansons de Charles d'Orléans, 1908) and
Villon (Trois ballades, 1910), the music for d'Annunzio's Le Martyre
de saint Sébastien (1911), the Trois Родтез de Stéphane Mallarmé for
voice and piano (1913), and the Douze Études for piano (1915). АП these
in their different ways—renunciation of ‘jewellers’ work’, absence of
extra-musical suggestion, simple modality of melody and harmony,
economy of texture—suggest, particularly when all these qualities show
themselves at the same time, an ever-increasing preoccupation with the
values we describe as 'classical' It was a tendency that reached its
apogee in Debussy's last works, the three Sonates of 1915—17, for cello
and piano, for flute, viola and harp, and for piano and violin. It is
difficult to imagine music more severely classical than the opening of the
last Sonata:

Ex. 41
Allegro vivo (4. = 55) eae

Е
Violin
шаз

Piano

D стаи
еды apum enl

d COT ET

1 The second, ‘Ballade que;feit Villon à la requeste de sa теге pour prier Nostre Dame’ is
recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x.

DEBUSSY AND RAVEL 101
DEBUSSY AND RAVEL

Although Debussy's development after Pelléas was little affected by the
music of other composers—in 1913 he told Calvocoressi he was rather
out of touch with contemporary music ‘because he wished to concen-
trate and had made it a rule to hear as little music as possible"!—there
was one young contemporary who undoubtedly came under his
influence and to whom, it seems possible, he was to a slight extent
indebted. In March 1898 he heard a performance of Ravel's Les Sites
auriculaires for two pianos (1895-6) and was so impressed by the first of
them, the ‘Habanera’ afterwards orchestrated as the third movement of
the Rapsodie espagnole (1907), that he asked the younger composer to
lend him the score. This led ultimately to charges of plagiarism in his
own ‘Soirée dans Grenade’ (1903), second of the Estampes for piano,
where the resemblance is certainly very striking, and his Lindaraja for
two pianos (1901), where it is limited to the dance-rhythm and a single
bar of melody common to other habaneras; indeed Ravel’s was itself
heavily indebted to Chabrier’s piano-piece of 1885, or, rather, the later
version in D flat. Similar claims have been made for the influence of
Ravel’s Jeux d’eau (1901) on Debussy’s piano-style; they are counter-
balanced by the fact that Jeux d'eau is itself marked by Debussyan
procedures.? And Ravel admired the Sarabande from Pour le piano
enough to orchestrate it in 1903, conversely arranged Г” Aprés-midi for
two pianos, and admitted in 1928 that in his Shéhérazade songs of
1903, Tinfluence, au moins spirituelle, de Debussy est assez visible’.®
The fact is that under the influences of Saint-Saéns, Fauré, and
Chabrier French piano-composers had for some time been exploring
the resources of the instrument; even minor figures such as Déodat de
Séverac (1873-1921) in his suites Le Chant de la terre (1901) and En
Languedoc (1904) made highly individual harmonic experiments before
succumbing to Debussy's influence in the Baigneuses au soleil (1908), so
it is hardly surprising that the two leading figures found each other
mutually stimulating. But even in this field of piano music, where in
his five Miroirs (1905) and the three pieces of Gaspard de la nuit (1908)
Ravel comes nearest to Debussy—and the Sonatine (1905) may perhaps
be regarded as a counterpart of Pour le piano—the differences are very
obvious. Harmonic vocabulary and pianistic figuration are similar yet

1 M. D. Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery (London, 1933), p. 122.

2 On Debussy's piano-style, see Frank Dawes, Debussy: Piano Music (London, 1969) and
Robert Schmitz, The Рано Works of Claude Debussy (New York, 1950); on Ravel's, Kurt
Akeret, Studien zum Klavierwerk von Maurice Ravel (Zürich, 1941), and Henri Gil-Marchex,
*La technique de piano', Revue musicale (special Ravel number), vi (1925), no. 6, p. 38.

3 *Esquisse autobiographique', Revue musicale, xix (1938), p. 212. On the musical and
personal relationships of Debussy and Ravel, see Lockspeiser, op. cit., ii, pp. 33-44, and
Martin Cooper, French Music (London, 1951), pp. 134-40.

102 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

different; Ravel's piano-writing is virtuosic in the sense of Liszt and
Balakirev (who meant quite as much to him as to Debussy), it is
rhythmically incisive as Debussy's seldom is, its shapes are generally
clear rather than blurred and they succeed each other with that logical
connection which Debussy minimized or spurned. For all the modernity
of his musical language—the pentatonic and modal elements, the
complication of individual chords, the parallel seconds and sevenths,
and so on—tonal feeling is nearer the surface of Ravel's music than
of Debussy's. Even the added seconds which blunt the edge of Debussy's
sound seem to sharpen the edge of Ravel’s, as in these passages from
*Scarbo', the third piece of Gaspard de la nuit:

Ex.42.

@ ааа вери.
oe
2 amm -—]

ЗА LH EIU жетіні ің
Д СИСАРЕ demere жасан)
к=п ЕАСИ ЕЕ. с=с gu атанғалы)

IER AC ERE FA Dg
ЕСЕ ЕМЕА Ееее и Lap ie E

Again unlike Debussy, Ravel cared more for instrumental line than for
instrumental colour. His orchestration—and he delighted in orchestrat-
ing even his own piano-music—is totally different. The lines are not
often variegated in themselves as in the romantic line derived from
Wagner's orchestra, which may pass from horns and lower strings to
upper woodwind (Ex. 27) or begin on flutes, be doubled by clarinet

DEBUSSY AND RAVEL 103

for half a bar and then (while flutes pursue a different line) by violas,
ending on violas alone—all within four bars (Ex. 21 (v) ). Ravel makes
no effort to avoid doubling and when he contrasts groups of instru-
mental colour he does so not to obtain subtle, iridescent effects but
for the sake of brilliant transparency in the Russian tradition. Thus,
when he scored the following passage from the ‘Alborada del gracioso’,
the fourth of the Miroirs:

Ex. 43

4 А Oe, m >
34 ағы ыз шс и г 97599 | а
ери —4— 119 —— 19 1 5.0
TEE WERE |

ж uel

he gave the melody to piccolo, oboes, cor anglais, bassoons, half the
first violins, half the seconds, half the violas, and half the cellos (in their
highest register) in octaves, and the ‘inside pedal’ A—always a favourite
device of Ravel’s from the ‘Habanera? onward—to the remaining
strings (in octaves), double basses, double bassoon, and tuba; the rich
harmony is left to flutes, clarinets, harps, and brass, and the second
chord of each bar (which is just off the second beat) is piquantly
emphasized, again in the manner of Rimsky-Korsakov, by triangle,
tambourine, side-drum, and cymbals. Similarly the harmony of the
opening of the Valses nobles et sentimentales for piano (1911) sounds
much clearer in the orchestral version. When Ravel wishes to create a
wash of imprecise sound as in the ‘Lever du jour’ of the ballet Daphnis
et Chloé (1909-12), it is paradoxically done with extreme precision and
serves as a background against which firm, clear lines are drawn in
contrasted instrumental colours.

104 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

When one turns from the two great sets-of piano pieces and the song-
cycle Histoires naturelles (1906), the most Debussyish of all Ravel's
mature works, the completely different basis of his aesthetic becomes
even more apparent. *Mon Quatuor en Ға” (1902-1903), he told Roland-
Manuel, ‘répond à une volonté de construction musicale ... qui
apparait beaucoup plus nette que dans mes précédentes compositions'.1
It was to appear again in the Sonatine for piano and the Introduction
et Allegro for harp with flute, clarinet, and string quartet (1906). The
wish to make а ‘musical structure’, tout simple, seldom visited Debussy
even in the non-impressionistic works of his maturity; it possessed him
only at the very end of his life in the three Sonates. But, looking back at
the frankly impressionistic Jeux d'eau after seventeen years, Ravel
thought it worthwhile to point out not only that it was ‘the starting-
point of all the pianistic novelties’ of his music but that it is ‘based оп
two themes in the manner of the first movement of a sonata, though not
however subjected to the classic key-scheme'. The classical ground-plan
of sonata-form, rudimentary in Jeux d'eau, is more obvious in the
String Quartet and Sonatine but they are equally emancipated from the
classical key-scheme. It is true the first subject of the first movement of
the Sonatine would be in F sharp minor if its Es were not all natural,
and the key suggested (but always evaded) by the second-subject
material is the orthodox relative major; moreover the second subject is
recapitulated in an identical evasion of F sharp—which actually
identifies itself only in the final bar of the movement. But these ghosts
of keys no more exercise pulls of tonal gravity than the themes in which
they are embodied act and react on each other. The String Quartet had
evidenced more thematic logic and is held together as a whole by
familiar cyclic methods; both slow movement and finale refer back to
the first. But the sonata-form of the first movement is even less orthodox
than that of the Sonatine; the second subject is not in a contrasting key
and is recapitulated in the same key; the tonal changes in the recapitu-
lation, which is otherwise nearly literal, occur within the subjects and
in the transition-passages—which thus become merely reliefs from
tonal monotony. But survival of the mere shell of sonata-form, void of
everything that had given it life and purpose, is a common phenomenon
of the period.? Without the gravitational pulls of tonality, neither the
loosely flowing diatonic or modal lines of a Ravel nor the tightly
woven chromatic fabrics of the Central Europeans could use sonata-
form in any significant way.

Although Ravel dispensed with the dynamism of key, his formal

1 *Esquisse autobiographique’, p. 212.
? Cf. the remarks on Alban Berg's Piano Sonata on p. 73.

THE WIDER INFLUENCE OF DEBUSSY 105

structure is perfectly lucid in ways that place him apart from Debussy
and at the opposite pole from the Central Europeans, not so much
because his melodic lines and harmony are free from hyper-chromatic-
ism, his textures from over-density and his rhythms from flaccidity, but
mainly because of its clear articulation by cadences. His cadences are
not corner-stones and key-stones of tonality; nothing gravitates toward
them; but their frank definition of periods is in striking contrast with
the practices of impressionism, where they were of no importance, and
of late romanticism, where every effort was made to nullify or conceal
them. A *musical structure', as Ravel conceived it, neither an expression
of emotion nor a play of exquisite sonorities, was a work of high
artifice and he saw no reason to conceal the fact. Thus in every way he
found himself congenially assuming eighteenth-century attitudes toward
music, just as when, in realizing ‘the Greece of his dreams’ in Daphnis,
he found that his ‘vast musical fresco’ readily harmonized with ‘that
which had been imagined and depicted by the French artists of the end
of the eighteenth century’. Ravel was only in a few of his works and
in a limited sense an ‘impressionist’, but he adapted some of Debussy’s
techniques, particularly his harmonic language, to a quite different end,
a renaissance of classicism, just as others borrowed them to enrich the
palette of exhausted romanticism: for example, the slow strange chords
evoking the atmosphere of Herod’s palace at the beginning of Florent
Schmitt’s mimodrame, La Tragédie de Salomé (1907; symphonic version,
quoted here, 1911), (Ex. 44), or Dukas’s Debussyan orchestration in La
Péri (1912), (Ex. 45).

In considering Debussy in the context of history, it is always necessary
to distinguish between ‘impressionism’ in the narrowest sense, which
was—at any rate for the time being—a dead end, and his conscious
‘emancipation of dissonance’? twenty years or more before Schoenberg
used the phrase in his Harmonielehre. Admittedly, the dissonances
Debussy set free were a great deal less fierce than Schoenberg’s.

THE WIDER INFLUENCE OF DEBUSSY

Considerable as Debussy’s reputation had been before the performance
of Pelléas (30 April 1902, the first major landmark in the history of
twentieth-century music), it was much greater afterwards. During the
next decade Debussy and Strauss were almost universally regarded as
the two outstanding figures, the leaders of strongly opposed tendencies,
in contemporary music. Debussy and Strauss, be it noted, not Ravel
and Mahler. In France Debussy’s influence was naturally very great;

1 ‘Esquisse’, p. 213. |
? бее Lockspeiser, op. cit., i, pp. 204-8.

THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

106

Ex. 44

Vins.

Ex. 45.

a
=

ж Е да
бъ ГІ

= кор

А
ET

ПЕ!

оз

ща

р mare.

а.

Он
=:

------

CODE

ЕЕ

Е:

р mare.

Tpts.

има

muted умыл,

BUT 3 —1

Vin. I

o ъ= == PüÓ— Á«

сте ai
21.41

r
y

I pizz Timp. іп Е col I

muted pizz.p

Vc. + D.B.
(both div.)

107

bis

"iet

— ІҢ

THE WIDER INFLUENCE OF DEBUSSY

2 ЕІ.,2 Ob., С.А.
(3 Bn. 8ve lower)
СІ.

pur
р

M Mit. |
ш X. x
Вай КЕЙ ий
с
aS о &
Р са H a3 a 2 Р Гы
2 E 3 Oe © ы d
е д ы ЕГІ |e И. 5 щ >
в га
Se ра
сә
eS

ия
НВ

[Е
[LN

Vin. II
Va.
Vc. + D.B.
(both div.)

108 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

composers of widely different character submitted to his influence in
one way or another, and only those of an older generation—Saint-
Saéns, Fauré, d'Indy—were immune to it; and in d'Indy's case the
immunity was not total.! As Léon Vallas put it, ‘Personne vers 1902-
1905 ne pouvait se défendre complétement de la contagion musicale de
Pelléas et Mélisande’.? That d'Indy should have been even slightly
infected is the more remarkable in that his variety of classicism, which
he imparted to Dukas, was more rigorous than that of Saint-Saéns;
Ravel could in later years recognize an affinity with Saint-Saéns but the
elegance of their classicism was quite foreign to d'Indy; the polyphony
of d'Indy's Second Symphony (1903) is often as harsh and angular as
Reger's:

Ex. 46

ПЕРЕН АЕ i
Bass Cl. oP hy с=с = а з= ае :
mf

0 А А А А А А
рг: :
Si py [en] ---- _—_—_ :
Horns у= == Woo pp tt е ПИ
C D :
= oz '
Trumpets | Hes —2 я :
DNA. і

Tbn. Па | se Е-Е

С.В. Tbn. |

() .
ЖЕР” ЖЕНГО > ШЫ rein ecc sene D. „чї ee Spese EUR. Түз ыз МР TT
| улса асы кых = ee
Vins. о т — ШИ
Е 9p . БИТ a FÉ

D
' cresc. .
0 unis.

“Же Сы ш зеш
Ирак а =. EE ou
Миз. div. | Е EL X I 2 НЕЕ

5 ise р. 240), Til, а
2 Vincent d' Indy, ii (Paris, 1950), р. 255.

THE WIDER INFLUENCE OF DEBUSSY 109

Bass Cl.

Horns

Trumpets Hf
e я: Li
Ша LS Se у Е-е =
С.В. Tbn. Е И тер т та
V стезс
f) II 2
[mU LiPEmeEUnSILSE.c cmm ат. тарлы. ла. ae SS ie E Е ен
Vins. = = iem: сзсз e um ЕЕ xl. BÉ m —— та

E --- E E O. — шы

ИЕ
Ни pF

Vlas. div.

Sempre cresc.

and the fugal middle section of the third movement of Dukas’s Piano
Sonata (1901):

Ex. 47
(d = 52)
Фр mystérieusement

doucement marqué

110 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

comes from the same school. If composers such as these could not
resist the infection (cf. also Exs. 44 and 45, the trio of the scherzo of
d'Indy's Violin Sonata (1904) and his Jour d'été à la montagne (1905)),
it is not surprising that such natural eclectics as Albert Roussel and
Charles Koechlin succumbed heavily before finding their own artistic
personalities.

Roussel’s acknowledgement of ‘the weak influence of Debussy’ has
already been quoted.! It is naturally most obvious in such early works
as the first set of Quatre poémes (by Henri de Régnier), Op. 3 (1903), the
Rustiques for piano, Ор. 5, and First Symphony (Le Poéme de la
forét), Op. 7 (both 1904—6), and persists until the orchestral triptych of
Indian impressions Evocations, Op. 15 (1910-11), but even in the
earliest of these works a distinctive personality begins to show itself;
the language of Debussy is used in a different sense. And actually at the
same time Roussel was writing things like the Divertissement, Op. 6, for
flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn and piano (1906) (1), and certain
parts of the D minor Violin Sonata, Op. 11 (1908) (11), which are as
neo-classical as Ravel without being particularly Ravelian:

v See р. 25.

111

THE WIDER INFLUENCE OF DEBUSSY

Ex. 48

г .
ое epe Шоо г = үүт асс с ааа

Ше i та нож сим а CIR e сыы ы ыны ae ы л ee (ee pp x] = — um 1
Я Я z с

Ент! “ұлың БН жо” а

BNA Sk anne en Щ eb] БЕ, = ланы... ЕС

112 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

Gi) Plus vite

Piano 3 №
only J^ énergique

P LL V
Е 7 аъ Ето Е,
[XE ш ЕЕ = УИНН

Nor, despite their structural leaning on d'Indy, are the Divertissement
and Sonata d'Indyesque. Like Debussy and Ravel, Roussel delighted
not only in the sound of added-note seconds but in the pentatonic
mode (from the ‘Ode à un jeune gentilhomme’ (1907), second of the
Deux poémes chinois, onward); exotic scales and the harmonies based
on them then played a more and more important part in Roussel's
music.? And, like Florent Schmitt, Koechlin, and others, he employs
‘scholastic’ chords of the ninth, not obtained by added notes as
Debussy's usually are, with a freedom of non-resolution and chromatic
alteration like that with which rather earlier composers had treated
chords of the seventh. The dissonances set free by Debussy were used
in music very unlike his, for example the bourrée of Roussel’s Suite for
piano, Op. 14 (1910):

1 See Arthur Hoérée, ‘Га Technique', Revue musicale (special Roussel number) x (1929),
по. 6, p. 84; this article, of which Roussel himself approved, is reprinted in condensed form
in Hoérée, Albert Roussel (Paris, 1938), p. 87.

THE WIDER INFLUENCE OF DEBUSSY 113

к= лет

4 Ба
р tres souple

Unlike Roussel’s eclecticism, Koechlin's was never focused by a
strong creative personality. During his long life (1867-1951) he com-
posed in every style of the day—at least in every French style and in
some not particularly French—very often with individual touches. One
hears this at once in his Op. 1, the first set of Rondels for voice and
piano (1890-94), where the delicious setting of Théodore de Banville's
*Le Thé' could not quite have been written by Fauré. The opening of the
prelude to Part I of his L'Abbaye (suite religieuse pour choeurs, orchestre
et orgue), Op. 16:1

Ex. 50
Andante

га

vi aa СА oA

[cuam ar ey _1

ED ЕЕ ШҮ со x el

6 5 = Фа eec > E [04 Е ааа ы
ШЕ. А 4 Ze 2 ВЕ И n —Á— —

р = А ре

1 Quoted from the composer’s piano reduction, the only published form.

114 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

Molto tranquillo

is remarkable in that it was composed during 1899-1901, long before
‘Га Cathédrale engloutie'. Debussyish harmony, Ravelian line-drawing,
Satie's deliberate naiveté and eccentricity, experiments of every kind,
often combining to produce music of undeniable beauty, converged
most satisfactorily in such trifles as the two sets of Esquisses for piano,
Op. 41, the more substantial Paysages et Marines, Op. 63 (1905-15),
and the Quatres Sonatines frangaises (Op. 60) for piano duet (1919).
In so far as Koechlin was influential, which was really only in the post-
war period, he certainly contributed to the current of French neo-
classicism.

It was not only French composers and foreign musicians living in
Paris who were infected by Debussy and—during this period to a much
lesser degree—by Ravel. Composers in other lands began to come
under the spell of the new techniques. But Debussy's influence followed
his reputation at a distance of five or six years; if Pelléas established
the one in 1902, it was only about 1907-8 that young foreign composers
began to succumb to the other. Paris became the magnet that Leipzig
once had been. In 1907 Falla went to Paris and worked with Dukas; in
1908 Vaughan Williams went to Paris to study with Ravel. And before
we dismiss Debussy's influence on Vaughan Williams as minimal, we
should note Bartók's account of his first acquaintance with Debussy's
music:

THE WIDER INFLUENCE OF DEBUSSY 115

When, urged by Kodály in 1907, Г began to know and study Debussy's
compositions, I was astonished to find that certain pentatonic motives
corresponding to ones in our folk-song similarly play a great role in his
melody.!

It was not the harmony that struck him first, though it did soon, not the
piano-writing or the pointilliste technique which never made much
impression on him. (Bartók's most Debussyish composition is the first
of the Két kép (Two pictures) for orchestra, Op. 10, no. 1 (1910): cf.
(Ex. 52 (iv).) As Edwin von der Nüll put it:?

He escaped from the atmosphere of neo-romanticism and subscribed to
Debussyism. He did not, it is true, fall under the spell of Debussy's highly
strung femininity . . . He took from the Frenchman what he could incorporate
in his own self-willed, angular nature. He gladly accepted the enrichment of
harmonic means but did not give up his sharply profiled melodic line; thus
from the combination of these two forces arose far more radical forms than
was ever the case with Debussy. Nor did he have at his disposal that narcotic
twilight which made complicated chord-formations tolerable to the ear of
1908.

The same might be said of Schoenberg, though it is difficult to determine
so precisely when and how Schoenberg became acquainted with
Debussy's music; according to his own statement in the Harmonielehre,*
it was 'three or four years' after 1902. However, the influence of
Debussy's piano-writing is unmistakable in much of the piano-part of
Pierrot lunaire—a work which, in turn, was to exercise through its
facture a transitory impression on both Stravinsky ((Mazatsumi’ from
Tri stikhotvoreniya iz yaponskoy liriki (Japanese lyric poems) ) and
Ravel (‘Placet futile’ from Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé) т 1913.

1908 was also the year of the earliest works in which the young
Stravinsky reflected the influence of Debussy: the Scherzo fantastique
and Fireworks for orchestra, followed by the First Act of his opera,
Solovey (The Nightingale) in 1909. The Lento middle section of Fire-
works also borrows from the opening of Dukas's Г’ Apprenti sorcier, and
some of Ше ‘unmistakable Debussy-like ... harmonic combinations’
that have been discovered in early Stravinsky* really derive from his
teacher Rimsky-Korsakov. For more than sixty years Russian com-
posers had shown a certain interest in artificial scales and the harmonies
derived from them: not only the whole-tone scale? but the scale of

1 ‘Önéletrajz’, Magyar Irás (1921); reprinted in Bartók, Válogatott zenei írásai (Budapest,
1948), р. 9. German version in Musikblätter des Anbruch, iii (1921), p. 89.

2 Béla Bartók : Ein Beitrag zur Morphologie der neuen Musik (Halle, 1930), p. 2.

3 p. 438. е.в. by Roman Vlad, Stravinsky (London, 1960), p. 6.

5 See supra, p. 88.

116 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

alternate tones and semitones invented: by Rimsky-Korsakov and first
employed by him in his opera Mlada (1890), and not only the whole-
tone mode with its augmented-triad harmonies, but ingeniously
fabricated, non-functional chord-progressions founded on the whole-
tone scale—as in the prologue to Zolotoy Petushok (The Golden
Cockerel) (1907):

Ex.51 |
Moderato assai (J = 80)
бор abra Wo. RET 4 te le,
SS ae ea о и В
Tekin) ЕН
ЗА A MN Поле даже wig — — Е т [ERR ЕО

p Pice. D
Р „Ба ?
Glockenspiel СИЕ В ааа есе

& Нагр LIES 4, — LLL pp pypeccfa yp ВТ Вет ДИ шаны pn qme Р) [fas Ира
ЕС г... Сва а Бе а LIAE] (amd атна гла

Gl.: Hp. 8ve higher

Уы Е ЕЕ ЕЕ
Vlas. 3 Е ова тения я ЕЕ

|
Ге |]

arr Sa ies SEC ere РЕН
mre e Ee So жака Se
EE ИЯНЕ ee Ae ee [n нашаға

Bn. I tacet а
Иа

THE WIDER INFLUENCE OF DEBUSSY 119

where the alternation of 6/4 and 6/3 chords based on the descending scale
admirably suggests the magical character of the Astrologer. It was from
the same toy-box that Stravinsky took the harmonic ingenuities from
which he fashioned the music of Kashchey and the Fire-Bird in Zhar-
Ptitsa (The Fire-Bird) (1910). But great as was Stravinsky’s debt to
Rimsky-Korsakov and other innovators of the period, the greatest (as
he acknowledged) was to Debussy: “Тһе musicians of my generation
and I myself owe the most to Debussy.'?

The technical devices, especially the orchestral devices, of impression-
ism—the kaleidoscopic open-work of melodic scraps and spots of
instrumental colour, the additional dimension given to pure line by
doubling at conventional or unconventional intervals simultaneously
(often amounting to side-slipping of chords), varied or unvaried
repetition of motives or mere figures or rhythmic patterns instead of
thematic development—all tending to the disintegration of the hitherto
accepted norms of texture and consequence, were adopted or adapted by
composers whose creative personalities differed markedly from each
other’s and from Debussy’s, as may be seen in the six excerpts shown in
Ex. 52. (The contemporary listener had no opportunity to hear the
Webern piece until March 1913; he would doubtless have been incredu-
lous of any prophecy that this would prove the most seminal of the six.)
Not everything that seems ‘impressionistic’ in the music of the period
stems from Debussy; the passage in Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande
(1903), pp. 42-5, where Mélisande lets down her hair from the tower,
probably owes more to passages in ‘Am Strande von Sorrent’ in Strauss's
Aus Italien than to Debussy; but even composers whose appreciation of
Debussy was severely limited were indebted to him technically. Such a
one was Holst, who admired L'Aprés-midi and liked the Nocturnes
‘but was never very happy about anything else’ and ‘hated’ Pelléas,?
yet ‘Saturn’ and ‘Neptune’ (composed 1914) in The Planets could
hardly have been written without the pre-existence of Debussy’s scores.
It was another side of Debussy that appealed to Vaughan Williams, the
diatonic or modal vein that runs from La Damoiselle élue (1888) to
Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911).

1 See, for instance, André Schaeffner, Strawinsky (Paris, 1931), р. 21, and Edwin Evans,
‘The Fire-Bird’ апа ‘Petrushka’ (London, 1933), p. 10.

2 Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (London, 1959), p. 48.

3 Imogen Holst, Gustav Holst (London, 1938), p. 147.

118
Ex. 52

THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

(i) DELIUS: In a Summer Garden (1908)

FI., Ob.

CA.

Вп. D. Bn.

Harp

Slower and more reposefully

А ві 2 5 3 3 ==
Ес T іс

eye БИР

|
|

Se ааа =
алУ; (= al
ow OS De EY LD
3 0—7
В. CL. Фр -----1
ПІ
сулу =====—=—===== ЕЕ:
jo mro. = 772
7 ща” -]
фри
4
БЕБЕ == у == сш = ==

реа оо ==

5
| 4
|

119

THE WIDER INFLUENCE OF DEBUSSY

BEA S ы ИВА НЕЕ ЕЕК |
ерте с NOCT... caes a
Ia E шышы]
кезді
a

| шз!
РЕБ —
puteum ШЕСЕ
tapas
------ --- ----.|
eel

| 1 1
n Е | |

N | ||

м , A.

il Т қ

ші |

үү №
il
H |
LIN il
«ul
mu
di
| | ШЕН!
| ; | В i

| Eo Al сё |
і We 8) ТЕ idi

-----
4
я

о
Bn., D.Bn.
Timp,

27+

D.B. tace

г.

THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

120

ШОШ

ЩІ M
ШШ

re
АЦ 88
T]

IY [qe — адыра

Ba., D. Bn.| Уч

#-
TERA p md
ee

D
EE

Hns.

АА ла ыыы

THE WIDER INFLUENCE OF DEBUSSY 121

(ii) STRAVINSKY: Scherzo fantastique (1908)
_ (4-89

en ig al a ms nm ie eo ee

ПОНЕ
Е ar ay
а [m

Picc.

Ob.
СА.

Вп.

| І
ІШ

TAR "лт ш тщ с a rre іне. —— es |
s n. І 2 Г)
бб 2 Se Sy i тше E RE EE ааа
i е p
nu f f mf iut
I p=
НО =
Е e Е-Е
му т 122 [gp слан:
= wr
п, №
pem еи
"Tpts. Да
т, Низ. III, IV р

z des

у a TERA Жы ыс тыш" еы шс — CAD ==
LIS [X lu I nao
a а SS eae Eee [ ЕП
> =

(0 DU =
= 2 ый dcc
BS, Ee БЕ ы ы к лес Мыл ы сал... зі
BS foc Б LD Р ЕИ с ee б 388 № БВ ИИ НОЕ ВААУ RA.: Е И LL LLL —LÉÉ—ÁLLÉÉLÁ—
И.Р Se eS ЭРЕШЕ ос ее”

:3. D.B. soli pizz.

THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

сшщ.
[opus тана нам ml
Це

70 ag
шах»,

Fi.

4-4

6, по. 3 (1909)

Ор.

Zart bewegt Q

(iii) WEBERN: Orchesterstück,

lich

50 zart wie mög

рр-- =

THE WIDER INFLUENCE OF DEBUSSY 123

4-4. 4-4 d-d.

aber etwas schneller

[ пра Г. | pus ери EL —Me— - |
[ 2 ба з Ан „Эй Мыш Se шы Ө" euo £n mE

Fl. [ TAs тиви ЕР Es ЗЕЕ ||
П jeep] wt: gum cum

SS сочен 1
je ре]
о )
a
I++ Ф. De це а Р це
EF >, Te | 107 че um pote |
Hon и | —# БО О п ая
Eu EE ЕО Sr T
Dpp———— — =
ко cer f hi E I Idol a pu 2811
Glockenspiel CARLES е ның Ен ERES Кы бе
Ето e
Solo Vin. ? poo oe

ти Dampfer 6

o 8 8 —

АСК | ==

Se ee e aS o e e S

кошсо лае
.B. eee EEE]

| Ju
D.B. (div) JES Fa NN
(Вов lower) |2 Жена eni ume]

ти Dampfer

124

THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

(iv) BARTOK: In Full Flower, Ор. 10, no. 1 (1910)

Fi.

Ob: С.А.

СІ.

Vins.

Vlas.

mf espress.

f) II б LII К ооа

в =Й == =, у an
21 c "e m

7—0 аР Ее СУ, or en
С 4 mm ae nint idu cm | БИШ === == ка элен ини ЕШР Cee. ll as Бр,

о ои Һ D
deb —€— == 1...

сұ Be
© mre =
а [7
as Са
и! 22% 2
П 026 Ре:
єс аа; 5—6 — р. Be
ЕЕ ЕН: ЕЕ Е,
Se at ea ee SS ee eee,
ок lm adum тые а ара

125

THE WIDER INFLUENCE OF DEBUSSY

Веви НТ»

Jd. dle
a) 7
И oí
ae

ИТ

аву

с
га

||
|

ЕУ

THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

126

i
i

A
e
сай

ға

THE NEW HARMONY IN NEW CONTEXTS 127

THE NEW HARMONY IN NEW CONTEXTS

The general techniques of impressionism lived on after the demise of
the aesthetic that had given birth to them, and were employed mainly in
attempts to rejuvenate romanticism (as in Skryabin's later style), but
gradually exhausted themselves. With the new harmonic resources
opened up by Debussy and his compatriots it was a different matter.
Instead of being employed as elements in pointillisme or dissolved into
‘romantic’ figuration and texture, often softened by appoggiaturas and
the like, they were commonly used—even by Debussy himself in such
late works as the Douze études of 1915--а the material of ‘pure music’.!
Ironically, the added notes which Debussy had employed to blur the
outlines of sound were now used to harden those outlines; the piled-up
chords producing a sensuous haze of sonority into which he breathed
the minimum of rhythmical life now gave dynamic weight and were
pounded out in vigorous or subtle rhythms which often seemed the most,
instead of the least, important element in the music, as in the *Russian
Dance’ of Petrushka (1911) and the final dance of The Rite of Spring
(1912). By 1908 piled-up chords were becoming common currency,
but they were seldom introduced as starkly and uncompromisingly as
by Bartók in his piano Bagatelles. Bartók was a pioneer of the new
percussiveness on the very instrument Debussy had treated with such
magical delicacy, but in any case the piano emphasized the ‘block’
character of chord agglomerations. The clarification of Ravel’s har-
mony in the Valses nobles, when he orchestrated them, has already been
pointed out? and in a piece written at almost exactly the same time as
Bartók's Bagatelles, the second of the Fünf Orchesterstiicke, Op. 16,
Schoenberg gave a classic demonstration of prismatic scoring. The first
sketch? shows the naked harmonic basis (i), though the instrumentation
is already indicated, but the effect to the ear is very different (ii):

1 Debussy, letter to Stravinsky, 24 October 1915. Зее р. 108.
3 Reproduced in Egon Wellesz, Arnold Schoenberg (Leipzig and Vienna, 1921), facing
р. 122:

128 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

(i) Mássige Viertel
II

Ob.

B. Fl. + Hn. 3
(muted)

Bn.

Tot.

Tbn.

Solo Cello

The importance of fourths in the chord-structure, as in nos. 10 and
11 of the Bagatelles, was no novelty by this date although the treatment
of them was. Chords of superimposed fourths had existed as early as
Satie’s Fils des étoiles (see Ex. 36 (1) )—to say nothing of Beckmesser's
lute—and had been an occasional component of the impressionist
vocabulary (Debussy's L'Isle joyeuse, Ravel’s ‘Vallée des cloches’ in
Miroirs, and elsewhere). Schoenberg himself had introduced them in
Pelleas und Melisande just before the appearance of the ‘Pelléas’ theme,
where they sound less daring in their context and threaded through by
the ‘Mélisande’ theme (Ex. 54) than when quoted in isolation, as they
are in the Harmonielehre, though he claims there that they occur ‘quite
isolated ... as the expression of a mood, the strangeness of which
obliged me against my will to find a new means of expression’. Further-
more, each is resolved; they аге not ‘emancipated’ chords like Debussy's
and Ravel’s. But in 1905 both Mahler and Strauss (Ex. 55) employed
quartal harmony and melodic lines derived from it in the Seventh
Symphony (i) and Salome (ii) and (iii).

So the celebrated opening of Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie was in

1 p. 450.

THE NEW HARMONY IN NEW CONTEXTS 129

Ех. 54

Woodwind

Brass

Mis are a А
Е ae ae
== eae 91 a Se 1 11777077 97 Ла 2]

жена ө e ———— ee кы acm

Strings

С ===

130 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

Ex. 55 ;
Рій mosso [than Adagio]

дай E CRIT
Woodwind

FEED
ERES eo
Ses Li ECL [ ==
mm — p

Tpts.

Vins.

sempre Р
x

ЕЕ Че жю жже е" —— 7

oo. ee e
Ее аа ынны + чырыш шш A „a
à EE EE EE 2 2
prec. | Ob. à3; Cl. à3
Он { SP = ИЛ РЕ
ҰЯ Jae eel к=
01-5 эө Se g—9 —]——-—
[пе Mi — ee He SSS
V Глисти сочи Iz] |

= О е. =. , .
o y . Lo” „е
а” pr Pp | —— — ДИНЫ БЫЛ — Jp IETS Sao HP
mi tpe а! елате mi. ———— E eel ere [УЫП [n cani СҮТ ШЫР НО ЧН ui o CM Daun
Ге“ 1 «СО ШЙНЕН Juni OmU „ый |) БЕРЫ he i) ЭНЕ Tree) 201 В тышсыз рр а uer
д 5 LE ГЕ LOE LE
p cresc. . -
cresc. molto
prs 8

Ро molto cresc,

131

THE NEW HARMONY IN NEW CONTEXTS

(i)

“i EH i \

pizz. arco
Bem ГЫ

a Pe
аи t
А
puce р Eee
y
ЕЕ Se]. Ca
г Ф |)
fe
P prc o el
2 рел]
"ВЕЕР pmi
=
Е Е ст ЕТ)

76)

po
ua
|
aw ЖЫН ЖЫН
куст нуш с ру
a y x eb e
2 ) )

IX ]
= IN L]
ШЕР ди MET, E
hlc o d —— анын

ae Р

plzz. arco

Да es БЕП
7—8 m
pour 04 ERI

М | i m m
НЯ “| Ў s. M I. E
ЕЕ |Б > WU n ^ J| mes M
EM а l^ m. = I Ш
ІШ = МЫ m X
um Mj : B OR Rm A ts m
ER PS PR Ж ui E ОА АА МИ.

Breit (4

С!
Bn
Horns
Timp
Small
Kettle-Drum
inE
Tambourine
Side Drum
Vins
Үс
(Ist desk)
Vc.
D.B

(iii)

THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

132
Ex. 56

м т
АЧ [i
ug
M

mul
n р
Vii ilii
Ш CL
ili
ПІ
IN
Г mul |
3 i its
Ша li |
¢ Wa i
Benita Сө A
Зее slimes
Оз. d
KE] №. (>
ПЕЙ" ІЙ
5
3

im TT
Г S : () à
4 нео = ръце
| | |
ПЕ! | |
E |
M БН |
UN. На
|| ү Gath EE |
ГБ | |
О ^ d П
А м mN
li RE The
ih MC ІҢ
NS E |
| all
ts s il "i
Ri al "Pu "n!
We fmi | |
ia Ш |
Exo d и di

THE NEW HARMONY IN NEW CONTEXTS 133

itself only abreast of other German music of its date (1906); the fourth-
chordal climax of the Kammersymphonie (Ex. 56), occurs later, at the
end of the ‘development’. Quartal music on this scale is the furthest
possible reaction from hyper-chromaticism. What was new about the
horn-theme was that it was “риге music'. Whereas Mahler and Strauss
and Schoenberg himself in Pelleas had turned to quartal music to
express a strange mood, or tense excitement, or to symbolize the
prophet's inflexibility or suggest the barbaric, it now existed for its
own sake as it was to do in Berg's Piano Sonata, Bartók's
Tenth and Eleventh Bagatelles, the end of his First String Quartet
(1907) and very much of his Second (1915-17), and a great deal of other
music of the next decade. In the ‘Spring Divinations’ of The Rite of
Spring (1912) Stravinsky throws in Schoenberg's six-note quartal chord
(Ex. 56) as the climax to an ostinato pattern just before fig. 18. A similar
accumulation of perfect fifths occurs half a dozen bars earlier (see
Ex. 57);

Like the whole-tone mode, quartal music generally remained an
adjunct to more normal music. Except the egregious Rebikov,! who
had certainly employed occasional fourth-chords in undistinguished
piano-pieces of the late 1890s but whose monstrosities of quartal
commonplace, the Вейуа pesni (Chansons blanches) Op. 48, and
Dances, Op. 51, for piano, date from c. 1913, the only composer to
construct a system of fourth-chords was Skryabin. Unlike almost all
his contemporaries, Skryabin did not confine himself mainly to the
perfect or diatonic fourths derived from impressionism though he
employed them in his early works in passing (cf. Ex. 12, bar 3); nor
was his basic chord a purely intellectual conception.? When he began
to compose his orchestral Prometheus in 1908, he consciously based it
on what he called his ‘synthetic harmony’: the basic chord С, Е sharp,
B flat, E, A, D, an arrangement in fourths of the scale C, D, E, F sharp,
A, B flat which corresponds to 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14 in the harmonic series
—or, rather, to the approximation attainable on the piano keyboard—
and also differs only in one note (A instead of G sharp) from the
whole-tone scale. According to Leonid Sabaneyev, it was he who
devised ex post facto the theory of overtone derivation, which was then
appropriated by the composer ‘almost as a dogma',? but Skryabin's

1 See p. 36.

2 For a survey of Skryabin's harmonic evolution see C. С. J. von Gleich, Die sinfonischen
Werke von Alexander Skrjabin (Bilthoven, 1963), pp. 85-90. Paul Dickenmann, Die Entwick-

lung der Harmonik bei A. Skrjabin (Bern, 1935) deals only with his pre-Promethean

harmony.
3 Sabaneyev, Vospominaniya o Skryabine (Moscow, 1925), p. 227. Schoenberg likewise
held that *dissonances . . . are merely more remote consonances in the series of overtones’

(Structural Functions of Harmony (London, 1954), p. 193).

1890-1914

THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM:

Ех. 57

134

Flutter-tongue
Le
lini

am |
Ш (ТШ
like
$ i
АП ӨП
“ill
А М
E
АР
i ШШ
Ш

g
її =
тъ Š
=
2 +
3 З
"Bb 8
в:
а %
alll =
кг! ї
ар! Fla.
Іш ІН
ue A aa

con sord.

| |

135

THE NEW HARMONY IN NEW CONTEXTS

|
Де Фе X

136 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

piano-playing fingers had already discovered the sound of the ‘Prome-
thean chord’, no doubt empirically, in the course of natural evolution
from the post-Chopinesque harmony of his early compositions. Two
examples occur in the second and third bars of the Prelude, Op. 37, no. 3,
written in 1903:

Ex. 58

Andante ( = 50—54) M
m; marcato : |

The technique is, of course, fundamentally different from the block
treatment of quartal harmony, though it is equally non-functional.
When Rebikov hit on something surprisingly close to the ‘Promethean
chord’ in 1907, in his ‘musico-psychological tale’ Bezdna (The Abyss,
based on Leonid Andreyev’s story), he could do nothing better than
side-slip it to accompany the moment when the student ‘gazes raptur-
ously’ at the schoolgirl:

Ex. 59

Рій mosso [zkan Па! 56]
9

But Skryabin, having taken his basic harmony as a concord, treats it
freely in any transposition, breaking it up into melodic fragments and
figuration, and admitting ‘foreign’ notes as appoggiaturas or passing-
notes. The chromatic parallel ninths which open the Étude, Op. 65,
no. 1 (1911-12), are drawn across Promethean chords as a nineteenth-
century composer would have drawn a simple chromatic scale across
conventional harmonies. In Prometheus itself the complete six-note
chord is used, but in Skryabin's post-Promethean compositions the last

THE NEW HARMONY IN NEW CONTEXTS 137

partial may be omitted, as in ‘Etrangeté’, Op. 63, no. 2 (1911-12)!
while in the seventh Sonata, Ор. 64 (1911-12) it is flattened.

The paradox of Skryabin, the arch-romantic with apocalyptic visions of
an art, or at least an act, embracing all humanity, is that he should have
invented a musical language of non-communication, a language the extra-
musical sense of which only he could understand. Sabaneyev tells us?
that Skryabin considered the passage in Prometheus quoted as Ex. 60
*the most tragic thing I have written in my whole life', but although
Sabaneyev was closer to him than any other colleague he was quite
unable to agree. Skryabin contributed as much to the final destruction
of functional harmony as any of the Central Europeans, and the
‘artificial’ constructivism of his last works was not merely symptomatic
of a tendency, like Rimsky-Korsakov's in the Cockerel and Stravinsky's
in The Fire-Bird: it pointed a way—which no one exactly followed,
though Schoenberg was soon to trace a parallel one—through the
potential chaos of atonality. Both the Promethean chord and the
twelve-note row provide synthetic nuclei for a composition and since
the опе can be ‘verticalized’ into chords and the other ‘horizontalized’
into melodic lines, they appear superficially to be opposite sides of the
same coin. But the notes of the Promethean chord are not ‘related to one
another' in Schoenberg's sense, and the six-note scale deducible from
the chord (without transposition) is apt to sound like a chromatically
altered diatonic scale, though it lacks points of tonic, dominant and
leading-note function. In his last compositions, the five Preludes, Op. 74,
of 1914, Skryabin introduced such a profusion of ‘foreign’ chromatic
notes that he reached a kind of twelve-note music, but it is certainly
not the Schoenbergian kind.?

A rather younger Russian contemporary of Skryabin's, Nikolay
Roslavets (1880-1944), did actually (for instance, in his Deux Composi-
tions pour piano (1915) ) go farther than Skryabin toward twelve-note
music.* In an autobiographical article published in 1924,5 Roslavets—
while denying that his system of sintetakkordi of “6 to 8 or more notes'
owed anything to post-Promethean Skryabin or to Schoenberg—
admitted that ‘Skryabin (in a musical-formal respect, but in no wise
ideologically [Roslavets was an anti-romantic constructivist]) is of

1 Recorded in Тйе History of Music in Sound, x. 2 Ор. cit. р. 228.

з On Ше analogies and differences between Promethean and twelve-note structures, see
Zofia Lissa, *Geschichtliche Vorform der Zwólftontechnik', Acta Musicologica, vii (1935),
p. 15. George Perle, Serial Composition and Atonality (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962),
p. 41, considers Skryabin as a ‘nondodecaphonic serialist’.

4See Detlef Gojowy, ‘Nikolaj Andreevic Roslavec, ein früher Zwólftonkomponist',
Die Musikforschung, xxii (1969), p. 22.

5 *Nik. A. Roslavets o sebe i svoem tvorchestve', Sovremennaya muzika, no. 5 (November-
December 1924), p. 132.

138
Ex. 60

Ob. &
CA.

СІ.

B. Cl., Bn.,
D. Bn.

Horns

Tpts.

Tbn.
Tuba

Vins.

Vlas.

THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

_———— I
ИТ не: eg 2. ys
LE—————4— 155498 Арапя те 5&9
Кес = ДЕР ker а= рано ра H9 9 я
[xao EE ey И жойи ГЕ = gue wd каналын Е жк грис Т]
2 a a oe р===ы
771, е
III & С.А. ур 7 II cresc

II ІП

Қары. ЕСТЕ ат тел

стезс.

[-9 )-—7 Dro
Eas = ше хак те сызгы
рс эн = eee |
II III IV
mf. тр cresc.
f) ІП
yp mc e en

Ц
ii

Г
|

:
|

IV ' con sord.

div.
f) unis. h „ ex ШӘ iT 3
ge Д Г д дет. e eR
Дай 4 = инь Г ЕР ДТҰ HN P Uds |
L Г аъ See. ы ay x l L— M [aac cd

THE NEW HARMONY IN NEW CONTEXTS 139

dim.
Р Р subitement trós doux
1+ Pic. De 7 Ec c M MEE EE
2- 3

f) ene 4: I £r =
[У о ры

ЕУ АЕ SPS ЕЕ ЕЕ uen mI Ч]
Fl. Г ШС Е ее, Zeg
MIU. ЖЕШ 1 а= eee a ГЕННӘН р ЫМ

L——

Ob. &

—
к-
[1

|
Б
c
L|
|

Horns [em mr cuna -— Bee Е
Eor EE с па и ЕЕ Е к г

У(
7

)
М

в. T

Тр.

Vins.

Vc.
D.B.

140 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

course far nearer to me than Schoenberg, whose work, I confess, I have
got to know only comparatively recently’.

SCHOENBERG

Compared with the brilliantly erratic side-track of Skryabin's Pro-
methean experiment, Schoenberg's progress from romanticism, through
expressionism and non-serial atonality,! seems a straightforward, even
logical process of evolution. For it was he who gathered the harmonic
fruits of impressionism—we must take note of his claim to have
discovered them independently of Debussy?—and integrated their free
dissonance with post-Wagnerian harmony and then with the polyphonic
devices of ‘absolute music’. In a lecture given in 1941? he described the
position around 1908, and hence his own historical role, with great
accuracy:

[Debussy's] harmonies, without constructive meaning, often served the
coloristic purpose of expressing moods and pictures [which] . . . thus became
constructive elements, incorporated in the musical functions; they produced
asort of emotional comprehensibility. In this way [as in post-Wagnerian
harmony] tonality was already dethroned in practise, if not in theory. This
alone would perhaps not have caused a radical change in compositional
technique. However, such a change became necessary when there occurred
simultaneously a development which ended in ... the emancipation of the
dissonance. . . . One no longer expected ... resolutions of Strauss’ discords;
one was not disturbed by Debussy's non-functional harmonies, or by the
harsh counterpoint of later composers. . . .

A style based on this premise [emancipation of ‘Wagner’s, Strauss’,
Moussorgsky’s, Debussy’s, Mahler’s, Puccini’s, and Reger’s more remote
dissonances'] treats dissonances like consonances and renounces a tonal
center. By avoiding the establishment of a key modulation is excluded. . . .

He then goes on to describe the problems raised by the first composi-
tions in this style by himself and his pupils Webern and Berg. “Тһе
foremost characteristics of these pieces in statu nascendi were their
extreme expressiveness and their extraordinary brevity.' Hitherto,
harmony “Чай served as a means of distinguishing the features of the
form'; transitional passages demanded different harmonic treatment
from those leading to cadence-points; ‘harmonic variation could be
executed intelligently and logically only with due consideration of the
fundamental meaning of the harmonies':

Fulfillment of all these functions ... could scarcely be assured with chords

whose constructive values had not as yet been explored. Hence, it seemed at
first impossible to compose pieces of complicated organization or of great

1 See chapter 1, pp. 15-17. ? Harmonielehre, pp. 435, 438, 450-1.
з Printed іп Style and Idea (New York, 1950), particularly pp. 104-6.

SCHOENBERG 141

length. A little later I discovered how to construct larger forms by following a
text ога poem. ...

But it was only ‘after many unsuccessful attempts during a period of
approximately twelve years’ that Schoenberg ‘laid the foundations for а
new procedure in musical construction which seemed fitted to replace
those structural differentiations provided formerly by tonal harmonies’:
the method of the twelve-note series.!

At first there was no question of 'absolute music'. Schoenberg
re-emphasized the ‘extreme expressiveness’, the ‘extreme emotionality’,
of his pre-serial atonal compositions—though they were no more
successful than Skryabin’s in communicating their message to a wider
circle. And for the same reason: the message was in a language com-
prehensible to few but the composer himself. But the real problem, as
Schoenberg makes abundantly clear, was not of expression but of
construction, a purely musical problem, and the search for a solution
forced Schoenberg to concentrate his thought on the structural devices
of ‘pure’ music: canon and ostinato, inversion and variation. He had
very early shown a predilection for canon: for instance in the first
movement of the early String Quartet in D (1897) at the beginning of the
development:

Ex. 61
Allegro molto | E ж ; si n

1 See infra, pp. 341 ff.

142 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

and in the finale of the same work (bars.65 ff.) where the close canon
between first violin and cello is much more ‘classical’ than the canon—
also between solo violin and solo cello—in Tove's first song in the
Gurrelieder. Now he began to construct with microscopic ingenuity, as
in the first piece of Op. 11:

I
langsam

In Op. 19, no. 2, an ingenious analyst! has discovered a foreshadowing
of serial construction and at the same time (1911) Schoenberg felt the
need to write a textbook that should ‘thoroughly impart to a student the
handicraft of our art, as a carpenter always сап’.? The highest point of
his own craftsmanship at this period was reached in the later numbers
of Pierrot lunaire (1912), for instance, по. 17, ‘Parodie’, which begins
with a canon by inversion between viola and clarinet, while the Sprech-
stimme follows the viola exactly at a bar's distance (Ex. 63).

At the repeat this theme becomes a normal canon between Sprech-
stimme and piccolo, to which is now added another canon by inversion
between viola and clarinet; the ‘accompanying’ piano part is also freely
varied. In the next number ‘Der Mondfleck’ similar ingenuities are com-
pounded by retrograde movement. Not all the numbers of Pierrot lunaire
are as intellectually constructed as this. No. 8, ‘Nacht’ is a passacaglia, as

1 Rudolf Wille, *Reihentechnik in Schönbergs opus 19, 2, Die Musikforschung, xix
(1966), p. 42.
з Harmonielehre, p. 7.

SCHOENBERG 143

Ex. 63
(Ò = 120) .
grazioso
ес ESS оо =т=т CO |
а. pape == aT e |
Ро ЕЕ = ттын кет== Lj mm л] = Бар

Eb
D == p
mit Dàmpfer
() RE ED VEN.

—JA——A4—————————s 4 LI d БЕ ое” Ж.

Vla. mo ы: к= — еў ее ес f= Lace]
ГА (3 отъ - лот ре Л

= - LI
Sue P stace. spice.
— À

()
a Lu EMI o -- о ДЕТТЕ ЕЕ
Sprech ГА 2
summe г КЛ

()
pu Дет 6 сс „л
ВЕУ 4
=
D EL mu Е
> caro
22 Е ;
Piano m Е fo JP 5
га PR IE ыс И. A ИЕ =
съ: 7 Е SS

[m Wes „лый |2 “ІСІ
DES ес Эш сы xm ту а И Ц P=. а
Se SS А cal [|— —]-aT р — —w 1 NES ЖШ ШЕШ
==
ve > Ба zi me |
SS спин
é ——OÁ' À ет |
РЕБ’ ЕЕ Б] ЗЕЕ Sa D rmi 231—377]
[Ji — со ысыта SS ие аар: АЕС meu. “ыы БЕП
Ta fas lo DGS un | rcm ae a es ———————[————/———— урра — [3]
pm ЗИ IN RLS all dme a ЕЕ арасан
r1 ж = xm n
---- а >
—— = Sb
Е:
f) = > —о => ———
EIS 01027 Е ЕЕ Т Сс" "чу" ТЗН: АЕН ЕЧЕИ NR RINT V

Mee - -па-деш, blank und blin - kend, in
С ЕЕ a

[m IS то
Гея» Урна Lie emma —— — ГОТ 3.7 Е
Lv шша ый Е]
v D р RJ ә рә
7 b EIU NS SS:
D Н H h
va чо НФ ИБ sy —— ——— |
p I ba Шан — qM тии S U-N-.« sx]
[7 (eS re eee ee a 2 ee
ен] EY ДЕННИ жетісті)
€———

144 THE REACTION AGAINST ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

C NS sentimental
() ты
ЭЕ —=— Е ee ааа [=
| —— а < 4 A T—
Au < р dolce

sentimental

b at
e c ame ae oe eee =]
Де 4 ПТ Бі; ТЕМ БЕРІ шл падна р {== Ее НЕ Бе
Hoe P Lid ae gs В раа ести

ih - rem | grau = = en Haar,

(Knitting-needles, polished and gleaming, in her grey hair,)

the composer points out. (The first of the Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16, is
held together by a three-note ostinato figure in the bass.) But despite the
ultra-romantic decadence of the Giraud-Hartleben poems, a decadence
subtly suggested rather than expressed by much of the music of the
*three-times seven melodramas’, ‘Parodie’ and ‘Der Mondfleck? are
essays in constructivism as ‘purely’ musical as the works of 1923, the
Klavierstiicke, Op. 23, and the Serenade, Op. 24, in which Schoenberg
began to ‘compose with twelve notes’. They are not neo-classical, any
more than Reger’s fugues are neo-classical—or the overture to Ariadne
auf Naxos or The Rite of Spring. More deserving of that epithet are
some of the French compositions of the War years: Fauré’s song-cycle
Le Jardin clos, Ravel’s Trio, Debussy’s piano Etudes and the Sonates
pour divers instruments, of the first of which—for cello and piano—he
himself claimed that the proportions and form were ‘presque classique,
dans le bon sens du mot’.! But all are symptoms of the same turning
away from romanticism, the same preoccupation with the basic
materials of music for their own sake, which were to characterize the
mainstream of Western music from the 1920s for the next half-century.

1 Quoted by Vallas, op. cit., p. 365.

Ш
STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

By MARTIN COOPER

WHEN Wagner died in Venice on 13 February 1883, his music was still
hotly discussed but the works had been very little staged outside Ger-
many and Austria. Elsewhere Tristan und Isolde had been given only in
London, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg only in Riga, London, Copen-
hagen, and Holland; and complete performances of Der Ring des Nibe-
lungen only in London, Brussels, and Amsterdam. Paris did not have a
performance of Lohengrin until 1887, followed by Die Walküre in 1893
and the complete Ring cycle only in 1911. Bayreuth and Munich were
places of pilgrimage for all Wagnerians, and the list of French
composers who made this pilgrimage during the seventies and eighties
includes all the most gifted and distinguished of the rising generation.
Places of pilgrimage, however, cater by definition for the converted; and
the large majority of opera-goers outside German-speaking countries,
and a very high proportion of musicians everywhere, had had very little
opportunity to judge Wagner's works except by isolated passages
transferred from their context to the concert-hall. When these works
began to be generally performed and became familiar, it took only
a single generation to discover that, far from heralding the dawn of
a new musical era, Wagner's music represented the all but final stage ina
great musical epoch which had begun in the second half of the sixteenth
century. Much, too, of what Wagner and his immediate disciples had
believed to be of universal significance proved to be either personal
in application, or relevant at most to German composers for the
stage.

In spite of this, opera during the years between 1890 and 1918 was
dominated by Wagner's shadow, and every composer for the stage was
forced to adopt an attitude to Wagner's music and to Wagner's ideas of
dramaturgy. It was possible to accept the one and reject the other, as
happened in France, and outright rejection of both became increas-
ingly common; but it was impossible to ignore the questions that
Wagner had asked or the answers which his own works had provided.

146 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

CENTRAL EUROPE

Wagner's fundamental contention that symphonic and chamber music
belonged to the past and that the future of music lay with the music-
drama rested on twin generalizations, of his own personal gifts on the
one hand and of German musical aptitudes and conditions on the other.
His further identification of German music with himself was proved
unjustified; but not until his influence had done much to weaken the
strong national traditions which had hitherto divided the operatic world
into largely self-subsistent compartments. It is not surprising that this
influence was strongest in Germany and Austria, where Wagner’s
dramatic theories were linked to literary, intellectual, and even political
movements, and Musikdrama appeared not only as the latest develop-
ment in the history of opera, but also as the first fully mature embodi-
ment of the form in wholly Germanic terms. Wagner's expansion and
enrichment of the orchestra, and its greater part in defining as well as
supporting the drama, were universally copied; but his conception of
opera as symphony proved to have a limited personal validity and was
ultimately rejected by even his most enthusiastic followers. The most
gifted of these was Richard Strauss (1864—1949), whose first opera
Guntram (1894) is a naive continuation of the knightly world of
Lohengrin, while in Feuersnot (1901) we have an example of that
specifically German delight in an idealized version of the national past,
mythical or historical, viewed in the same golden, transfiguring, and
largely diatonic light that Wagner had created for Die Meistersinger,
enhanced by a nostalgic counterpoint employed to heighten the illusion
of the medieval past. Although Tristan continued to be the most
musically influential of Wagner's works, it was Parsifal and Meister-
singer that were most copied by opera-composers of this period.

The Meistersinger world, as we may for convenience call it, proved a
particularly rich vein. It was exploited successfully by Engelbert
Humperdinck (1854-1921), who had worked for a time at Bayreuth as
Wagner's assistant, in two Mdrchenoper, or fairy-story operas, in which
a Wagnerian harmonic and orchestral style is scaled down so that the
disproportion between manner and matter is not offensive. Hänsel und
Gretel (1893) belongs to a class not uncommon in the nineteenth
century: a work of art conceived ostensibly for children but in fact
reflecting an adult's sentimental idealization of childhood and very
little appreciated by children themselves. It is musically inferior to
Kónigskinder (Royal Children) (1910), where the medieval atmosphere
is plainly modelled on that of Die Meistersinger, and there is even a
boys' dance that suggests an obvious parallel with Wagner's apprentices.

CENTRAL EUROPE 147

A more important parallel is the personification of the power of music
in the character of Der Spielmann, whose (offstage) violin solo in Act III
provides the focal point of the drama, like Walther von Stolzing's Prize
Song; and the children's music, which Humperdinck introduces in the
same spirit as the opening chorale of Die Meistersinger, emphasizes the
naive, folk-like element in the work.

Ex. 64

Kinder а.

Lie - ber Spiel - mann, al - le Kin-der und ich, wir

ha - ben ge-be - ten, ge - fleht für dich

(Dear Mr Player, all the children and I have begged and prayed for you)

The personification of music in a single character! and the sophisticated
use of simple, popular material as a reassuring feature in intellectually
demanding or emotionally threatening situations? are common features
of opera in this period. Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) further exploited the
‘golden’ Meistersinger atmosphere in Der Corregidor (1896), formally
weak but musically rewarding and containing a Beckmesser part in the
amorous Alcalde. A different kind of Wagnerian affiliation appears
in Der arme Heinrich (1895), the first opera of Hans Pfitzner (1869-
1949). Here the music owes as much to Weber as to Wagner, but there
is a clear echo of Parsifal in the harmonies associated with the rela-
tionship between Agnes and the wounded Heinrich. Pfitzner's
Marchenoper, Die Rose vom Liebesgarten (1901) is an essay in that
sophisticated simplicity more successfully exploited by Humperdinck,
and it was admired and performed by Gustav Mahler, whose own
music contains many of the same features that distinguish the operas
written by members of the first generation after Wagner's death—
idealization of an imaginary past (Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs) and

1 СЕ. Beppe in Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz (1891), Sadko in Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko
(1898), Floria Tosca in Puccini's Tosca (1900), the Jongleur in Massenet's Jongleur de
Notre Dame (1902), the Dark Fiddler in Delius's Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (1907),
the Italian Singer in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier (1911), and Palestrina in Pfitzner’s Pales-
trina (1917).

? E.g. the shepherd boy at the opening of Puccini’s Tosca, Act ІП; the child's piano
practice in Leoncavallo's Хага, Act П; the children's Christmas song in Massenet's
Werther; and the fisher-girl’s humming a folk-song at the opening of d'Indy's L’Etranger.

148 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

the innocence of folk- or child-elements contrasted with psychological
complexity and suffering (Symphonies 3, 4 and 8). In the operas of
Siegfried Wagner (1869—1930), Wagner's son and Humperdinck's pupil,
humour is added to the symbolism of the Магсйепорег (Der Bürenhüuter,
1899); and Austria produced a variety of popular post-Wagnerian
crossings with folk-music in Der Evangelimann (1895) by Wilhelm
Kienzl (1857-1941) and Der Musikant (1910) and Das hóllisch Gold
(1916) by Julius Bittner (1874-1939).

It was not only the example of Wagner's music, or his professed
belief that myth and symbol were the proper concern of the music-
drama, that turned the minds of many composers in this direction
when searching for a libretto. The Symbolist movement in France, led
by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, had itself been influenced by Wagner's
theories! and was in its turn to furnish composers with the new ideals of
hermetic reserve and indirect allusiveness characteristic of a mandarin
art. Symbolism appeared as a reaction against the realism, or natural-
ism, that marked the development of the French novel in the hands of
Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant; and realism and symbolism were the
dominant elements in opera between 1890 and 1910, at first strongly
contrasted but later amalgamating in many instances.

Both the mosaic-like structure of Wagner's musical idiom involving
an intricate system of cross-references, and the richly poetic and
evocative resources of the Wagnerian orchestra clearly corresponded
more closely to the Symbolists’ use of language in poetry than to the
prose of the naturalist novelist. Wagner's own symbolic conception of
opera was carried to its logical extreme in the two works that Strauss
wrote after Feuersnot—Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909). In both of
these the role of the orchestra is more important than in any of Wagner's
works, and the structure and even the scale recall those of Strauss's tone-
poems. Oscar Wilde wrote his Salome, on which Strauss based his opera,
in French, and the central figure was inspired by Gustave Moreau's
picture ‘L’Apparition’; but Wilde's reference to ‘refrains whose recur-
ring motifs make the poem like a piece of music and bind it together as a
ballad'? almost certainly betrays a superficial acquaintance with
Wagnerian theory. His description of the work to Sarah Bernhardt
as ‘quelque chose de curieux et de sensuel’? suggests that, like Debussy,
he was already interested in the so-called ‘theatre of cruelty’; and the
perverted eroticism of Salome, which gave the work a succés de scandale

1 See Mallarmé, ‘Richard Wagner, rêverie d'un poète français’, Revue wagnérienne, no. 7
(August, 1885) p. 195. For a study of the impact of Wagner's ideas on French literature see
Eliot Zuckerman, The first 100 years of Wagner's ‘Tristan’ (New York, 1964), pp. 83-122.

2 Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (London, 1905), 26th ed., p. 66.
3 Quoted in Norman Del Mar, Richard Strauss (London, 1962), i, р. 240.

PLATES

STRAUSS'S SALOME, 1905 (see p. 148)
The dance of the seven veils in the original Dresden production

CENTRAL EUROPE 149

clearly foreseen by the composer, provided a piquant sauce welcome to
jaded fin de siécle appetites. Although the crucial Dance of the Seven
Veils! 15 as weak and commonplace as the dance section in Strauss's
Also sprach Zarathustra, and Jochanaan's music has the flat, oleaginous
quality of much painting of the Nazarene School, Salome is a brilliant
tour de force unique in the history of opera. The characterization of
every member of the Idumaean court is needle-sharp and concise, and
Strauss applied all his phenomenal orchestral virtuosity and musical
inventiveness to set his characters in high relief against the general
background of sultry, acrid hysteria. Psychological motivation is
supplied by the ingenious cross-references which form the web of the
music, whose nervous plasticity follows every physical movement or
gesture by corresponding rhythmic and melodic shapes as skilfully
chosen as in the finest of the tone-poems. Ex. 65 (i) expresses Salome's
violence and perversity, (ii) Jochanaan's prophetic conviction:

. ees от
—— Á— оне

Бізге See SEE] Е М =
jm scan [main oa RETI —— — — ТУР
Өй ыш кч NT
акы 707 Е

In Elektra Strauss collaborated for the first time with the Austrian poet
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose libretto is deeply coloured by
Nietzsche's insistence on the part played in Greek tragedy by the dark
Dionysian world as a counterweight to the bright Apollonian air of
Goethe’s griechische Heiterkeit. The difference between Strauss’s
thematic vocabulary here and in Salome is immediately noticeable in the
simple and majestic phrase associated throughout the work with the
figure of Agamemnon, and providing the Grundgestalt for countless
psychologically significant derivations and variations (Ex. 66 (1) ). By the
side of this diatonic fanfare the theme associated with Klytemnestra has
the same penetrating and concentrated suggestion of perverse evil as is
to be found in Salome (Ex. 66 (ii) ):

X Ser iplis Но

150 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

There is a further parallel between the two operas in the figure of
Chrysothemis, Elektra's sister who stands, like Jochanaan in Salome,
outside the main preoccupations of the drama. But whereas Jochanaan's
austere and unbending ethical idealism prompted only second-hand
reminiscences in the composer, Strauss's natural sympathies were
stirred by the impassioned femininity and life-affirming instincts of
Chrysothemis, the broad lyrical sweep and diatonic strength of whose
music sets her in harsh contrast to the rest of the characters. It is
significant that in the scene with Orestes even the obsessed, half-crazed
Elektra catches some of this vital warmth:

J — 108 ELEKTRA

151

CENTRAL EUROPE

Au - gen mich sehn,

bild

_ mir ge-schenk-tes Traum

(O let me behold your eyes, vision that has been granted to me, lovelier than

any dream)

152 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

It is in such ecstatic, long-breathed passages as these, often forming
extended cadences on an enormous scale, that Strauss's debt to Wagner
is most clear; and he was to write them to the end of his life, always for
one, two, or even three soprano voices. Indeed a number of duets and a
trio of this kind formed some of the climactic moments in his next opera,
Der Rosenkavalier (1911).

The collaboration with Hofmannsthal had led Strauss into a world
of literary sophistication that he would hardly have entered otherwise,
and it is to Hofmannsthal’s brilliant recreation of late eighteenth-
century Viennese society that Der Rosenkavalier owed much of its
success. This work is in essence a comedy, but so richly complicated
by sentiment and spectacle that the comic element is largely overlaid.
The Marschallin's levée in Act I and the presentation of the Silver Rose
in Act II, on which the composer lavishes all his extraordinary gifts of
harmonic and orchestral invention for their own sake rather than for
specific dramatic effect, recall the great tableaux and divertissements of
Meyerbeer's operas; and it is only in Act III that the comic element,
represented by Baron Ochs, predominates unequivocally. In the
Marschallin's music Strauss made himself the mouthpiece of that
nostalgia that characterizes so much of the art of this period, in which
Mahler's Sehnsucht nach der Kindheit was only exceeded by Rakhmani-
nov's more radical and unqualified nostalgia—the Buddhistic ‘longing
for non-existence’ (toska nebitiya) of Alexander Blok’s poems. The
Marschallin’s nostalgia is ostensibly for her vanished youth, but her
desire ‘to put the clocks back in the night’ is in fact a symbol of that
deeper nostalgia for the past that had already played an important
part in Hofmannsthal’s early lyric poetry. As early as 1893 he wrote
in the Prologue to Artur Schnitzler’s Anatol:

Hohe Gótter, Taxushecken,

Wappen nimmermehr vergoldet,

Sphinxe, durch das Dickicht schimmernd,
Knarrend óffnen sich die Tore.

Mit verschlagenen Kaskaden

und verschlafenen Tritonen,

Rokoko verstaubt und lieblich,

бет... das Wien des Canaletto,

Wien von siebzehn hundert sechzig.

In his case this was not simply a longing for a vanished innocence and
simplicity, such as we find in Mahler's symphonies and Humperdinck's
operas, nor even an idealization of the past in the manner of Wagner's
Meistersinger. It was rather a delight in what he felt to be the richness,
variety, and vitality of an older society, including its inhumanity and

ITALY AND THE NEW REALISM 153

injustice. Baron Ochs represents that society's unregenerate face, the
selfishness and ruthlessness of feudalism; and although Ochs is defeated,
neither Hofmannsthal nor Strauss conceals his sympathy with the
defeated. Beneath its smiling surface Der Rosenkavalier is in fact a
‘reactionary’ work of art which owes much of its popularity to that
nostalgia for ‘the good old days’ that since 1900 has been a powerful, if
not always acknowledged, emotional force in the bourgeoisie of
Western Europe.

Again, as in Salome and Elektra, the fascination of Strauss’s score
lies in the skilful contrasting of the familiar and the novel, an abundant
diatonic melodiousness (the Marschallin’s soliloquy and the Italian
Singer’s aria in Act I, Sophie’s music and Ochs’s waltzes in Act II and
the trio and final duet in Act III) and the more complex, chromatic
style of the intervening passages in which these form points of rest,
exactly like the closed forms of the old opera, which are in fact here
resurrected. In Strauss’s next collaboration with Hofmannsthal,
Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), the disparate elements are presented with
more sophistication, first by the scheme of presenting a play (or plays)
within a play and then even more strikingly by giving a com-
media dell'arte improvisation and an opera seria simultaneously.
This device may perhaps be regarded as a type-figuring of the
schizophrenia which marked much of the art of these years immediately
before the First World War. Historically it is interesting that Strauss,
who started his career in the theatre as an enthusiastic Wagnerian,
should have returned in Der Rosenkavalier to the closed forms and
even, in the Italian Singer's aria, to the bel canto of nineteenth-century
Italian opera. In Ariadne auf Naxos his taste for the most mellifluous
possible combinations (three soprano voices and harps in a D flat
major trio) is even more marked ; and in Zerbinetta's aria he resurrected
coloratura as an expression of character. This had not been attempted
in Western Europe since Delibes's Lakmé (1883), with the possible
exception of Catalani's La Wally (1892), where La Wally's “Сапгоп del
Edelweiss’ adds a fantastic, unreal note to a character in other ways
fiercely realistic.

ITALY AND THE NEW REALISM

Although realism might appear to be of all aesthetic attitudes the one
least compatible with so highly artificial an art-form as opera, it was in
fact the influence of the French realist, or naturaliste, school of writers—
and above all Emile Zola, whose often brutal novels of contemporary
life began to appear in the seventies—that gave rise to the movement
which carried opera equally far from the historical or exotic world

154 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

popularized by Meyerbeer and his followers and the world of myth or
legend which Wagner chose for his music dramas. Just as Zola himself
had found inspiration for his new approach to the novel in Gustave
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), во opera-composers of the next
generation found for the first time since Verdi's La Traviata (1853)
something like a window on contemporary life іп Bizet's Carmen
(1875).* The extraordinary aristocratic finesse of Bizet's music and his
instinctive distancing, or stylizing, of the popular, *vulgar', element to
a great extent masked the real originality of Carmen. Unfortunately very
few of the composers who were tempted to follow his example possessed
either his purely musical gifts or that instinct, which can only be called
classical, for the effortless conversion of raw vulgarities into the material
for a serious work of art.

Although in France there are realistic elements in Delibes's ГаКкте,
and a collaboration between Zola himself and Alfred Bruneau (1857-
1934)? began in 1891, it was in Italy that realism in opera first developed
as a distinct movement, under the name of verismo. The Sicilian
village-drama of Cavalleria rusticana (1890) is innocent of any attempt
at distancing, and the composer Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945), was
content with the same naive criteria of simple, sensuous, and passionate
melody that would have been applied in real life by the characters of
Giovanni Verga's story. Cavalleria rusticana may be regarded as an
instinctive, unconscious Italian protest against the ‘mandarin’ music-
drama, the infiltration of even the Italian operatic world by Wagnerian
theories. Pagliacci (1892) is only slightly more sophisticated musically,
and the sentimentality of popular melodrama is equally dominant in
both works. The composer, Ruggiero Leoncavallo (1858-1919), had in
fact personal experience of the life of a touring company, though on a
different level from that shown in Pagliacci and nearer to the compara-
tively polite demi-monde which he used as the background for his
Хага (1900). In Mascagni's Iris (1898), realism is tempered not only
by the exotic Japanese setting but by a strong note of poetic fantasy
introduced by the librettist, Giovanni Illica. In the opening scene, for
instance, a hidden chorus makes itself the mouthpiece of the rising sun
with the words ‘Son Io! son Io la Vita! son la Beltà, la Luce e il
Calor", and this reappears at the end of the work, when the heroine
has jumped from a window into what proves to be the town's main
drain, where she encounters the rag-pickers, symbols of social rejection
whom we are to meet again in the masterpiece of French realistic opera,
Louise (1900) by Gustave Charpentier (1860—1956). There is an interest-
ing example of what was to become a common feature in art nouveau

1 See Vol. IX. ? See below, p. 164.

ITALY AND THE NEW REALISM 155

music, not only opera: Ше wordless chorus singing bocca chiusa. Тһе
geisha chorus opens Act II of /ris thus:

Ex. 68

Lentamento Р
a bocca chiusa, accompagnandosi al suono di samisen e tam-tam delle altre guechas

This interlarding of an often crudely realistic modern story with
decorative, and fundamentally inorganic, symbolism became increas-
ingly common and represents a bridge between veristic and mytho-
logical or fairytale opera.

Leoncavallo's La Bohéme (1897), based on Henri Murger's Vie de
Bohéme, contained none of these unrealistic elements, but was unable
to support the inevitable comparison with an opera with the same title
produced a few months earlier by the composer who was to prove the
only undoubted master among the Italian veristi, Giacomo Puccini
(1858-1924). Puccini turned for his librettos to a very different class of
French writer, and no vitalistic symbolism such as we find in Zola was
to be found in Prévost, Murger, or Sardou. Apart from Verdi, the
productions of whose last years towered above all other Italian music
of the day, the strongest influence in Puccini’s musical formation was
Jules Massenet (1842-1912), whose Manon (1884) prompted Puccini’s
first mature work, Manon Lescaut (1893). To his librettist, Emilio
Praga, he observed very truly that ‘Massenet may feel his subject with
the powder and the minuets. I shall feel it with a despairing passion’?
and this passione disperata is the keynote of Puccini’s music, a lyrical
outpouring that puts into the shade the eighteenth-century French
graces which had formed an important attraction in the older man’s
work. In two of the three operas which followed—La Bohéme (1896),
Tosca (1900),3 and Madama Butterfly (1904)—Puccini turned again to

1 Similar choruses are to be found in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Rakhmaninov’s
Francesca da Rimini, in the Sirénes in the third of Debussy’s Nocturnes, and in Delius
passim,

2 Quoted in Mosco Carner, Puccini (London, 1958), p. 57. 3 See pl. II.

156 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

French sources; but in each case his librettists, Giacomo Giacosa and |
Luigi Шіса, faithfully presented him with versions of Murger and |
Sardou that allowed full scope for the despair as well as the passion in
the composer's personality. If this despairing quality in Puccini's
lyricism had its immediate origin in his own personal psychology, it
also corresponded to a more general mood in the public, a vague
emotional unrest and presentiment of future disaster that found
poignant expression in the almost funereal melodies, which have often
escaped notice among Puccini’s innumerable expressions of erotic
passion. In Act II, scene 5, of Tosca the Andante sostenuto, with
muted violins playing on the G string, could be the funeral march not
simply of Scarpia but of a whole civilization, like the slow movement of
Elgar's Second Symphony written ten years later.

Ex. 69
Andante sostenuto
Vn.1 & Vla.

O НЕ
у а [pee

Бу Астыма еті [s [ee [n comm mn Fun ee
a aa ЕЕ ЕЕ ЕЕ НЕ

PLATE H

7 m

PUCCINI'S TOSCA, 1900 (see p. 156)

A poster advertising the first performance

ITALY AND THE NEW REALISM 157

The frailty of Puccini's heroines and the fated character of their loves
had a sentimental and sensual appeal for his listeners similar to that
which Verdi's La Traviata had enjoyed half a century earlier. Only this
appeal was now greatly enhanced by the obscure, and often unacknow-
ledged, sense of moral and social insecurity, of enjoying the last un-
certain splendours of an age of European civilization that was
unmistakeably coming to an end. In this sense Puccini's relationship
to Verdi is exactly paralleled by Strauss’s relationship to Wagner.
In each case we can observe the characteristic marks of a decadence—
the replacing of strength by violence, the exclusive concern with the
subjective interests of the individual and the constant demand for
emotional extremes, reflected in dynamic and other markings of
expression formerly reserved for climactic moments.

The elements of melodrama and sadism in Puccini's works are not
without parallel in nineteenth-century opera, including Wagner;
but they had never been so nakedly exposed, even exploited. The
description of Mimi's physical and emotional distress in Act III of
La Bohéme has a gloating quality, to which Puccini added a macabre
note of banality by using a thinly disguised version of the fashionable
‘hesitation’ waltz (Ex. 70).

The lengthy and detailed exploitation of Cavaradossi’s torturing in
Act II of Tosca, and its close linking with Scarpia’s physical desire for

Ex. 70

Sostenuto molto
PPP
Fi.
Gh
Vin. +
Via.
div.

158 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

ч/
San-gue son ros - se

(A terrible cough racks her thin chest, already her hollow cheeks have a hectic
flush)

Tosca, is in its less glaring way quite as perverted as the child-princess's
erotic apostrophizing of Jochanaan's severed head in Salome. For
Madama Butterfly and La Fanciulla del West (1910) Puccini turned
to the novelette; but his handling of the orchestra, at its most delicate
and transparent in La Bohéme, grew increasingly adventurous, while

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF VERISMO 159

his harmonic language was increasingly enriched by the absorption
of the last of many French influences—the elements of Debussy's
style to be found in whole-tone chords, sequences of block harmonies
and atmospheric chains of fifths. The last and most powerful of his
purely veristic operas, И Tabarro, appeared іп 1918 in the Trittico,
with the convent opera Suor Angelica (women's voices only) and
Gianni Schicchi, a Dante-based comedy the vicious bitterness of whose
humour has not always been observed. In Turandot, which he left
unfinished at his death in 1924, Puccini returned to a type of Italian
grand opera which he had done more than any other single composer to
supersede. The exotic magnificence of the spectacle is often matched
by the music, especially in the central scene of the three riddles; and in
Liü Puccini created the last of his fragile, fated heroines pitted against
hopelessly unequal odds, here represented by the pathologically cold
and revengeful Turandot, a sketch for whose portrait had already
appeared in the Zia Principessa of Suor Angelica.

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF VERISMO

Opera became an increasingly popular art during the nineteenth
century in Italy, where Verdi's personal devotion to the cause of Italian
liberation and unity even lent it on occasion a political colouring. Only a
very small group of Italian musicians and intellectuals, of whom the
most distinguished was Arrigo Boito, interested themselves in Wagner's
music and theories. The chief foreign influences were Meyerbeer and
Massenet, both of whom contributed to that progressive popularization
of musical style and manner of presentation which followed naturally
on the musical enfranchisement of a wider section of the public. In the
operas which Verdi wrote for Paris, and later in Ама, the element of
orchestral and scenic display, the ambitious use of the chorus in
large quasi-symphonic tableaux, and a new dramatic style of vocal
virtuosity reveal Meyerbeer's influence. Following Gounod, and in
conscious reaction against Meyerbeer, Massenet developed a new,
intimate type of opera in which scenic display is less important and the
chief emphasis is on erotically poignant melody, short-breathed and
presented with the greatest possible emotional impact. The touch of
realism lent by comparative informality was considerably increased by
the Italian veristi, whose melodies often show the unmistakably
melodramatic character of Italian popular speech. Irregular phrase-
lengths and frequent variations of metre are interspersed with dramatic
pauses. Triplet figures lend an added urgency and, combined with
stylized sobs, produce an almost physical effect on the unsophisticated
listener, as in Tosca, Act III:

160 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

sostenuto e cresc. con slancio rit. (bursts into tears)
тз Л

ПРА В О О. -
ең iS ее 2. M оч |
)—H p m i ey созо шп.

AUR 54 ый IS НЫШ iam [ecu col

vi-ta, Тап-іо la vi-ta!

(The hour is past and I am dying in despair! And never have I loved life so much)

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF VERISMO 161

Like Diderot and Greuze in the 1750s, the veristi chose convention-
ally heart-rending subjects, cultivating in their operas a similar
larmoyant emotionalism aimed at the unsophisticated. It was not only
erotic scenes that were presented in this perfervid way. In Act I of
Andrea Chénier (1896) by Umberto Giordano (1867-1948), the hero
Gérard indignantly commiserates with his old father who has worked
for sixty years in serf-like conditions for arrogant aristocratic masters.
The free declamation follows the more formal melody in the orchestra:

162 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

ETE Eo кыр ==
Ја for- za dei tuo ner - vi
cu 1_

Е At "8 ЕЕ ЕЕ ==

- -Ф-
ЗЕЕ ЕР е ЕЕ ==

(You have been a servant for sixty years, old man! and have given freely to your
impudent, arrogant masters your loyalty, the sweat of your brow, and the strength
of your muscles)

The doubling of the melodic line in the orchestra, the pauses, the
appoggiature or stylized sobs and the final unison are well calculated to
give the scene an intensity that will stir even the dullest listener. Har-
monic effects were often calculated in the same way to stun the listener,
as in the opening chords of Тозса; while at the opposite extreme ап
almost conversational lyrical style often takes on a caressing, childlike
character, as in Mascagni's Iris (Act II), (Ex. 73).

If block sequences proved the simplest and most effective weapon
in the emotional arsenal of the veristi, Puccini in particular makes use
of altered chords of all kinds in order to extract the last refinements of
poignancy from a motif often simple in itself, as in Act IV of La Войёте:

Ex. 73 і
Larghetto mosso - con molta semplicità
IRIS

Vo-glio il giar-di-no ші - o! iovoglioil mio giar-di - по,

THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF VERISMO 163

delicato poco rit.

a tempo

(I want my garden with its surrounding hedge, and my white cottage)

where the dying Mimi is represented by a mortally sick version of her
original motif:
Ex. 74

Molto meno

molto espress.
f) C.A. & Vlas

As early as 1892 Alfredo Catalani (1854-93) had used in La Wally
more sophisticated and Wagnerian sequences in order to heighten
the tension:

Ex. 75

co- me s'a.dora in ciel, Ра- do - re. - те - i!
stento col canto

ГИР, с 5 е
ot РГ a Ра

(As adoration is known in heaven, so would I adore you)

164 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

But verismo in Italy was only rarely to follow this path, which was
subsequently adopted by veristic composers in Germany and Austria.

As we have seen, French subjects were particularly favoured by the
Italian veristi, and Prévost, Murger, and Sardou had furnished material
for three of Puccini's most successful operas. He was to turn to France
again for the first of the three operas in his Trittico (1918), and Л
Tabarro may be counted as the last masterpiece of the movement which
had spent its vital force by 1910. It was not only Puccini who had fallen
under Massenet's spell. The whole Act III of Leoncavallo's Хага
(1900), which takes place in a Paris drawing-room, is redolent of
Massenet, and Milio's elegiac reflections clearly echo des Grieux's
dream in Act II of Manon.

FRANCE AND THE REACTION AGAINST REALISM

Meanwhile Massenet himself repaid the compliment implicit in such
imitations when he wrote La Navarraise (1894), which might appear to
be a parody of an Italian veristic opera in its violence and brutality.
Far more characteristic of Massenet's real musical character, and a
work of delicate charm and sensibility, was his Werther (1892), in which
domestic and genre scenes are skilfully used to diversify the unhappy
love-story in a manner quite foreign to the more simple-minded Italian
veristi. Sophie's Че gai soleil’, in particular, which distinguishes her
from her sister Charlotte in exactly the same way as Strauss was to
distinguish Chrysothemis from Elektra, is one of the last and finest
examples of a characterization which goes back to the old opéra comique.
(Soeur Constance in Poulenc’s Dialogues les Carmélites (1957) is
perhaps the latest avatar of this traditionally French type of character.)
Thais (1894) is yet another working of the popular theme of the prosti-
tute redeemed by love, and the ballet, in which a ballroom waltz is
danced by La Perdition, even harks back to Meyerbeer's Robert le
Diable. More in harmony with the new tastes that Massenet himself had
done much to create was Sapho (1897), based on a story of contem-
porary life by Alphonse Daudet, while in Grisélidis (1901) and Le
Jongleur de Notre Dame (1902) Massenet moved into the field of
medieval legend without abandoning his own personal lyrical style.

If operatic realism was really foreign to Massenet, it was the whole
inspiration of Alfred Bruneau (1857-1934), who chose Zola's stories
for five operas written between 1891 and 1905. In Г’ Attaque du moulin,
which is the most strictly realistic in character, Bruneau used one of
the Soirées de Médan dealing with an incident in the Franco-Prussian
war. Messidor (1897) and L’Ouragan (1901), on the other hand, contain

FRANCE AND THE REACTION AGAINST REALISM 165

strong veins of symbolism. In Messidor the contrast between the evil
power of Gold and the beneficent Water dominates, while in L’Ouragan
weather and scenery are used to symbolize the passions of the characters.
Bruneau's music, though unmistakably French and considerably in-
indebted to Massenet, also shows Wagnerian influence in the orchestra-
tion. The third act of Messidor is an interesting example of the
apparently incompatible elements that Bruneau combined in his operas.
The first scene is entitled ‘Га Légende d'Or' and is a full-length ballet,
full of symbolical figures including the Madonna and Child, set in a
vast cathedral-like cave. On the other hand the second scene shows a
newly installed machine for washing the gold brought down from the
mountains by the river. As the curtain rises, the large wheel of the
machine is shown in motion. Bruneau plainly turned to Wagner in his
music for the opening of the scene, and the epic of man's mastering
natural forces by mechanical power suggested to him a parallel with the
primitive forces of the Valkyries:

Ex. 76
Animé modérément

Dm 5 р куша
------за зенита про pelis —— parili
га 1] Шелли eo a aS as Be ea q ПЕЕ y EE
aoe 22 FLAG VI —— eet Pg
ie a E і Бе

wep — —g- Pei poe de m — rd
iS ——4 па uem ЕН ни.
DPI Fou

De-
= SSS aa ae ини ЕЕ
OF ӘН ТІР (ішсе! ee шетен | Беттен ee а UB ШЕ ТЕ 27 Жа шана на
шаһ ——M—À ——À А 543-2 оГ A ПИВО клен T aae
WD Бар -————— [LE um asuma

166 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

It is characteristic of French opera in general, and of Bruneau in
particular, that the final scene of Messidor shows a return to the
conventions of Latin rustic life. After the villain, Mathias, has admitted
the murder of Véronique's husband and committed suicide by jumping
from a rock, the smiling crops that have sprung up under the beneficent
influence of the Water are solemnly blessed, in the traditional Latin
liturgical formulae, by the village priest. This suggests a link with Gou-
nod rather than with Massenet,

The same is true of the most remarkable of all French realistic
operas, Charpentier's Louise (1900). Here the banal story of a Parisian
working-girl's love-affair and her escape from parental authority is
set against a romantic vision of the street and factory-life of Paris,
envisaged as the Ville-Lumiére and itself a product of that art nouveau
that was subtly modifying the attitude of French artists to their
materials. Charpentier's musical invention is undistinguished and his
melodic ideas have a facile sentimental appeal (and even a preference
for triplet-phrases, as in Louise's ‘Depuis le jour’) similar to that of the
lesser Italian veristi. The very naiveté and plasticity of his style, however,
the absence of all academic stiffness and the suggestion of mysterious
vital forces present beneath the commonplace surface of everyday life
were novel.

These features were to find expression of a very different kind in the
Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) of Claude Debussy (1862-1918), where the
reaction against realism appears at its most marked. Debussy had
already shown in his cantata La Damoiselle élue (1888) his sympathy
with the ideals of the English Pre-Raphaelites, which were at the root of
art nouveau\—the freely flowing, plant-like arabesque, the sinuous and
mysterious femininity whose misleadingly ‘chaste’ contours and anae-
mic complexion barely conceal a sophisticated sensuality, and the hushed
palette and matt surfaces that give an equally misleading impression of
monastic tranquillity. In Maeterlinck’s poem Debussy found a perfect
literary expression of these features, and in addition a scale of moral
values dominated by compassion in the face of human suffering and
the acknowledgement of the mystery of human existence, a rejection
of the too easy optimism of scientific materialism and of Nietzsche’s
philosophy of power. In retreat from, yet still deeply marked by his
early Wagnerian fervours, Debussy had come upon a score of Mus-
sorgsky’s Boris Godunov which had suggested to him rhythms, phrase-
shapes, and harmonies useful in his search for a new dramatic
language and a new musical prosody for the French language. A
systematic use of the whole-tone scale and its resulting harmonies

1 See below р. 183.

FRANCE AND THE REACTION AGAINST REALISM 167

hitherto used only in isolated passages for dramatic or decorative
purposes by Liszt and his Russian followers, enabled Debussy to avoid
the emphatic statements and rhetorical cadences conventionally
associated with the opera. The echo of ecclesiastical modes heard in the
very opening bars seems to set the action of Pelléas outside chrono-
logical time and topographical space; and it is followed immediately
by the pliable, floating motif that suggests the passive movement of
weed in a gently flowing stream—an image of human powerlessness
against the flow of events.

Ex. 77

Trés modéré Ob., С.А. б

22
[ugue — — mu]
[ee =.

Debussy's views on dramaturgy and the part to be played in the drama
by the orchestra are reflected in a conversation, reported by Jean
Cocteau, where Debussy quoted with approval the advice of Erik Satie.
‘There is no need for the orchestra to grimace when a character comes
on to the stage. Do the trees in the scenery grimace? What we have to
do is to create a musical scenery, a musical atmosphere in which the
characters of the drama move and talk.”+

In spite of many echoes of Wagner (particularly Parsifal) in Debussy's
harmony, and frequent almost verbatim quotations of Mussorgsky's
Boris Godunov (mostly Pimen's music)? Debussy's score is wholly
original in conception and texture. The handling of the unaccented

1 Quoted in Rollo Myers, Erik Satie (London, 1948), p. 32.

? For Parsifal see e.g. the Lent section in the orchestral interlude between Act IT, scenes 1
and 2. For Boris Godunov see Act II, scene 2, the orchestral introduction to Act IV, and
Act III, scene 2. Debussy's two-bar structures are also of Russian origin.

168 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

French language, to which the emphatic accentuation proper to both
German and Italian is completely alien, is faithful throughout to the
muted understatements and elusiveness of Maeterlinck's text. The
breathless simplicity of the lovers' declaration is characteristic and
unique in operatic literature. Having set the scene, the orchestra is
suddenly silent:

Ex. 78 32-1
P EE ms
Ob. eux ш ла ве та м
CA Hi e Ef go eR. |
(ОЁ ”_ m Ў П ——
ате с сш]
PELLEAS
Е Гар SS, SS в т =
р г р р Г 7 лас ee «РЕ
: Ти ne sais pas pour-quoi il faut que je т -

Strings

- loi -gne.. Tu пе sais pas que c'est par-ce que

FRANCE AND THE REACTION AGAINST REALISM 169

MÉLISANDE PELLÉAS

PELLEAS

ES
КА a EE. ar И" er ee ааа Ж A |}
m ре в НЯ SE Sa S Бел / аты (И ee
Е == паа) гр o

e Рф
Е — 1 14-і

Те t'ai-me. Je t'aimeaus - si. Oh! qu'as tu dit, Mé-lis- an-de!
[Orchestra tacet]

je ne l'ai presque pas en-ten-du!___.
(P: You don't know why I have to go away . . . you don't know that it is
because . . . I love you. M: I love you too. P: Oh! what did you say, Mélisande?
I could hardly hear!)

Although pastel colours and the pliable arabesques of art nouveau play a
large part in the score, Golaud's explosions of anger are anything but
muted and the scene (Act ІП, scene 4) in which he sets the child Yniold
to spy on the lovers is in its way as terrible a depiction of ungovernable
jealousy as anything in Verdi's Otello, and represents a heightened form
of realism beside which the naivetés of Italian verismo seem pale indeed.

With Pelléas opera moved for the first time unequivocally outside the
conventions of the nineteenth-century opera-house. Debussy's new
conception of opera clearly influenced Paul Dukas (1865-1935) in
another setting of a Maeterlinck play, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1907), in
which choral, descriptive, and even purely decorative scenes represent
links with the past. Themes are treated symphonically and cyclically,
and thematic material shaped into a grandiose coda. These musical
procedures are largely hidden from the ordinary listener by Dukas's
orchestration, which often has the amplitude and much of the brilliance
of Strauss's. A less accomplished example of the style is to be found in
Macbeth (1910), the single opera written by Ernest Bloch (1880-1959)
where Lady Macbeth in the sleep-walking scene improbably echoes
Mélisande (Ex. 79).

During the same years as the realistic operas of Bruneau and Char-
pentier and the innovatory Pelléas there appeared the last monuments
of the Wagnerian enthusiasm which had made so deep a mark on
French music in the eighties. Something has already been said of
Vincent d'Indy's Parsifal-like Fervaal (1897) and Ernest Chausson's
posthumously performed Le Roi Arthus (1903), which witnesses to that
obsession with Tristan traceable as far back as Duparc's earlier songs
(‘Soupir’, 1868). In the same year as Le Roi Arthus, Vincent d'Indy
produced L’Ftranger. This is a very free reworking by the composer of
the Flying Dutchman story. The mysterious Stranger, whose success as a
fisherman and evangelical behaviour cause havoc in a small French

170 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

LADY MACBETH en retenant

un soldat! avoir peur!

(Fie, my lord, fie! A soldier and afraid!)

fishing-village, seeks redemption from an unspecified guilt in the love of
the symbolically-named Vita. She already has a pretender to her hand,
a dashing excise-man very unlike Wagner’s Erik. Torn between her
feelings for the two men Vita, like Senta, sacrifices her life when she
shares the Stranger's attempt to rescue a ship in distress. D'Indy makes
effective use of folk-song choruses, and a traditional opéra comique
style of characterization for Vita’s mother; but the music of the Stranger
and his scenes with Vita have a Wagnerian harmonic density and
flavour. In bar 4 of the following passage from Act II the Franck
fingerprint is unmistakable:

Ex. 80

Spe = чыш;
НЕ с ІЗ ee s

RN SETS
и aec — a

FRANCE AND THE REACTION AGAINST REALISM 171

(Forgive me the rash words that escaped me yesterday. Forgive me, tell me that
you forgive me and that I can go away absolved)

It is interesting to find Debussy, in his article for СИ Blas on the first
performance of L'Étranger (Brussels, Theátre de la Monnaie) observing
that ‘this work is an admirable lesson for those who believe in the crude
imported style which consists in crushing music under cartloads of
realism."

André Messager (1853-1929), whom Debussy had chosen to conduct
the first performance of Pelléas, showed an excellent craftsmanship
and a delightful lyrical gift in a series of operettas which included
Madame Chrysanthéme (1893), Les p'tites Michu (1897), and Véronique
(1898). The only other country in which light opera was treated with
comparable skill was Austria, where Franz Léhar (1870-1948) produced
in Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) (1905) a work which has
outlived all but a few of the serious post-Wagnerian or veristic operas
of the day. Certainly the final numbers of Massenet's long portrait-
gallery of women, which ended only with his death in 1912, contained

1 Reprinted in Monsieur Croche the Dilettante- Hater (English ed., London, 1927).

172 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

nothing more distinguished than the.slight Thérèse (1907); and the
advent of Sergey Dyagilev's Ballet russe to Paris in 1909 had the effect
of distracting the attention of the most gifted composers away from the
lyrical drama. Apart from the musically interesting but dramatically
weak Pénélope (1912) by Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) the only opera of
distinction produced in France between 1908 and 1918 was L'Heure
espagnole (1911) by Maurice Ravel (1875-1934). Іп this, a deliberately
frivolous subject, which might seem to belong to the operetta rather
than to the opera, is handled with a care and skill that at first seem
disproportionate. Ravel, however, was seeking for a solution of the
problem facing all French composers of the day: that of avoiding the
shadows of both Wagner and Debussy and presenting the public with a
work that made full allowance for the well-developed French sense of
the ridiculous yet still allowed a place for fine musical craftsmanship.

Ravel's characters are no more than exquisitely fashioned puppets,
but they express their conventional sentiments in a perfectly calculated
and highly polished language, in which Spanish rhythms and melodic
phrases are presented with French gracefulness and a strong sense of
parody. The plot has the symmetry of a mouvement de ballet, and Ravel
and his librettist Franc-Nohain emphasize this fragile artificiality in the
final quintet which, like the vaudeville in the old opéra comique, points
the moral. Here Ravel harks back to the clowning of Offenbach's
Belle Hélène, with his take-off of vocal fioriture.

Ex. 81 Presse beaucoup rubato

CONCEPCION

GONZALVE 5 4— ha Po Fi
'TORQUEMADA
RAMIRO
INIG o: fg mmm

Orchestra

173

FRANCE AND THE REACTION AGAINST REALISM

se СШ | В
Ae a МИ

(Ah! The muleteer has his turn!)

174 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

Ravel did not write another opera until 1925, when he collaborated
with Colette in a fantaisie lyrique, L'Enfant et les sortiléges, which is as
much ballet as opera. Here the divertissements provided by animals and
inanimate objects far outweigh the slender central theme in importance.
This was in effect a return to the ideals of the French eighteenth century,
which had already prompted the most important of the works which
Ravel wrote for the Ballets russes. Before examining these ballets it will
be as well to trace the history of opera in Russia itself during the last
years before it was largely replaced by ballet.

RUSSIA AND THE SLAVONIC PERIPHERY

The year 1890 witnessed the production in St. Petersburg of two dif-
ferent flawed masterpieces, Tchaikovsky's Pikovaya Dama (The Queen of
Spades) and Borodin's posthumous Knyaz Igor (Prince Igor).1 Tchaikov-
sky was to write only one more opera before his death in 1893, the
comparatively feeble fairytale Jolanta (1892), and it was fairytale operas
that were to predominate among the dozen operas that Nikolay
Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) was to write during the last fifteen
years of his life. Already in his Snegurochka (Snowmaiden) (1882)
there had been a marked accentuation of the fantastic and spectacular
elements at the expense of character-delineation and human interest in
general; and this emphasis, all but complete in Mlada (1892), was very
marked in Noch pered Rozhdestvom (Christmas Eve) (1895) and the
brilliant Sadko (1898). The decorative scenes and divertissements
showing the bustling commercial life of Novgorod and the submarine
kingdom to which Sadko is carried off by the Sea King’s daughter
quite outweigh the rest of the work in musical interest. Rimsky-
Korsakov’s preoccupation with fantasy and spectacle, and the banality
of the love-music in his operas, no doubt reflect a certain lack of
humanity in his character; but this is counterbalanced by the skill and
inventiveness displayed in his cold and glittering instrumental combina-
tions, as in the scene in Sadko where the fish are turned into ingots of
gold.

In Mozart i Salieri, which was produced in the same year as Sadko
(1898), Rimsky-Korsakov imitated Dargomizhsky! in setting a complete
Pushkin text, but used a pastiche ‘classical’ style in every way different
from his own and Dargomizhsky’s. Human interest is strong in Tsar-
skaya Nevesta (The Tsar’s Bride) (1899) and Servilia (1902) but these
are feeble works compared with the four fairy-stories or legends
Skazka o Tsare Saltane (The Tale of Tsar Saltan) (1900) Kashchey

1 бее Vol. IX.

RUSSIA AND THE SLAVONIC PERIPHERY 175

Bessmertny (Immortal Kashchey) (1902), Skazanie o nevidimom grade
Kitezhe i deve Fevronii (The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and
the Maiden Fevronia) (1907) and Zolotoy Petushok (The Golden
Cockerel) (1909).

The first two of these are fantasies, fairy-stories from the Russian
past that provide the composer with scenes in which he can simply
exploit to the full his colouristic imagination. In Kitezh and The Golden
Cockerel, on the other hand, the fairy-story is used as a parable for the
times, the deeply troubled years of the Russo-Japanese War and the
1905 revolution. Kitezh reflects the ferment in Russian religious апа
philosophical thought during these years, when Vladimir Solovyev
was developing the final stages of his new ideas of Christian mysticism
and Leo Tolstoy a new version of evangelical simplicity, while theo-
sophical and anthroposophical speculations were under the influence of
Rudolf Steiner. Although Rimsky-Korsakov himself was a typical
nineteenth-century rationalist, he felt the aesthetic attraction of the
legend, medieval and originally Platonic, of a Holy City conceived in
terms of Orthodox liturgy and symbolism. His librettist, V. I. Belsky,
based his text on a thirteenth-century legend and his language is
deliberately archaic, influenced by that of Wagner’s librettos. The
composer drew not only on the traditional songs and chants which had
provided much of the material of his earlier operas, but on Wagnerian
models. For instance, the opening scene, which shows the maiden
Fevronia alone in the depth of the forest in summer, recalls the Forest
Murmurs of Wagner’s Siegfried; and in Act IV there are clear
reminiscences of the Flower Maidens in Parsifal. The figure of Grishka
Kuterma, who betrays the city of Kitezh to the Tatars and is never-
theless forgiven and redeemed by Fevronia, is a cross between the
holy simpleton of Russian tradition and the tortured psychological
criminals of Dostoevsky. Throughout the opera the conflation of
Orthodox ideals and imagery with the pantheistic nature-worship of
the pre-Christian Slavs is reflected in the music, which alternates
between a stiff, archaic and fundamentally modal idiom and Wagnerian
colour and flexibility. There are passages in Kitezh where Rimsky-
Korsakov denies himself his customary luxury of orchestration and
adopts, in the interests of the drama, a much more austere manner that
recalls Mussorgsky. In Act III, scene 2, where Grishka Kuterma’s guilt
is beginning to send him out of his mind, the insistent expanding
figure representing the bells of Kitezh ringing in his head is heard
echoing in the lowest reaches of the orchestra, a psychological trans-
formation that is very telling.

176 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

Ц [ | Ц

ПА я P 4 P m. а

НАЕ кеш кашкасы E СЫС о
е л. савана ава реа

Strings and muted Horns

(No escape from hellish torments—no life for me on God's fair earth! I shall cast
myself headlong into the depths)

Pushkin’s The Golden Cockerel? is a fable which shows a stupid, ease-
loving king deaf to warnings of imminent disaster and unwilling to
keep his promises, engaged with a mysterious Eastern enemy with
whose queen he falls in love. The parallel with the political situation in
Russia at the time of the war with Japan was close enough for the
censor to raise obstacles to the performance of the work; but this last
of Rimsky-Korsakov's fourteen operas is the finest example of his
powers both as dramatist and orchestrator. The clever musical con-
trasting of the solid King Dodon and his court with the mysterious trio
of the Astrologer, the Golden Cockerel, and the Queen of Shemakha
shows clearly his unusual ability to create atmosphere rather, tha
human character by musical means. His use of coloratura, as in the
shimmering roulades of the Queen of Shemakha, anticipates the
Zerbinetta of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos.

1 See pl. Ш.

PLATE IH

шая 71 Ха pousisap uononpoud [eursrio 34} jo IYL 12у JO 198 28015 әчү

(941 “4 225) 6061 “ТЯЧЯЯООЭ NHUG'IOD FHL 8,.ЛОМУБНОЯ-А ЯБИТА

LIE,

BOHEMIA 177

The Golden Cockerei was later performed in a ballet version by
Dyagilev's Ballet russe, and in Rimsky-Korsakov's earlier. Kashchey
the Immortal (1902) the element of ballet was already strong. Every-
thing in this ‘autumn fairy-story', which is in fact another winter-spring
myth like the earlier Snegurochka, is magic. The Stormwind suggests a
dancer rather than a singer, and the Princess Kashcheevna is character-
ized as much by the orchestra and by her movements as by her actual
singing. It was, in fact, with a ballet based on another version of the
same story that Rimsky-Korsakov's most gifted pupil, Igor Stravinsky
(1882-1971), was to make his name.

The principles of realism, which had found an early expression in
parts of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov and in Serov's The Power of Evil
during the 1870s, hardly interested Russian composers of the nineties.
Sergey Rakhmaninov (1873-1943) was influenced by Mascagni's
example in his A/eko (1893); but he showed his real dramatic powers
much later in the more ambitious setting of Pushkin's Skupoy Ritsar
(The Miserly Knight), and an awareness of contemporary fashion in
the bouche fermée choruses of the more feeble Francesca da Rimini,
both of which appeared in 1906.

BOHEMIA

Russian music and literature played an increasingly important role
in the artistic developments of Bohemia as dissatisfaction with Austrian
rule and the centralizing policy of Vienna grew more acute. Dvorak
had chosen a Russian subject for his Dimitrij as early as 1881, but the
influence of Wagner is paramount in the most important of his later
operas, Cert a Káca (The Devil and Kate, 1899) and Rusalka (1901),
a fairy-story which had inspired Dargomizhsky. Wagner and Smetana
largely determine the style and character of Sárka (1897) one of the
handful of stage-works by Zdenék Fibich (1850-1900), which include an
historically interesting trilogy in which the composer attempted to
revive the melodrama. An earlier Bohemian composer, ЛЇЇ Benda
(1722-95), had experimented with some success in setting a spoken text
against orchestral accompaniment and comment;! but Fibich's musical
language, in which the already old-fashioned language of Schumann
is only superficially modernized by a Wagnerian leitmotive technique,
was not strong enough to bear the weight of the drama in his trilogy of
heroic Greek legends based on the character of Hippodamia—Námluvy
Pelopovy (Pelops’ Wooing) (1889), Smir Tantaláv (Tantalus's Atone-
ment (1890) and Smrt Hippodamie (Hippodamia's Death) (1891). The
following excerpt from Námluvy Pelopovy, Act IV, scene 2, is typical:

! See Vol. VII, pp. 76-9.

1890-1918

STAGE WORKS:

178

Ex. 83

Chci přímou cestou

PEL. Neb to
nemusíš.! byl Myrtillos!

ít

Hippopamia Daleko j

hledám si!

toho dosáhnout, já vy -

ku jeho

zámyslem. PEL. Kdo ru

we =...

узаК nikdy

Ніррор. Svou rukou jen,

------

kdo tebe

æ æ a ne wee

vedl zlotřilou?
Quasi Adagio

BOHEMIA 179

|] 1
kdo у očích v tvoje patřé à -!v srdci zápalil se blahosti, kdo nemoh’ jinak, néz té!
smévem a milovat.!

CES Д

!
| p€—M——— a
! pe———MÓÓ—— 1

(Pelops: Y mean to plumb the depths of this hideous treachery, leave nothing
unexplored until I find the traitor. Hippod: You will not have far to seek. P: Then
it is Myrtillos! H: Only his hand, not his the design. P: Then who guided that
infamous hand? H: One, Pelops, who loved you from the moment you crossed our
threshold, with a love more burning than the sun in the heavens. One who looked
smiling into your eyes, one whose heart blazed in ecstasy and could not but
love you.)

The only opera of outstanding quality and originality to appear in
Bohemia (or rather Moravia) at this time passed unnoticed by the
outside world, and had to wait twelve years for its first performance in
Prague. This was Лей pastorkyňa (Her Step-daughter) (1904) by Leos
Janáček (1854-1928). The story by Gabriela Preissová is one of peasant
life, involving primitive passions as violent, in a setting as realistic, as
those of Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana. In fact this opera, which made
its reputation in the outside world under the title of Jenufa, may be
considered as the supreme masterpiece of verismo although the com-
poser insisted on 'naturism', rather than naturalism, as his guiding
principle. In this, as in his use of a prose libretto, he followed the
example of Alfred Bruneau.

Janácek's musical style is naturalistic in the sense that his vocal line
was modelled on the rhythms of Moravian peasant speech, just as
Mussorgsky had shaped his phrases and rhythms on those of the
Russian language. Unrealistic elements, however, appear in the many
repetitions of words or single phrases, sometimes emphasizing a single

180 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

idea but often modifying it slightly; and in Janácek's handling of the
denouement where the characteristically veristic horror and despair are
replaced by the catharsis brought about by the Kostelnicka's confession
of her crime. Janácek's use of cross-rhythms and repetition, for intensi-
fying and slightly modifying a phrase, often has a quasi-hypnotic effect:

Ех. 84 Act I, scene 1

ТНЕ GRANDMOTHER

3
И boty = as Lum га ест new]
(дуст = ^ ж: Hf ро
WU [mx BÉ eet Cl Gd == mns eir [io mm Vl ma

Co to máš za ra-dost! Со to máš, dev-Ci-co, za ra-dost!

ua ete Eee Rin

ЕТ ЕЕ Е: En

Ва- те nu jsi na u- ci la ta ке а

et ot et et ot ef тата: E LL,
psc Е am = | eFerer er ЕЕ НЕ EE

BOHEMIA 181

> PP

Muzs- ky ro-zum máš

(What joy that gives you, my girl, what joy! You taught even the servant-girl to
read! You have a man's intelligence)

Or a vocal line unaccompanied but echoed, or interrupted, by the
orchestra may be given the solemnity of a primitive spell:

Ex. 85 Act II, scene 1

Meno mosso А
KOSTELNICKA

ОН
И | Ве ERR
AG ate Е
El Cac ten - 173 E) елү ааа
GS ame Y o Ер peret]

182 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

pli-zna-la зе svým po-kles-kem. _

do hro-bu spro-vo-dit,

(From the day that I brought you home I noticed your grieving and your misery,
and when you confessed your guilt I thought that it would be the end of me)

AFTER VERISMO: ART NOUVEAU AND THE CLASSICAL REACTION
Wagner’s legacy, though most fruitfully invested by the composers
of Central Europe, had certainly enriched opera in both France and
Russia. Realism, too, though primarily an Italian movement in opera,
proved a fertilizing agent well beyond the borders of Italy, first in
France and then in Central Europe, where it was combined with
Wagnerian elements in a number of works which caught the imagination
of the day, though they proved to possess small lasting power. A third

AFTER VERISMO: ART NOUVEAU & CLASSICAL REACTION 183

element which played an important part in modifying both neo-
Wagnerian and realistic opera has already been mentioned on several
occasions: the art nouveau, or Jugendstil, movement which originated
in the visual arts. It was a minority movement, one of the many protests
against the accepted presuppositions of artistic academies and so, in
the last resort, against the industrial society of nineteenth-century
Western Europe. The roots of the movement can be easily traced,
through the Aesthetic Movement of the eighties in England, back to the
Pre-Raphaelite painters of the fifties; and they in their turn were
indebted to the German school of *Nazarene' painters, who owed their
origin to the secessionist Guild of St. Luke founded in Vienna in 1809
by Overbeck. The rejection of the Renaissance image of man and the
return to an imagined Middle Ages was accompanied by a new cult of
nature, a conscious turning away from the literal representation of
human life at its fullest and most magnificent to a study of the forms
and textures of inanimate nature. Man's place in the new art was
humbler and more mysterious, no longer that of ‘the lord of creation’
but suggesting rather an order of being shared with plant and animal
life and equally at the mercy of destructive forces. During the eighties
this new attitude found expression in an enthusiasm for Japanese art,
especially prints and pottery, and in the cultivation of the arabesque or
stylized plant-forms of oriental art; and it soon spread to feminine
fashions, which dictated clothes moulded naturally to the figure instead
of the exaggerations and stylizations of the crinoline and the bustle.
Floating veils and gauzes, clinging stuffs and floral designs such as
those elaborated by William Morris replaced stiff brocades and velvets,
and the bourgeois ideal of opulent display yielded to a subtler and more
poetic conception of feminine beauty.

Art nouveau elements in the opera go back as far as Wagner's Rhine-
maidens and Flowermaidens, and oriental and flower motifs often
modify the realism of Italian opera in the 1890s (e.g. Puccini's Madama
Butterfly and Mascagni's Iris and L'Amico Fritz). The sense of human
fragility, the mysteriousness of existence and an overriding sense of
pity, which characterize the writing of Maurice Maeterlinck, found
musical expression in the operas based on his works, and supremely
in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. In Charpentier's Louise and in
Dukas's treatment of Maeterlinck's Ariane et Barbe-Bleue there is
more than an echo of the contemporary struggle to obtain for women a
position in society if not equal to that of men at least superior to that of
minors. Outside the Latin countries an amalgam of Wagnerian (or
later Straussian) harmony and orchestration with typically veristic
Italian melody is to be found in the operas of Eugen d'Albert (1864—

184 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

1932) and, in a more personal idiom, Frederick Delius (1862-1934) and
Franz Schreker (1878-1934). D'Albert's Tiefland (1903) is a skilful
and effective score almost equally indebted to Puccini and Wagner, and
the story of violent passions in a Pyrenean village is comparable to that
of Janaéek’s almost exactly contemporary Лей pastorkyňa (‘Jenufa’).
Art nouveau elements are much stronger in Delius. His first opera,
Koanga (1904), is set in Florida and the heavily chromatic post-Wagner-
ian style of the white planters’ music is happily relieved by the slave
choruses, whose old-fashioned ‘nigger-minstrel’ style suggests an
acquaintance with the ballads of Alfred Scott-Gatty. Romeo und Julia
auf dem Dorfe (А Village Romeo and Juliet) (1907), based on a story
from Gottfried Keller's Die Leute von Seldwyla, presents a pair of
child lovers defying the conventions of a small-minded, property-
conscious society and ends in the Liebestod of a double suicide. The
Black Fiddler is a personification of music as a sinister power, and
Delius's melting chromatic harmonies spread a very characteristic art
nouveau veil over melodic lines which are often of extreme simplicity.

Ex. 86
Der schwarze Geiger (in der Ferne)
The Dark Fiddler (in the distance)

ein - за - mer Sän-ger, du ei - lest da-hin, durch das

О pi - per un -fol -lowed, how thou flin-gest on thro the
Гал

Dik - kicht der Wàl - der, durch Kraut und Ge-strüpp. Ich
tan - gle of trees and the wran- gle of shrubs while

AFTER VERISMO: ART NOUVEAU & CLASSICAL REACTION 185

ei - le dir nach, dein ver - lass-en - ег Gei-ger:
I must limp af - ter thy — fidd.-ler for - за - ken,

sind ja doch Brii-der, du
are we not com-rades, o

In Schreker’s Der ferne Klang (The Distant Sound) (1912) the heavy
unisons and fortissimo sequences of unrelated triads recall verismo, the
thick texture and opulent orchestration are borrowed from Strauss, and
much of the harmony shows the superficial influence of Debussy. The
realistic opening scenes of Act I gradually take on a symbolical, unreal
character; and Act II takes place in the Casa delle Maschere, a fantastic
brothel on an island in the Venetian lagoon, which is a thinly disguised
modernization of Klingsor’s garden in Act II of Parsifal. In this act
the contrasting of gipsy music on the stage in close antiphony with the
orchestra (a device not lost on Alban Berg, who made the piano-
reduction of Schreker’s score) alternates with passages of character-
istically overblown late romantic harmony, like Grete’s dream.

186 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

ren, dünkt

Gipsy music

D 6 L)
ЕР 1-1 Қ с ==. | o— "
; ERI
——— ШУ ЕЕ
эфирш ПРЕД Ва ПИН и ната poc
=== А =

Е
—

Appassionato rubato, sehr rhythmisch, scharf, doch die
Viertel gleich lang.
(The count, surprised and intrigued, sends the gipsies away.)

AFTER VERISMO: ART NOUVEAU & CLASSICAL REACTION 187

(For many years, it seems to me, I have been dreaming a wild dream.)

The heroine of Der ferne Klang, Grete, is a minor character in the long
portrait-gallery of erotic pathology, which stretches from Verdi's
Violetta to Alban Berg's Lulu, through Wagners Kundry and
Massenet's Manon and Thais, Strauss's Salome and Puccini's Turandot.
The exploitation of sexual elements is an even stronger feature of
Schreker's Die Gezeichneten (The Branded) (1918).

Art nouveau in its most innocent, even etiolated form strongly
influenced two English operas of the period. The mystery of life and
death and the all-prevailing power of conjugal love are presented in an
Indian scriptural setting, and in a musical language of extreme chastity
by Gustav Holst (1874—1934) in his chamber opera Savitri (1916), and a
Celtic fairy twilight provided the background for The Immortal Hour
(1914) by Rutland Boughton (1878-1960). The revived interest in
Celtic mythology, and the example of Wagner, prompted three operas
by Joseph Holbrooke (1878-1958), The Children of Don (1912), Dylan,
Son of the Wave (1914), and Bronwen (1929). These stood out as novel
compared with the well-made but musically characterless operas of Sir
Charles Stanford (1852-1924), whose Shamus O'Brien (1896) put
conventional Irish comedy on the operatic stage for the first time. Art
nouveau elements appear in the wood-spirits of Der Wald (1902) by
Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), whose Strandrecht (The Wreckers) (1906)
would have insured her a future as an operatic composer in any country
but England, where opera at this time was virtually confined to a
summer season at Covent Garden closely linked with the social life of
London and provided almost entirely by foreign artists. A later comedy,
The Boatswain's Mate (1916), contains much shrewd characterization
and clear references to the still continuing struggle for women's rights.

In Italy Gabriele d'Annunzio's highly coloured and scented, but
sterile poetry had a powerful effect on all the arts, prolonging the

188 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

‘decadence’ of the nineties by at least two decades. As verismo lost its
novelty, d'Annunzio's influence prompted a wave of spectacular neo-
romanticism to be felt in Francesca da Rimini (1914) by Riccardo
Zandonai (1883-1944), a work full of medieval pageantry including a
stage orchestra of flute, piffero, clarinet in C, viola pomposa, and lute.
This, like Fedra (1915), the first opera by Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880—
1968), was based on a play by d'Annunzio, who also provided the
subject of La Nave (1918) by Italo Montemezzi (1875-1952).
Montemezzi’s L’Amore dei tre Re (1913) is outstandingly the finest of
these neo-romantic operas, a powerful story presented in a musical
language quite free of the more facile theatrical exaggerations and
stylistic coarseness of verismo, but still plainly indebted to Tristan in
the love-music which forms the greater part of the work, one way and
another.

o Е: а жесе PS.
Г) кожа В jesse] aE,
Lcd A eS ЕЕ 52] ppp

Io non ti vo - glio guar-

AFTER VERISMO: ART NOUVEAU & CLASSICAL REACTION 189

сай». 79 atempo

(I do not want to look at you before you speak, beloved, chosen one, ever-living,
my soul...)

At least a decade before verismo had produced its last major flowering
in Puccini's Л Tabarro (1918) or combined with the neo-romantic
fashion in I Gioelli della Madonna (The Jewels of the Madonna) (1911)
by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948), this gifted half-German, half-
Italian composer was anticipating what was to become the classical
reaction in two operas based on Goldoni. Both Die neugierigen Frauen
(The Inquisitive Women) (1903) and Die vier Grobiane (A School for
Fathers) (1906) were given at Munich, where the Venetian-born
composer had studied with Rheinberger, acquiring an excellent and
robust musico-dramatic technique which he used to evoke the world
of the Italian eighteenth century. Wolf-Ferrari's musical language is
traditional, but his use of jt is personal and his strong melodic gift often
seems to lie midway between Mahler and Puccini, as in this song from
Act I of Die vier Grobiane:

Ех. 89
Tranquillo
LUCIETA

Ja, lie-ber Va-ter mein, so sein Sie wie- "s Кеш, bin

4 -- аа | есі
Ob = perd жиса к= Ежен) кте) е а
p ке GE

190 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

_ dolce
и
Б Мю А - мм” оре |

в» е”, e

ae SS == ее РЕН

2 D) Э РОО,
БЕ 2

TE тә Fn.) ue
JE? aerea. жен ша. D e]
[mmc

kannauchoh - ne Ball_ von Her - zen

[== E
==) = aaa ги БЕБІ
[-— 2 a = sui] =

(Be nice to me again, dear father, for after all I am your little daughter, and a
good and obedient little girl. It’s Carnival too—but of course I can be joyful and
happy without a mask or a ball.)

The very topical Susannens Geheimnis (Susanna’s Secret) (1909),
where the plot turns on a husband’s discovery that his wife smokes
cigarettes, is a ‘modern-style’ comedy such as Strauss was later to
write in his autobiographical Intermezzo.

Neither the mood of the times nor the musical language available

AFTER VERISMO: ART NOUVEAU & CLASSICAL REACTION 191

favoured the writing of such broadly human comedies as Die Meister-
singer or Falstaff during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
The outstanding exceptions, Der Rosenkavalier and L'Heure espagnole,
though musically far more ambitious than Wolf-Ferrari's charming and
slender period pieces, do not stand comparison with Wagner or Verdi.
Maskarade (1906) by the Danish composer Carl Nielsen, is a comedy
based, like Wolf-Ferrari's Goldoni operas, on an eighteenth-century
classic—Holberg’s comedy of 1723—and alternating between a lively
neo-classical style, partly pastiche and partly Regerish in character
(overture, the folie d'Espagne and archaic dances in Act I, Hieronymus's
C major aria in praise of *the good old days', and the three-part madrigal
in Act III) and memories of nineteenth-century models. These include
Die Meistersinger (the character of Arv recalls David, and the Night-
watchman in Act III is an obvious borrowing) and, at a deeper level,
Berlioz. In an earlier opera, Saul og David (1902), the love-duet between
David and Saul’s daughter, Michal, already recalls the unique combina-
tion of sensuality and chastity that distinguishes the love-music in
Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette and Les Troyens; and the scene between
Leander and Leonora in Act II of Maskarade confirms this impression:

LEONORE LEANDER poco rall.

(kissing her)

po pee ЕЕ a 2 а]
ТОЙ GRECO ТЕН E ЖЕП "ЕН ee

ртс тыл 22 ы ————— 5
=. E92 Feu]

192 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

LEONORE

() Я И о.

at Б

= MUI М-С

Басты ы | CHRGLEN. ee Жанр и Қолы" USE UO тыз стш ше ооо
291 в

кшш ee meae uni]

Buts —H
24

(Leander: No, let me drink from rosy beakers the happiness, the life which you
have given me by that single word. Leonore: Yes, drink on!)

In the character of the valet Henrik, Nielsen created one of the great
servant-roles of operatic literature, a worthy Danish successor to
Mozart's Leporello.

A very different kind of wit from that of either Nielsen or Wolf-
Ferrari marks the operas of another half-German, half-Italian composer,
Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924). His double nationality found a striking
parallel in a double indebtedness to J. S. Bach and Liszt, who between
them dominated his twin careers of composer-theorist and piano
virtuoso. It is significant that, whereas Wolf-Ferrari turned for the
subjects of his operas to Goldoni, Busoni's choice among Italian
writers was the fantastic, even visionary Gozzi, for whose Turandot he
wrote incidental music in 1911. From this he later constructed an
opera of the same name, given in a double-bill with his Arlecchino
in 1917. These and Die Brautwahl (1912) represent the first conscious
intrusion into the operatic field of the neo-classical spirit—objective,
quick-witted, dry, and contrived, in the sense of stylistically eclectic—
which had already appeared in Busoni’s own Fantasia contrappuntistica
and even earlier in the works of his friend Max Reger.

1 See above pp. 82 ff.

AFTER VERISMO: ART NOUVEAU & CLASSICAL REACTION 193

Mascagni had already attempted, though unsuccessfully, to reclaim
for the opera the figures of the Italian commedia dell'arte in his Le
Maschere (The Masks) (1901). Busoni's Arlecchino is altogether
different from the sentimental and decorative, Watteauesque use of the
old comedy figures which became fashionable in French literature after
the publication of Jules and Edmond de Goncourt's L’Art du dix-
huitiéme siécle (1859—75) and developed into a mannerism among poets
of the nineties who imitated Verlaine.t The masks in Arlecchino are used
to lend greater objectivity and more general relevance to Busoni’s very
shrewd and individual comments on human existence. The musical
style of Arlecchino is desperately taut and nervous, as full of allusions as
Busoni’s text, which shows an intimate knowledge of Dante and Goethe.
Musical references include quotations or parodies of Don Giovanni’s
‘Finch’ han del vino’ and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the Fidelio
march, with sidelong glances at Rossini and Wagner, and some
eighteenth-century pastiche. Much of the music has a nervous, staccato
glitter that looks forward to Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress—the last of
the neo-classical operas, as this is the first—but the sham funeral march
in Act IV might be a parody of Mahler, and there are passages in which
the telling awkwardness of the vocal line and the orchestral spacing
recall those of Dargomizhsky’s Stone Guest, though the more probable
and immediate source is Strauss’s Elektra:

1 The composer’s own curiously ambiguous attitude to his Arlecchino, and to opera in
general, can be found in his essay Entwurf einer neuer Aesthetik der Tonkunst (1907),
relevant passages of which appear in The Essence of Music (English translation, London,
1957), pp. 40, 60-70.

194 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

(I know of cardinals who would deserve to be treated by you.)

The music of Turandot has little except some oriental pastiche in
common with the opera that Puccini left unfinished at his death in 1924.
The fantastic plays an even more important role here than in Arlecchino,
and the eclectic, consciously fabricated nature of Busoni's music is
emphasized when he introduces Ше old English tune of ‘Greensleeves’
at the opening of Act II. Intellectual contrivance, a vivid musical
imagination, and vast musical and literary erudition are combined in
Dr. Faustus, the opera which the composer left unfinished at his death
in 1924.! Busoni's libretto shows a literary gift very similar, and not
much inferior, to his musical powers. After the opening symphonia,
which evokes the spring festival of Easter, two preludes show Faustus
approached by three mysterious students from Cracow and then
summoning Mephistopheles. As Faustus signs away his soul, Busoni’s
‘Credo’ and ‘Gloria’ emphasize the world that he is deliberately
rejecting; and the extended organ-solo in the following church scene,
where Gretchen's brother is seen praying for vengeance, is used
for the same effect, while the vivace Te Deum in 6/8 time in the second
scene of the Hauptspiel becomes a song to wine and women. The first
scene of the Hauptspiel, which shows Mephistopheles at the court of
Parma, contains many characteristics of nineteenth-century grand
opera—a polonaise, pages duelling to waltz-music, noble girls with
wreaths, and scenes of magic in which Mephistopheles conjures up
apparitions of Solomon and Balkis, Samson and Delilah, John the
Baptist and Salome, before spiriting away the Duchess. In the following
scene, Mephistopheles appears in a Wittenberg tavern among quarrel-
ling students (Te Deum pitted against ‘Ein’ feste Burg’ in the manner of
Meyerbeer's Huguenots).

In the final scenes the appearance of the Nightwatchman and

1 It was completed by his pupil Philipp Jarnach and performed in 1925.

AFTER VERISMO: ART NOUVEAU & CLASSICAL REACTION 195

Mephistopheles's tempo di minuetto serenade with pizzicato accompani-
ment inevitably call up the ghosts of Wagner and Berlioz. But the end
of the opera is a monologue for Faustus, in which Busoni's own
Faustian spirit of enquiry and *young classicism' find worthy expression.
Busoni's eclectic historicism with its many literary as well as musical
overtones from the European past, seemed altogether too contrived and
intellectual when Dr. Faustus first appeared. Fifty years later the
perspective has changed as completely as in any conjuring-trick of
Mephistopheles himself; and what seemed the freakish, if brilliant
concoction of an intellectual visionary has found an honourable place
in the mainstream of operatic history.

If there was something of the Abbé Vogler about Busoni, Hans
Pfitzner's lonely championship of late romantic musical ideals and
language in the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1914-18 war suggests
rather a musical Don Quixote.! His Palestrina (1917) is the latest of the
operas centred around a character in whom the power of music
is personified, as earlier opera-composers had chosen Orpheus and
Wagner Hans Sachs, although Hindemith was to choose artist-heroes
for his Cardillac (1926) and Mathis der Maler (1938). Pfitzner's musical
idiom is basically Wagnerian, though extended by harmonic freedoms
that owe something to Strauss, perhaps more to Reger. The legend of
Palestrina’s composing the so-called ‘Missa Papae Marcelli! in a single
night gave Pfitzner, who wrote his own libretto, the opportunity for a
powerfully conceived choral scene (Act I, scenes 4-6) in which
composers of earlier ages urge him on and a chorus of angels echoes
phrases of the Mass as he writes them. In Act II the scenes depicting the
Council of Trent contain masterly vignettes of the leaders of the
different national factions and their suites—the Bishop of Budoja
characterized by brisk neo-classical music, for example, the Assyrian
Patriarch using oriental melismata and the Master of Ceremonies,
Ercole Severolus, depicted in austere brass unisons. In the final scene of
the opera, where Palestrina is shown sitting peacefully at the organ
while crowds outside hail him as “езсиег of music', Pfitzner clearly
reflected his idea of his own position as legitimate champion of musical
traditions which he saw on all sides rejected. His loyalty to the past was
to become increasingly intense, and blind, during the next thirty years,
while the musical revolution was to establish its legitimacy often in the
face of social ostracism and even, in some cases, political persecution.
Nineteenth-century traditions, whether of Wagnerian music-drama or
Italian verismo, could not resist the new forces which were transfiguring
society as well as the arts. Puccini wrote the last Italian grand opera

1 Pfitzner made a personal attack on Busoni in an essay of 1917, *Futuristengefahr'.

196 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

with Turandot and died in 1924. Strauss, like Pfitzner, was less fortunate
in living another quarter of a century and continuing to write, against
the current of the times, complex and luxuriant fables like Die Frau
ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) (1919), Die aegyptische
Helena (1928) and Die Liebe der Danae (1940) or nostalgic comedies in
the vein of Der Rosenkavalier, like Arabella (1933). Despite real indivi-
dual merits these proved as ineffective against the tide of events as his
own Marschallin's desire to put the clocks back in order to preserve her
youth. The lyrical drama was far from dead, but its spirit had deserted
the old forms and was searching for the new.

TOWARDS NEW SHORES

Although Strauss and Pfitzner eventually rejected Wagnerian music-
drama in favour of a return to the traditional opera, we have seen that
in Russia Rimsky-Korsakov's last operas suggest a quite different way
out of a situation which most intelligent composers felt to be an impasse.
Instead of insisting, like the Italian veristi and their followers in France
and Central Europe, on ignoring the gulf between a highly artificial
form and naturalistic subject-matter, Rimsky-Korsakov chose exclu-
sively fantastic subjects; and Debussy, though avoiding all hint of
fantasy and the supernatural, found in Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et
Mélisande a largely interior, only half articulate drama. These were in
effect the two paths explored by the composers who came to maturity
around 1910, and they led to two quite different solutions: on the one
hand the ballet and on the other hand the symbolist or ‘expressionist’
drama with music, the one essentially an extrovert form and the other
raising introversion to a principle.

BALLET

Although ballet had been cultivated in Russia on quite a different
footing from any Western European country, with the possible excep-
tion of Denmark, at least since the days of Noverre, ballet music first
became a serious art-form in France with Adolphe Adam and, far more
importantly, Leo Delibes (1836-91). The first great ballet scores in
Russia were Tchaikovsky's,! much indebted to Delibes in detail but
incomparably richer and more varied musically. It was the musical
standard set by Tchaikovsky іп Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and
The Nutcracker that made it possible for the young Igor Stravinsky
(1882-1971) to consider ballet as a possible form, and the example of

1 See Vol. IX.

BALLET 197

his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, that showed him how the fundamentally
plastic language of ballet could be employed in a work which lay on the
borderline between this and opera. The first act of his opera Тйе
Nightingale was written in 1908-9, before his three ballets Zhar-ptitsa
(The Fire-Bird) (1910), Petrushka (1911) and Le Sacre du printemps
(The Rite of Spring) (1913) were presented in Paris by Sergey Dyagilev’s
Ballet Russe. In both ТЛе Nightingale and The Fire-Bird Stravinsky is
still very much indebted to Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘magic’ orchestration.
The intermezzo ‘Courants аш” is full of harp and horn glissandos,
glittering trills and tremolandos from the whole orchestra; and the
Nightingale's song recalls the coloratura of the Queen of Shemakha in
The Golden Cockerel:

Ex. 92 ^ 2. J
) = 66 (circa) Ee. Гаф ae ROSSIGNOL

ast c Pe 2 4:. P та
Hity EHI iml eM
BUSS внесете e Жш ESAE cual кезе)
EE i seg ес = жини às.

0 - те
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E = л рел cum а ЕВ = жору "ek Ре цеви X
SSS еее ы E Sea at as a

ХЭР EE es ee | ee | ==

“ын
de усл сс к=

pipe EA

meno mosso accel.

ги аа == Т гу E. 2

“л-ден ша а Рен
pen

In The Fire-Bird Stravinsky shows his acquaintance with contemporary
French music very clearly, and the earliest example of what was to
become his characteristic mature style, laconic in utterance, with
irregular ostinato rhythms, and analytical rather than synthetic orches-
tration is to be found in the ‘Danse infernale’;

198 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

Tromb., Ob., Fl., Cl.
mf Cymbal roll
=

In Petrushka, a puppet fantasy played against the background of
a Russian Shrovetide fair, the crude, incisive, spiky harmonies are
either superimposed to form a giant accordion-like orchestral sound,
still recognizably diatonic, or detached from this background with
exaggerated emphasis and high relief that recall those of a Fauviste
painting. The quotation of deliberately trival music—a French café
song and a Tyrolese waltz by Lanner—and the embedding of this
material in a score where echoes of Russian folk-music closely jostle

BALLET 199

fragments of a highly sophisticated Konzertstück for piano and orchestra,
together form a clear portrait of Stravinsky's musical character, in
which sharp intelligence, curious erudition and the gifts of a colourist
and a miniaturist rather than those of a musical architect are directed
by a forcible, even aggressive personality. This aggressive trait was to
find formidable expression in The Rite of Spring, ‘pictures of pagan
Russia' presented with a neo-primitive savagery of rhythm and a
frequent piling-up of disparate harmonic aggregates that seemed at first
provocatively revolutionary. In fact, however, the substance of Stravin-
sky's harmony in Le Sacre is seldom bolder than that to be found in the
last piano works of Aleksandr Skryabin,! and it was the vertiginous
rhythmic vitality and the enormous percussive impact of the music that
gave it a unique character. Where Stravinsky's harmonic daring differed
from Skryabin's was in its application; and here Т/е Rite shows clearly
the influence of his French friends, Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) and
Florent Schmitt (1870-1958). In La Tragédie de Salomé (1907-12)

(3 + 13)

Schmitt wrote a ‘Danse des éclairs’ with a rhythm of anda

‘Danse de l'effro, which plainly anticipate The Rite. Already іп
Petrushka, and even in Zhar-ptitsa, Stravinsky had exploited with bril-
liant effect the clash of triads whose tonics lie an augmented fourth apart
(C-F sharp)—a bitonal effect already used by Ravel for the cadenza
of his Jeux d’eau (1902); in The Rite it is Stravinsky’s methodical
insistence, at the opening of Ше ‘Cercles mystérieux des adolescentes’,
on a chord consisting of a dominant seventh on E flat and a chord of
F flat (E) major, rather than the chord itself, that was novel. On the
other hand the rhythmic pattern in the final ‘Danse sacrale'—9/8-5/8—
3/8-2/4-7/4-3/4-7/4-3/8-2/4 and so on—was a unique innovation in
European music.? The leading French composers of the day were soon
fired by the new possibilities suggested by Dyagilev's Ballet russe.
Debussy's Jeux and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe, both dating from 1912,
represent the latest and highest achievements in that Impressionist
writing for the orchestra which had been developing since Debussy's
Prélude à l'aprés-midi d'un faune (1894). The pointillistic style already
developed in painting by Georges Pierre Seurat, who died in 1891, was
effectively imitated in Jeux, where Debussy breaks down his material
to the smallest possible units, writing music that is not so much thematic
as cellular. Ravel's score is perfectly judged and organized to the

1 See chapter 2, pp. 133-7.
? Cf. Jean Cocteau, Le Coq et l'Arlequin (Paris, 1918), p. 64 *Le Sacre est encore une
“oeuvre fauve’’—une oeuvre fauve organisée’.

200 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

smallest detail, a monument of that refinement of taste and that poetic
sensibility expressed in terms of colour and rhythm, which were to be
superseded by the neo-primitive savagery of The Rite and the dry,
objective prose style of the neo-classical reaction. An elegant, well-
made ballet-score of the same period is Paul Dukas's La Péri (1912), in
which Russian influence is again strong.

Quite different from this Franco-Russian ballet style which developed
from the mutual exchanges of ideas between Rimsky-Korsakov and
Stravinsky on the one hand and Debussy and Ravel on the other, was
Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911), incidental music written by
Debussy for a mystery-play by Gabriele d'Annunzio. Here the most
disparate and unexpected sources are drawn upon by the composer—
Palestrina, the Wagner of Parsifal, and the Liszt of Christus—to form a
modern version of that fresque musicale at which Gounod had aimed at
the end of his life. D'Annunzio's hypertrophic and profoundly insensi-
tive art was at the opposite pole to Debussy's; but Le Martyre lies on
the same borderline between opera and ballet as the symbolist dramas
of Bartók and Schoenberg. Much of the music is in a flat-toned fresco
style that suggests the oratorio rather than the theatre (Ex. 94).

Debussy and Ravel both obliged Dyagilev by either supplying him
with new ballet-scores or permitting the use of former works or arrange-
ments of former works (Prélude à l'aprés-midi d'un faune, Ma Mére
l'oye, Valses nobles et sentimentales, renamed Adelaide ou le langage des
fleurs). Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) was the most gifted of the com-
posers, after Stravinsky, who owed their international reputation to
music written for the Russian Ballet. In E/ amor brujo (Love the Sorcerer)

Ex. 94
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(1915) and El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-cornered Hat) (1919)! he
moved forward from the refined zarzuela style of his early La vida
breve (1913) to a language in which Spanish dance-rhythms and
melodies based on Spanish folk-song patterns are combined with a
French elegance and polish, and the neo-classical element played a
considerable part. In Е/ sombrero de tres picos, where the influence of
Petrushka is often felt, the use of a quasi-symphonic style gives the
*Dance of the Neighbours', which opens Part II, a size and a breadth
quite new to music based on Spanish folk-songs and folk-dances.

In El retablo de Maese Pedro (Master Peter's Puppet Show) (1923)
Falla wrote the finest and most intelligent of puppet-operas, reproducing
with extraordinary skill the atmosphere of sixteenth-century Spain and
drawing, like his master Felipe Pedrell (1841-1922), on contemporary
material as his inspiration. Е! Retablo is as untranslatable as Dargo-
mizhsky's Stone Guest, but it is a small masterpiece. In Pedrell’s own
opera, Els Pirineus (The Pyrenees) (published 1894, performed 1902),
archaic material is combined with music written in a style that owes
something to Wagner yet remains fundamentally Latin in its graceful
sentiment and physical verve. There was no flowering of opera, how-
ever, in Spain; Falla's dance-dramas remain the only serious Iberian
contribution to the lyrical theatre in the first quarter of the twentieth
century.

1 See pl. IV.

202 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

SYMBOLIST DRAMA
Music formed an integral part of the Symbolist aesthetic, since it
represented an ideal, abstract art to which all other arts are continually
approximating. A Symbolist poem is essentially an act of contemplation,
a magic evocation of the metaphysical reality behind appearances.
Action belongs to the other, phenomenal world; and we have seen
how Maeterlinck's dramas attracted both Debussy and Dukas by their
interior nature, an intense life of the spirit that is hardly exteriorized in
gesture or action. ‘Vous avez brisé la glace avec des fers rougis’ says
Pelléas, after Mélisande's confession of love; and it is characteristic of
symbolist drama in general that the surface of life is there shown as dis-
turbed only when a character's emotional life has reached volcanic heat.
Іп А kékszakállú herceg уйға (Duke Bluebeard’s Castle) (written in
1911, performed 1918) Béla Bartók (1881—1945) set an Hungarian
adaptation by Béla Balázs of Maeterlinck's Ariane et Barbe Bleue in a
style where the tonic accent of the Hungarian language combines with a
parlando rubato to create vocal lines entirely new to European music.
There is no action, only the change of mood induced in Judith by the
successive opening of the seven doors in Bluebeard's castle. These are
symbolized not only by the changing nature of the orchestral music (a
46-bar trill, recalling Strauss's Sa/ome, for the torture-chamber: a horn
theme against string tremolos for the flower-garden; an orchestral tutti,
with organ and Debussy-like sequences of major triads for Bluebeard's
wide domains) but also by the play of light and colour. This is an
important element in the work, which moves out of darkness into light
and back again into darkness. This association of colour with music,
which had already interested Skryabin! and was to concern Schoenberg,
is indicative of the synaesthesia which had been adumbrated by E. T. A.
Hoffmann and Baudelaire and consciously aimed at by Wagner in his
ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, against which Stravinsky and the whole
neo-classical school were to protest. Although action is minimal, the
psychological reflection of the music is clear: Bluebeard's happiness is
contingent on those he loves, and he can possess them only in memory.
Judith, by arousing these memories, automatically becomes one of them.
Although there are momentary echoes of Debussy and Strauss (the
D flat major 6/4 chord at Bluebeard's protestation of love after the
opening of the sixth door) Bartók's language is already an individual
blend of Hungarian and Western European elements, with chains of
sevenths or minor seconds often built into powerful combinations.

1 See above p. 36.

SYMBOLIST DRAMA 203
Ex. 95

Sempre molto sostenuto

Vc., Bn. кр Sa ol

aa чаша) a See еве Қа стена
сова ре p EE
итар EADEM

kit sze-ret-tél én e - ]ót - tem?
(Tell me, Bluebeard, whom have you loved before me?)

Maeterlinck had attracted the attention of other writers and musicians
quite outside the orbit of the French-speaking world, and Arnold
Schoenberg (1874-1951) had written his symphonic poem Pelleas und
Melisande (1902-3) ‘after Maeterlinck', as well as setting Herzgewdchse
for soprano, celesta, harmonium, and harp (1911). More important in
determining the character of Schoenberg's work for the theatre, how-
ever, were his experiences as a painter. These began in 1907, when he
created portraits and masks which foreshadowed those of the artists
who, five years later, were to form the Blaue Reiter group in Munich—
Kandinsky, Klee, and Marc. Expression— not the rendering of the

204 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

visible, but the rendering visible —was the object of this art; and
Expressionism had from the outset something of the amorphous quality
of the human psyche itself, lacking both the geometrical foundations of
French Cubism and the intellectually defined aims of Italian Futurism.
Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung (Expectation) (composed in 1909,
performed 1924) is a minutely detailed study of erotic tension and
existential anxiety. Although the speech-like prosody is naturalistic,
the exaggeration characteristic of all Expressionist art is to be found in
the enormous melodic intervals, which give the vocal line the nature as
well as the appearance of a fever chart.! Marie Pappenheim’s text
presents the monologue of a woman walking through a forest at night
in search of her lover, whom she eventually finds dead. Every minute
inflexion of her feelings is reflected in the myriad changes of instru-
mental colour, pitch, texture, and dynamics; and unacknowledged
resentments and hostilities are exteriorized with the acuteness of the
new psychological analysts. Schoenberg's language owes something still
to the Salome and Elektra of Richard Strauss, but its nervous tension
and fragmented texture are entirely novel, and the detailed, often
delicate scoring for the large orchestra achieves a feverish delicacy.

Ex. 96

II. Szene (Very dark, wide path; tall, closely planted trees. She gropes her way
4-52 forward)
wieder etwas langsamer

(noch hinter der Szene)
FRAU D

ЕЕ =
Ва ЕД А
ага ге нед 31

FH Di" E „с ЛА BC ey (шел Ge Le Lm Р
D ще

1 H. Н, Stuckenschmidt, Arnold Schoenberg (Zürich, 1951: English translation, London,
1959), p. 54.

SYMBOLIST DRAMA 205
459
wieder viel rascher

z (trembling, tries to look at her
(stoops, gropes with her hands, then screams)

own hand)

Was? Јаб 1051... Eingeklemmt? . . Nein

HURTS ли, = mie
Г В Hb = Dd

a eee =e aaa Ty zd [277
Li е - Н ра 7 p mcs amen) 22
И Нм Е Ее. Р716
е 2 1 еу а

ТЕР иа

АР га
г ИГТ
bz — 1719057

206 STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

mf Tbn. (con sord.)

(Is that still the path? . .. Ah! here it is. What's that? Leave go of me! ... hemmed
іп?... No—there was something creeping . . . and here (оо... who is that touching
me? Go away—I must go оп...)

In Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand) (written in 1910-13, per-
formed 1924) Schoenberg wrote an Expressionist drama in which the
distinction between dream and reality is abolished. There is no logical
sequence in the scenes between the Man, the Woman, and the Gentle-
man, only an often confused rhythmic polyphony and “ап insatiable
piling up of harmonic complexes as an allegory of the many layers of
the psychological subject.’! The writing for the chorus of six men and
six women includes whispering and speaking as well as singing, and
Schoenberg's insistence on the exact visual representation includes
crescendos of colour, or shifting colour-schemes which reflect the
emotions of the characters, as in the 25-bar sequence brown-dirty
green-dark blue-grey which corresponds to a growing tension in the
Man, and leads eventually to a bright-yellow climax.

These two works of Schoenberg's are the first examples in music of
that exclusive concern with the suppressed elements in human existence
that Adorno regards as necessarily characteristic of twentieth-century
art.? “Тп so far as art to-day has any real substance, it reflects without any
concessions, and brings to the level of consciousness, what people would
like to forget.' Radicalism such as this, pursued with such total and
exclusive passion, posed the problem of musical theatre in terms which
made any substantial continuity with the old opera out of the question.
It was left to Schoenberg's pupil Alban Berg (1885-1935) to find a
compromise.?

Outside Central Europe composers were not attracted by Symbolist

! Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen, 1949), p. 20.
2 Ibid., p. 8. 3 See below pp. 363 ff.

SYMBOLIST DRAMA 207

drama and knew little or nothing of Expressionism in these years.
Rebikov's *musico-psychological drama’ Alpha i Omega (1911), which
purports to show the beginning and the end of the human race in terms
of diabolical seduction, is no more than a curiosity rendered musically
tedious by an all too thorough and unimaginative use of whole-tone
harmony. Stravinsky, on the other hand, was to experiment during the
war years, when the resources of Dyagilev's ballet were no longer
available, with chamber-music entertainments such as Renard (com-
posed іп 1916-17, performed 1922) and L’ Histoire du soldat (1918). But
both these must be considered as substitutes for opera rather than
extensions of operatic form, and their examination belongs to the next
chapter.!

1 See pp. 211-15.

MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND
OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

By Mosco CARNER

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

HERACLITUS'S “АП is flux, nothing is stationary’ is true of all epochs
that have witnessed a radical moral, political, intellectual, and artistic
transvaluation; but it would appear to apply with particular force to
the arts in the years between 1918 and 1939. Centripetal and centrifugal
forces were pulling in opposite directions, school stood against school
each proclaiming a different aesthetic creed, and the air was full of
slogans and counter-slogans. It was as though a new Sturm und Drang
had seized the European mind. In music, rumblings of the coming storm
had been heard during the decade or so before the First World War.
Both Debussy's impressionism and Schoenberg's expressionism sprang
from a new ‘feeling’ about music and both represented far-reaching and
successful attempts to free musical thinking from the fetters of tradition
and to advance into new territory. Yet it was not until the beginning of
the 1920s that the full strength of these powerful forces was felt—in
Central Europe, where revolutionary political and social changes fol-
lowed in the wake of a lost war and strongly influenced the arts,
particularly in Germany, but also among young artists in France and
Italy, who were profoundly affected by the new ideas that had sprung
up during and shortly after the war. The general feeling was that one
epoch had come to an end and another was born which held the
promise of a regeneration, if not indeed a rebirth, of the human spirit,
bringing with it a liberation from the obsolescent traditions and con-
ventions of the romantic past. The millennium, so it seemed, was round
the corner. If this optimism proved unjustified in the light of subsequent
developments in the political and social life of most European nations,
it nevertheless had the effect of creating in the arts a new outlook, a
spectacular change of orientation among artists.

In music this transformation manifested itself in two aspects. On the
one hand, open war was declared on the lingering romanticism and all
it implied—pronounced subjectivism, unhindered projection of the
artist’s private ego into his work, the tendency to make music a means

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 209

to an end by using it as a vehicle for emotional expression and psycho-
logical exploration or rendering it a reflecting mirror of literary and
programmatic ideas. The most violent attacks were reserved for the
Wagnerian music-drama and its progeny as the chief culprit in having
led music away from its true self by the emphasis on emotional, psycho-
logical, philosophical, and mythological elements, by the sensuality and
opulence of its tone colours and by the huge array of instrumental
forces. More positively artists sought to write music that avoided at all
costs the subjective, expressive factor and that aimed instead at a
detached, objective attitude such, it was assumed, as had been cultivated
in the Baroque period. Composers turned to a new consideration of the
musical material as such, exploring its immanent laws of texture and
structure and treating it in an analogous manner to the architect's
handling of bricks and stone. ‘Construction’ became the alpha and
omega of this New Music. The work of building in sounds and achieving
a clear order and organization assumed the significance which the
former emotional ‘content’ had possessed. Technical craftsmanship was
placed on a higher plane than inspiration, the sheer métier was often
exalted over imagination. This attitude scarcely affected the aesthetic
merits of the works of such masters as Stravinsky, Bartók, or Schoen-
berg, but with less creative artists it led to a species of dry, cerebral
academicism. Form, design, and texture were reduced to essentials and
this explains the characteristic predilection for chamber music and
chamber orchestras, in which each part of the fabric was set out with
succinctness and clarity and was of individual musical account. This
was the antithesis of the large forms and dense overloaded texture shown
in late-romantic music, particularly the opera and the symphonic poem.
In search of this ideal of pure construction a return was made to the
style of Baroque polyphony, yet with a marked difference of emphasis;
for the vast extension and final attenuation of tonality and the eman-
cipation of the dissonance to an equal status with the consonance had
led to the gradual destruction of functional harmony, and thus the new
contrapuntal style developed largely non-harmonic, linear patterns, in
which vertical configurations became the accidental result of horizontal
part-writing. In the same way the Baroque forms of suite, concerto, and
cantata were revived, as ideal moulds into which to pour a purely
musical content, whereas the dramatic form of the sonata was corre-
spondingly neglected. Expression became an incidental by-product of
construction and even where it was intentional, as in operas and can-
tatas, it was expression not of subjective ego-bound feeling, but of an
impersonal, more universal order. The object was to concentrate
attention not on the individual’s personal feelings, but on types of

210 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

sentiment which possessed general validity. Whether it was the neo-
classicism of Stravinsky, the New Objectivity of Hindemith, or the
mixture of experiment with the urge to ‘épater le bourgeois’ of the
young French artists known as ‘Les Six'—all shared іп common the
negation of subjectivism and the concentration on an objective interplay
of the constituents of the musical material. The sole exceptions in this
general trend towards emotional detachment were Schoenberg, Berg,
and, chiefly during his pre-dodecaphonic period, Webern. These com-
posers adhered essentially to the aesthetic tenets of romanticism,
pressing construction into the almost exclusive service of espressivo; and
thus they represented, in a sense, the ‘reaction’. Yet, on the other hand,
Schoenberg’s establishment of the serial method constituted an entirely
novel and revolutionary approach to the technique of composition and
resulted in the creation of what may be termed a true ars nova.

In short, the years between the German Wars formed a period of
intense search for means whereby to transform radically the face of
music and lend it a new physiognomy—a process that is parallel to the
beginning of the seventeenth century when the old polyphony gave way
to homophonic thinking and a whole new musical outlook was born.
The strong impulse to find fresh solutions for old problems led to
a rage of experiment, some of it issuing in merely ephemeral results
but leading in other cases to enduring achievements which may be
ranked with the great masterpieces of past ages.

STRAVINSKY AFTER THE RITE

One of the foremost exponents of the movement to break with the
heritage of romanticism and evolve a new aesthetic outlook was Igor
Stravinsky! (1882-1971). After the monster score of The Rite of Spring
(1913) in which primitive ‘barbaric’ expression is combined with the
highest degree of technical sophistication, especially in rhythm and
instrumentation, Stravinsky realized that an extension of the boundaries
of music in this direction was not possible and he changed his course,
making simplicity and economy of means his guiding principle. Charac-
teristic of this new development were already three pre-war compositions
—the vocal Three Japanese Lyrics and Pribautki (written between 1912
and 1914) and the Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914),? intimate small-
scale works of which the first two are scored for a chamber orchestra.
This treatment was probably suggested by the peculiar instrumentation
of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire which Stravinsky heard in Berlin in

1 For Stravinsky's earlier music see Chapter II.
? No. 1 is recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x.

STRAVINSKY AFTER THE RITE 211

1912, but it largely corresponded with the new aim he was setting him-
self in his artistic aspirations. The great restriction of forces available,
particularly in the Ballets Russes, during the war years between 1914 and
1918, also played a purely practical part in determining Stravinsky's
change of front.

This departure from his previous style reached its first culmination in
a series of three chamber works for the stage—Renard (1917), L'Histoire
du soldat (1918) and Les Noces (1917, orch. 1923)—in which Stravinsky
evolved novel musico-dramatic forms and a new type of orchestration.
Though they were written at the period when the composer had
severed his connexion with his native country and was living in
Switzerland, they still belong in style to his *Russian' period and their
texts all derive from Russian sources—in the case of Renard and
L'Histoire from folk-tales and in Les Noces from records of ancient
Russian folk customs and wedding rites. Stravinsky, who began as a
nationalist, inherited his love of Russian folk-material from his teacher
Rimsky-Korsakov, but the younger composer treated it in a strikingly
different manner from his master. In Renard and L'Histoire he does
not anchor the story in a definite time or place, but sets it in the
timelessness and unreality of a fairy-tale; and as early as Petrushka
(1911), instead of individual living characters he presents puppet-like
figures governed by rudimentary primitive instincts. This mechanical,
automaton-like element appears to correspond with a trait in Stravin-
sky's artistic make-up and finds its musical expression in the stereotyped,
continuous repetition of short melodic-rhythmic patterns whose
machine-like regularity is, however, broken up by the conflict between
metre and rhythm, resulting in the displacement of the strong beats in
the bar and in an ideal, if not actual, negation of the bar-line division of
the phrases (see Ex. 97). In setting the texts of these three works
Stravinsky was, of course, attracted by the story, by its poetic images
and metaphors; but what exercised on him an equal, if not indeed
stronger, fascination was the sequence of words and syllables—in
short, the purely phonetic element which ‘produces an effect on one's
sensibility very closely akin to that of music’.!

Renard is a ‘Burlesque in Song and Dance’, one of whose novel
features is the division of the cast into singers and actors, with the
former (two tenors and two basses) placed in the orchestra. This proce-
dure was adopted in order to ensure, on the one hand, the greatest
possible concentration on the music and, on the other, the greatest
liberty in the representation of the stage action; and it sprang from
Stravinsky's dissatisfaction with the absence of close union between

1 Трог Stravinsky, Chroniques de ma vie (Paris, 1935; English translation 1936, p. 91.)

212 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND CF EUROPE: 1918-1939

music and action observed in the production of his opera Rossignol (The
Nightingale) (1914). The plot of Renard unfolds in two dramatic episodes
of which the second, with the exception of the ending, is a literal repeti-
tion of the first. The Fox lures the Cock from his perch and seizes him
but, owing to the intervention of the Cat and the Goat, has to release
him. The play starts again, but this time ends with the killing of the
Fox by the Cat, followed by a jubilant dance, and the burlesque closes
with the mummers' ancient request to the public:

‘Et si l'histoir' vous a plu,
Payez-moi c'qui m'est dà!

The style of the work is Russian in the sense that it is marked by the
repetition of short melodic phrases. But a typically Stravinskyian
quality is noticeable in their outline, which is clear-cut and sharp-edged
as though etched with a stylus, a feature that remains characteristic
of all his later periods. Some of the melodies possess the flavour of
Russian folk-song, as the introductory March which is partly Dorian,
partly Phrygian, or the duet between the Cat and the Goat, sung to the
accompaniment of a gusli.! The instrumental ensemble consists of flute,
cor anglais, E flat clarinet, two horns, trumpet, string quintet, percus-
sion, and cimbalom. This last instrument, for which the composer
developed a strong liking, is largely used to accompany the Cock, play-
ing sustained pedals and marking the rhythmic accents, and generally
serves the purpose of holding the harmonic textures together. The sound
produced by this unusual combination of instruments, particularly by
the cimbalom, the various percussion instruments and the strings
plucked and martellato, is dry, sharp, and very resonant.

Renard is a genuine burlesque with a strong element of caricature, as
when, for instance, the Fox, disguised as a monk, sings to the Cock with
an expression of mock-piety,? or when the Cock replies in an arrogant,
complacent vein.? Stravinsky exacts from the four singers a large
measure of vocal virtuosity and special effects, their music frequently
imitating in a stylized fashion the noises of the farmyard. There is,
however, no attempt at a fusion of the diverse musical, poetic, and
dramatic elements, which are complementary rather than blended
together, and the work as a whole creates a static effect partly due to the
symmetrical arrangement of the action but more especially to the
automaton-like, circumscribed, and formalized nature of the music.

L'Histoire du soldat was conceived in peculiar circumstances. During
the latter part of the war Stravinsky found himself cut off from Russia,

1 At 62. 2 At 11. VAHLS

STRAVINSKY AFTER THE RITE 213

and after the Russian Revolution of 1917 he decided never to return and
settled for the time being in Switzerland. This meant that he could
expect no income from Russia and it occurred to him to improve his
situation by writing a stage work that would require only two or three
characters and a handful of instruments and that could be produced in a
mobile theatre to be transported from place to place and staged in the
smallest locality. The Swiss poet, C. F. Ramuz, who had provided the
French version of Renard, suggested a mimed narration, a story to be
read, acted, and danced. Stravinsky's choice fell on Afanasyev's collec-
tion of Russian tales, which contains a cycle of stories dealing with the
adventures of a deserter and his compact with the devil.

L'Histoire has four characters: the Soldier and the Devil who have
speaking parts, the Princess who is a dancer, and the Narrator who
combines several functions: he recounts the tale, sometimes comments
on the action as an outsider rather in the manner of a Greek chorus,
and at other times participates in it, expressing the Soldier's thoughts and
feelings and occasionally addressing him in direct speech. The orchestra
consists of a violin and a double bass, a clarinet (on account of its
possessing the widest compass among the woodwind) and bassoon,
a cornet-à-pistons, trumpet and trombone, and finally a variety of
eight percussion to be managed by a single player, the whole to be
directed by a conductor.

Stravinsky was partly influenced in his choice of this combination by
contemporary jazz, a selection of which had been brought to him from
America in 1918 by the conductor, Ernest Ansermet. Jazz was bound
to appeal to a musician with such interest in rhythmic-percussive experi-
ments as Stravinsky, and indeed he included a tango and a ragtime
among the Princess's dances and followed this up by his Ragtime for
eleven instruments (1918) and the Piano Rag-Music (1919).

The instrumental ensemble is to be placed on the stage, for it was the
composer's view that seeing the movements of the players facilitates
Ше spectator’s auditory perception. On another ‘drum’ at the opposite
side of the stage sits the Narrator, before a little table ‘with a pint of
white wine', while the centre is occupied by the actors. For the thirteen
musical numbers, to be played simultaneously with the action or inter-
polated in the narration, Stravinsky drew on a great variety of sources:
Russian folk-song, American ragtime, Argentine tango, Viennese
waltz, Swiss brass band, and Bach chorale.! Yet all these heterogeneous
elements are fused together in the alembic of Stravinsky’s imagination,
resulting in a perfect homogeneity of style. The melodic and contra-

1The Royal March, recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x, is pseudo-
Andalusian.

.214 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

puntal lines are invented in terms of the particular nature of the
instruments producing textures of sharply defined sonorities, and the
fact that the part-writing is linear rather than harmonically determined
accounts for the astringently dissonant character of the music, as illu-
strated in the following example which also shows the pull of rhythmic
phrases against the underlying metre: x

Ех. 97

Clar.
inA

Bassoon

y Ll я Г... Е ей
Cornet ГД 9 || wv фе [LJ ғ А теулер)
: AE е? av oi eae Ss ЕЕ PL T Se CT YES E А IR Ы ЕСУ ay sl
in B flat А = «2 "RN, [np EY (AE A ЕР p

Stravinsky, it should be observed, pretends to no sympathy, no com-
passion for the Soldier; he is not emotionally involved and illustrates
from outside, dispassionate and objective. This tallies with the view he
expounded in his autobiography! where he wrote that

music, by its very nature, is essentially powerless to express anything at all,
whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon
of nature, etc. . . . Expression has never been an inherent property of music.
That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the
case, music appears simply to express something, this is only an illusion and
not a reality... The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole
purpose of establishing an order in things, including particularly the co-
ordination between тап and time. To be put into practice, its indispensable
and single requirement is construction. Construction once completed, this
order has been attained, and there is nothing more to be said... One
could not better define the sensation produced by music than by saying that it

! Chronicle of my Life, p. 91.

STRAVINSKY AFTER THE RITE 215

is identical with that evoked by contemplation of the interplay of architectural
forms.

Stravinsky's theoretical axiom, however, does not entirely square with
his actual practice which fell somewhat short of his strict demands for
non-expressive music and pure construction. Even in his neo-classical
works emotive impulses press to the surface, especially in the stage

Bae BCC ы)
a SS Se Sa == Y BI ERO АТ RN.
ТАЗА И epu <a ee I _

works where something of the characters' feelings and sentiments is
projected into the music, and it was not until Stravinsky embraced
serial technique that he came near his ideal of pure construction.
Nevertheless, it was left to the dodecaphonic Webern and the succeeding
generation of advanced composers to realize (if this is not a contradic-
tion in terms) the Platonic idea of construction. Les Noces, which was
completed before L'Histoire du soldat but not orchestrated until 1923,
expresses, together with the joys and exultation of bride and bridegroom,
the awe and trepidation felt by man at the renewal of life. Stravinsky
adapted the text from Kireyevsky's collection of Russian folk poems
which contains a number bearing on the subject of peasant wedding
customs, but he used this material in a very free manner, paying little
heed to ethnographical considerations and aiming to reproduce not the
actual character of the wedding ritual, but its essential spirit and feeling.
Though entitled *Russian Choreographic Scenes', the work is more in

216 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

the nature of a stage cantata, with four.scenes which follow one another
without a break and employ four soloists (soprano, mezzo soprano,
tenor and bass), chorus, four pianos, and percussion. There is no real
plot, the action unfolding in four static tableaux which describe the
preparations and the actual wedding of the couple.

The work displays an extraordinary unity of conception and treat-
ment. Virtually all the material is derived from a single cell—the interval
of the fourth divided into a major second and minor third and vice versa,
and there are also other permutations. This basic motive is heard at the
very beginning:

Ex. 98

Soprano solo

П D
p 955.189 525.1738 fen 17329: —]13—2 —]
у NE Е-е е ee ema у = [eps [e ГО СД dii Qn. 60]
f? Сезе ae ЦИШ БЕ > ое
Ng ppp Ij cw Е el ааа Дъ ессе mmn | zum Lor
VY

Tres-se, tres - se, mà. — ma tres-se à moi

The motive is pentatonic, being modelled on Russian folk-song, but in
its elaborations it frequently takes on a modal character, and the
presence in it of the major second leads, harmonically, to bitonal
chords at the distance of that interval. In addition to the themes derived
from the germ cell, there are several other ideas which are first intro-
duced as counterpoints and subsequently achieve independence. The
entire melodic material is of Stravinsky’s own invention, with the
exception of three themes which are, however, so closely integrated
with the composer’s individual language that they all but lose their
original identity. The setting of the Russian text is syllabic almost
throughout and emphasizes the sonorous (phonetic) quality of the words.
It must be admitted that this peculiar treatment, in combination with
the melodic-rhythmic repetitions, results in a certain monotony which
was probably intentional, but it is a monotony which has an extra-
ordinary mesmeric effect comparable to that of primitive Asian and
African music.

Stravinsky's neo-classical phase, which began after Les Noces, has
sometimes been dismissed as ‘time travelling’, ‘musical impersonation’,
‘music about music’, or simply as a ‘pastiche’ of older styles. Yet
Stravinsky’s neo-classicism reflects quite as much his own sharply
defined individuality as the acute historical sense which he developed in
order to fuse the Russian elements in his musical personality with the
wide range of Western musical thought of the last three centuries. To
possess a sense of the past is to enrich the present; and by his references

STRAVINSKY'S NEO-CLASSICISM 217

to the styles of former composers Stravinsky has reconstituted a
picture of Western musical tradition seen through the prism of his own
imagination. The original music, observed with the sensibility and taste
of an artist of a later age, is so metamorphosed as to acquire an aito-
gether new meaning or, to put it differently, the old material is so re-
thought and commented upon in the light of Stravinsky's own artistic
experience that the result is a genuine individual creation. Closely
linked with this neo-classicizing tendency was Stravinsky's pre-
occupation with the Nietzschean dialectic of Apollonian and Dionysian
art. The Apollonian artist has for his supreme object the creation of
order by means of self-restriction and self-imposed laws. The Dionysian
artist, on the other hand, is ruled by irrational urges and a pronounced
tendency towards the frenzied and chaotic. After The Rite of Spring
Stravinsky gradually turned from Dionysian to Apollonian art, moving
on to a more or less abstract plane, where the invention appears at
times cold, cerebral, and even arid. Even in those of his works which
are coloured Бу a certain expressive element—Oedipus Rex, the Sym-
phony of Psalms, and Perséphone—the emotions are of a generic,
universal order finding expression in highly stylized and formalized
music from which all suggestions of an anecdotal, picturesque, psycho-
logical, or philosophical nature are absent.

STRAVINSKY'S NEO-CLASSICISM

Stravinsky's neo-classical period was initiated by the ballet Pulcinella
(1920), after music by Pergolesi, but the process of remoulding and re-
thinking the old material is here seen still in its initial and tentative stage.
Pergolesi's themes are taken over intact, and while Stravinsky adheres
to their original melodic outlines it is chiefly in the inner harmony and
the rhythm that he begins to press his own stamp on the music; the
harmonic texture is stiffened and given more violent impact by astrin-
gent chords, the symmetry of the phrases is broken and their regular
accent often displaced by syncopation. Where Stravinsky is entirely
himself is in the orchestration, in which he adapts the eighteenth-
century concertante manner to his own brilliant purposes. The subse-
quent Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920) and the Octet (1923) both
employ an instrumental combination which is the outward expression
of the impersonal, objective nature of the music. The absence from both
works of the strings is significant.

The Octet, scored for flute, clarinet, two bassoons, two trumpets, and
a tenor and bass trombone, is modelled partly on the Venetian renais-
sance style (Gabrieli) and partly on Bach. It consists of three compact
movements—a Sinfonia (overture), an Air with five variations, and a

218 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Finale. If the Symphonies of Wind Instruments already contained many
passages of non-harmonic, linear counterpoint—to be distinguished
from the technique of short ostinatos and heterophony characteristic
of Stravinsky's Russian period—the Octet shows the total application
of this typically twentieth-century Western device.

Between the Symphonies of Wind Instruments and the Octet Stravin-
sky composed the one-act opera Мауга (1922) which is in a sense a
throwback to his Russian style, yet at the same time is influenced by
his neo-classicistic preoccupation. In it he adopts and adapts to his own
manner of speech the language of Glinka, Dargomizhsky, and Tchai-
kovsky and writes in the convention of Russo-Italian opera. The libretto
is based on a rhymed story, The Little House in Kolomna, by Pushkin—
Pushkin who in the composer's own words *was the most perfect
representation of that wonderful line which began with Peter the Great
and which, by a fortunate alloy, has united the most characteristically
Russian elements with the spiritual riches of the West . . . As for myself,
I had always been aware that I had in me the germs of this same
mentality only needing development, and I subsequently deliberately
cultivated it'.* This precise statement helps to explain one of the guiding
aims which Stravinsky pursued after his ‘Russian’ period, and Mavra
is a characteristic example of this in its resuscitation of the shades of
Glinka and Tchaikovsky, whose Europeanized nationalism the composer
compares favourably with the 'doctrinaire aestheticism" of the pure
Russian nationalists. The opera, dedicated to the memory of Pushkin,
Glinka, and Tchaikovsky, conveys, despite its comic action, a feeling
of nostalgia and even bitterness which no doubt reflects Stravinsky's
mixed feelings about Russia, ancient as well as modern. In style the
work is an opera buffa consisting of arias, duets, and ensembles, but it
has no recitatives.

Stravinsky's strong attraction to the wind ensemble, demonstrated
in the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, the Octet and Mavra, was
followed by an equally keen interest in the piano as a solo instrument.
True, during his previous years he had written some piano pieces, such
as the Five Easy Pieces (1917) and The Five Fingers (1921), but these
were intended for his children; at the opposite end stand the Piano Rag-
Music and the Three Movements from Petrushka (1921) (written for
Artur Rubinstein) which are virtuoso pieces. In his use of the piano
as an orchestral instrument he strongly emphasized its percussive aspect
(Petrushka) developing this to a ne plus ultra in the martellato style of
the four pianos in Les Noces. In the works of his neo-classical period he
still exploits the percussive quality, but he takes advantage also of the

1 Chronicle of my Life, p. 159.

STRAVINSKY'S NEO-CLASSICISM 219

legato and cantabile potentialities of the keyboard. This preoccupation
with the piano led first to the Concerto for piano, wind orchestra, double
basses and timpani (1924), then the Piano Sonata (1924), the Serenade in
А (1925) and, after a lapse of four years, the Capriccio for piano and
orchestra (1929). The characteristic common to these four works is the
propulsive ‘motoric’ and ‘open’ writing for the piano and, in the first
three works, the influence of the Baroque harpsichord style, while the
Capriccio emulated the brilliant virtuoso writing of Weber or Mendels-
sohn.

The Piano Concerto was the first work that suggested Stravinsky's
‘return to Bach’. The first movement is in the style of a Bach toccata
whose introductory Largo recalls in its measured dotted rhythm Lully
and the seventeenth-century French overture. The middle movement, a
Larghissimo, unfolds with a stately tread somewhat reminiscent of
Vivaldi, while the middle section contains a cantabile of incantatory
effect, the orchestral melody in 2/4 being accompanied in the treble of
the piano and the double basses by an implied 3/8 rhythm. The finale
combines the flavour of eighteenth-century music with fierce syncopa-
tions which recall remotely the ‘barbaric’ rhythms of Petrushka and
The Rite of Spring, proving that, despite the adoption of the Apollonian
principle, Stravinsky's old Dionysian urge could not be altogether sup-
pressed. The Piano Sonata is noteworthy for the sparse, attenuated
texture of the first and last movements, mostly in two parts, with the
treble of the opening Allegro at times thickened out with euphonious
thirds and sixths. Yet the music as a whole strikes the ear as cold and
calculated, and almost the only relief is provided by the lyrical charm of
the middle movement, an Adagietto that is reminiscent, in its rich
ornamentation and the ostinato-like appoggiaturas of the middle sec-
tion, of early Beethoven. Though Stravinsky studied Beethoven's piano
sonatas before his own composition, the latter is entirely different
in form and in development of thought. The title ‘sonata’ is intended in
its pre-classical, Baroque, sense denoting music to be played as against
*cantata', 1.е. music to be sung. The Serenade in А is a far more genial
and immediately attractive work emulating the style of eighteenth-
century ‘night music’ and consisting of four short, well-contrasted
movements. It provides a characteristic example of his concept of ‘polar’
or extended tonality, the note A acting as the point of harmonic
attraction in the completely free flow of keys, and at various times
assuming the function of tonic, dominant or major and minor third.

Stravinsky’s neo-classicism assumed a profounder, more spiritual
aspect after his discovery of the world of Greek antiquity. ‘Discovery’
is perhaps not quite the appropriate term since two of his very early

220 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

works, the song cycle Faun and Shepherdess (1906) and the wordless
song Pastoral (1908), already proclaim a certain affinity with the
spiritual landscape of the Hellenic world. But it was not until Stravinsky
came to live in Paris and felt the influence of Cocteau, Gide, and other
writers that classical antiquity with its idealistic yet essentially tragic
view of life—man living in a realm of purity and serenity but pursued
by a remorseless Fate—exercised a fascination on him, and gave rise to
a series of important stage-works—the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex
(1927), the ballet Apollo Musagetes (1928), the melodrama Perséphone
(1934), and the ballet Orpheus (1948).

The choice of the Sophoclean Oedipus as a subject for an opera-
oratorio was determined by two facts. One was Stravinsky’s desire to
use a plot known to the generality of spectators, so that their undivided
attention could be given to the musical treatment. The second and,
perhaps, more important fact is to be found in an affinity between
something in Stravinsky’s own personality and the spirit of the Greek
play, which shows man as the plaything of higher, supernatural forces,
entangled in the meshes of a snare that gradually closes on him and
eventually destroys him. This idea of a tragic destiny suspended like the
sword of Damocles over the human being had in the past given rise to
three of Stravinsky’s works—Petrushka, The Rite of Spring and
L'Histoire du soldat—but Oedipus Rex projects it in the most un-
equivocal, direct terms yet with a striking economy of dramatic gestures.
What there is of external action is chiefly confined to the latter part of
the drama—the revelation of the Messenger and Shepherd, the suicide
of Jocasta, and the self-mutilation of Oedipus. For the greater part
Stravinsky concentrates on the inner, psychological, action—the fall
of Oedipus from his height as the proud and self-confident King of
Thebes into an abyss of misery and tragic guilt. Cocteau’s libretto, which
is masterly in the compression of the ancient tragedy and impressive in
the simple dignity of the language, was translated into Latin (by Jean
Daniélou) which was Stravinsky’s idea. Reading Joergensen’s book St.
Francis of Assisi he discovered that the saint (whose native language was
Italian) used French on all solemn occasions; and by analogy he
decided to have a Latin text, which had the advantage of being ‘a
medium not dead but turned to stone and so monumentalized as to have
become immune from all risk of vulgarization'.!

The static, hieratic, and impersonal character of the drama is already
emphasized in the ‘alienation’ effect created by its method of produc-
tion: the stage has no depth, the whole action taking place on one level
suggesting a bas-relief. With the exception of Tiresias, the Shepherd, and

1 Chronicle of my Life, p. 210.

STRAVINSKY'S NEO-CLASSICISM 221

the Messenger, the characters appear in built-up costumes and masks,
moving only their heads and arms and producing the effect of living
statues; their entries and exits are made through trap doors which are
alternately veiled and unveiled by special curtains; the chorus sits on
three tiers. To assist the spectators in recalling the detail of the plot, a
Speaker in evening dress explains, in the vernacular, the action in an
impersonal, detached way like a lecturer. In his musical design Stravin-
sky follows the scheme of eighteenth-century opera and oratorio: self-
contained arias, duets, and choruses which have no thematic con-
nection and are arranged like stark contiguous blocks of granite, the
cumulative effect of which is one of awe-inspiring monumentality.
The idiom is for the most part diatonic, another means by which the
composer achieves directness, immediacy, and simplicity of expression.
The pervasive rigidity of the rhythmic language corresponds with the
ritualistic character of the tragedy, and it 15 only at the peripeteia—the
highly dramatic scene between the Messenger and the Shepherd—that
the cast-iron regularity of the metrical scheme is abandoned in favour of
a more irregular treatment, with asymmetrical phrases reminiscent of the
composer's ‘Russian’ style.

The musical material of Oedipus Rex is derived from widely differing
sources—Handel and Bach, Verdi and the early nineteenth-century
Italian opera, and Russian music. But these heterogeneous materials
are moulded together into a new and entirely original synthesis in which
not a single bar could have been written by any other composer but
Stravinsky. Oedipus is the sole character who is shown in a consistent
psychological development—from the first aria *Liberi, vos liberabo',
expressing his self-assurance and supreme pride in the stiffness of the
vocal writing which is marked by a high tessitura and oriental melismas,
to the final *Natus sum quo nefastum est' where at last he recognizes the
enormity of his guilt and reaches the point of utter humiliation. His
thrice-repeated phrase rotating round the constituent notes of the B
minor chord (accompanied by shuddering strings and woodwind) and
his last ‘Lux facta est’ are characteristic examples of Stravinsky's use
of the simplest harmonic formulae in the service of an intense dramatic
expression. These and other instances in this work demonstrate the
extent to which he revitalizes seemingly outworn harmonic devices and
achieves a strikingly fresh effect by divesting them of their original tonal
function and grafting them on the living tissues of his personal style.

If Oedipus Rex was an illustration of the tragic aspect of Greek
mythology, the ballet Аройо Musagetes, written a year after, represents
the opposite world—the world of Arcadian bliss, unruffled calm, and
supreme serenity and beauty. It may be taken as an allegory on the

227 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

theme of artistic creation: Apollo inspires the muses and leads them to a
final apotheosis on Mount Parnassus. The composer intended the work
as a ballet blanc, devoid of all psychological, narrative and expressive
interest, with an abstract choreography based on the traditional
classical forms of pas d'action, pas de deux, and variation and using
simple scenery and monochrome antique costumes. Musically this
finds its counterpart in a predominantly diatonic style from which all
harmonic tension and conflict are banished, and the effect of extreme
calm and purity is heightened by the use of a string orchestra to which
the composer returned after twelve years of comparative neglect. In his
Chronicle of my Life! he writes of the utter delight he experienced in
employing the string medium whose original purpose, he says, was the
cultivation of canto, and he wished to compose music in which “еуегу-
thing evolved round the melodic principle’ making ‘the multi-sonorous
euphony of the strings penetrate even the furthest fibre of the poly-
phonic web'.

Perséphone, for which André Gide supplied the text, bears the sub-
title ‘melodrama’, a description not to be understood in the traditional
sense of music accompanying a spoken text but as indicating a hybrid
between opera and ballet, which combines music, singing, dancing,
miming, and spoken recitative. The work is divided into three parts—
The Abduction of Perséphone, Persephone in the Underworld and The
Rebirth of Persephone. In the treatment of the text Stravinsky is seen to
apply his by now customary method of repeating words and whole
sentences in order to build up his musical phrases, a striking instance of
which is the four-part chorus of Nymphs, Danaids, and Shades in the
second part. Similarly, to suit his rhythmic patterns he broke up the
words into syllables, to the discomfiture of Gide who, rightly, felt that
this method did violence to his prosody. This aerated style of writing,
which Stravinsky had already used in Oedipus Rex, lends the music an
extraordinary limpidity and transparency and the idiom is in an even
more pronounced diatonicism than in Apollo Musagetes, while the
rhythms are remarkably fluent and subtle but frequently of a regular
pattern, entire sections adhering to the identical metre. The melodic
invention is distinguished by a natural, unforced flow and almost the
whole of the work is marked by a remarkable tenderness of expression.

Stravinsky's love and admiration for Tchaikovsky, to which he first
gave expression in the opera Mavra, prompted him six years later to a
ballet Le Baiser de la Fée (The Fairy's Kiss) (1928), composed in com-
memoration of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the composer's death; the
choreographic action is taken from Hans Andersen's The Ice Maiden.

1 pp. 221-2.

THE 'SYMPHONY OF PSALMS' AND LATER WORKS 223

While in Mavra it is only the style which is reminiscent of Tchaikovsky,
the themes being Stravinsky's own, in the ballet the material is borrowed
in toto from the older composer and treated in something like the
manner of Pulcinella yet without the sense of parody and caricature
characteristic of that earlier score. ТЛе Fairy's Kiss foreshadows another
and far more successful work written by Stravinsky eight years later.
This was Jeu de cartes (Card Game) (1936), a ballet in *Three Deals',
whose choreographic plot revolves round a game of poker, with the
various characters represented by the chief cards. In the first two deals
the Joker, because of his ability to become any desired card, stirs
up all sorts of trouble, but in the last deal he is beaten by a Royal Flush
of Hearts which puts an end to his malice and knavery. In a sense this
ballet forms a counterpart to L’ Histoire du soldat which is also con-
cerned with the force of evil but closes with the triumph of the devil,
while Jeu de cartes ends with his defeat. Each of the three ‘deals’, which
follow without a break, is prefaced by the same 'processional' music,
intended to suggest the shuffling of the card pack; each of the main
movements, however, bears a distinct character of its own and although
the musical ingredients derive from a great variety of sources—Haydn
and Weber, Delibes and Tchaikovsky, Johann Strauss and Ravel—the
result is unmistakably original.

THE ‘SYMPHONY OF PSALMS’ AND LATER WORKS

We must now retrace our steps to the year 1930 to examine the first
major work in which Stravinsky gave eloquent expression to his deep-
seated religious feelings. The Symphony of Psalms originated in a
request by Sergey Kusevitsky to compose a work in celebration of the
fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Boston Symphony Orches-
tra; but a profounder and more exalted impulse is revealed in the
inscription ‘composed to the Glory of God’. In his Poetics of Music!
the composer ascribed to music the aim of promoting ‘a communion
with our fellow-men and with the Supreme Being’ which gives a
clear indication of the spiritual significance he perceived in music in
general and in sacred music in particular.

In choosing three of the Psalms from the Vulgate (38: 13-14; 39: 2-4;
150) Stravinsky was concerned with man’s relation to God in the spirit
of the Old Testament which, in contrast to the Christian doctrine, knows
of no redemption but only offers the consolation of hope and comfort in
the struggle and sufferings of life on this earth, in response to man’s
humble prayer and obedience. It is to this conception, compounded of
utter humility and severity, that the work gives unique expression,

1 Harvard, 1947, p. 18.

224 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

avoiding all undue dramatization of the text, toning down the impulse
of all subjective feeling, aspiring to a devout contemplation of divine
mystery and thus raising its message to the plane of universality. The
work is of an extraordinary compactness and terseness, lasting about
twenty minutes; and although there is a marked contrast in the structure
and texture of the three linked movements—‘Prayer’ (Prelude), ‘Thanks-
giving’ (Double Fugue) and ‘Hymn of Praise’ (Symphonic Allegro)—it
yet conveys the distinct feeling of a higher, spiritual, unity which is
largely achieved by the application of Stravinsky’s principle of simi-
larity. What contributes to this impression is a motive of two interlinked
minor thirds which in various permutations recurs in all three move-
ments, yet does not possess the role of germ cell from which, as in Les
Noces, all the essential material is evolved. In the opening movement
this basic motif is to be found mainly as an accompanying figure, in the
second movement it forms part of the subject of the instrumental fugue,
with the second minor third now inverted to a major sixth, and in the
finale it appears in the opening chorus ‘Laudate Dominum’:

Ex. 99
(1)

In the ‘Prayer’ the contrapuntal burden is carried Бу Ше orchestra
while the choral writing is predominantly homophonic and is marked,
first, by small intervals, as in the subdued *Exaudi orationem meum,
Domine’, sung on the two adjacent notes E and Е; but, as the prayer
grows more fervent, the intervallic steps become wider. The *Thanks-
giving’ is fugal, showing the composer at the height of his polyphonic
ingenuity, especially in the manner in which he achieves a close yet

THE ‘SYMPHONY OF PSALMS’ AND LATER WORKS 225

entirely effortless interlocking of the instrumental and choral subjects.
The most extensive piece is the ‘Hymn of Praise’ which is less con-
centrated in the structure than the two preceding movements but of a
more varied texture. The gulf that separates Stravinsky from musicians
of the past centuries is seen in the way in which he sets the opening
line, ‘Alleluia. Laudate Dominum" (Ex. 99(iii) ). Where other composers
would have burst forth in loud jubilations he preserves an attitude of
utter calm and humility and even where the text invites a pictorial
image, as in ‘Laudate Eum in cymbalis', the music remains subdued
and inward-glancing. This is not to say that the ‘Hymn of Praise’ is
entirely devoid of a feeling of joyful exultation and ecstatic fervour, but
its general tendency is towards the expression of tranquil, sublimated
emotions, and, significantly, it closes with the same ethereal choral
phrase with which it began.

After the Symphony of Psalms Stravinsky turned to a medium which,
except for a passing excursion in L’Histoire du soldat, he had not
attempted before—music for the solo violin. The immediate cause for
this awakening of a new interest was his acquaintance in early 1931
with the violinist Samuel Dushkin, for whom he composed the Violin
Concerto (1931) and the Duo Concertante for violin and piano (1932).
This task afforded the composer the opportunity for a more serious
study of the expressive and virtuosic possibilities of the violin, while
Dushkin collaborated with him in the matter of technical details.
The Concerto which, following established precedents, is in the
‘violinistic’ key of D, and shows in general character a certain affinity with
the Capriccio for piano and orchestra. Of the four movements, the
opening Toccata and the closing Capriccio are modelled on eighteenth-
century patterns (Bach and Mozart) and represent Spie/musik in the
true sense, displaying the composer’s delight in the sheer manipulation
of form, design, and texture for their own, purely musical sakes. In
the Toccata soloist and orchestra have interchangeable material. By
contrast, the Aria I and II are in an expressive lyrical vein, with much
sustained cantabile writing, and in the Aria II the melodic line dissolves
into rich yet most supple filigrees (runs and arpeggios). Roman Vlad!
perceives in the two arias Stravinsky's wistful longing for the full
expressiveness that music once possessed, an abandonment to a
nostalgic ‘recherche du temps perdu’. In the Duo Stravinsky explores
the potentialities of the violin in conjunction with the piano. The work
is a small-scale illustration of Stravinsky’s attraction to the ancient
Hellenic world, for in spirit and formal structure it is intended as a
musical counterpart to the pastoral poetry and scholarly art of antiquity,

1 Stravinsky (Turin, 1958; English translation 1960), pp. 115-16.

226 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

with its enforcement of strict rules and an iron discipline on lyrical
composition. A common theme runs through all the five movements,
lending them coherence and unity; it first occurs in the fifteenth bar of
the opening Cantilena and is given its most articulate shape in the slow
Eclogue II, the central piece of the work round which the other move-
ments are symmetrically grouped. The tranquil, serene lyricism of this
Eclogue is admirably matched by the bucolic charm of Eclogue I, which
opens with a delightful bagpipe episode, the bass of the piano playing a
patterned drone-like ostinato while the treble echoes in canon the chanter
tune of the violin, the note A being sustained as an inner pedal. The
brilliant Gigue is a perpetuo mobile and the final Dithyrambe is note-
worthy for its gently undulating piano phrases in three and four parts
and an expressive violin cantilena which reaches its climax in a passage
of truly ecstatic fervour.

In the Concerto for Two Pianos (1935) Stravinsky displays the same
delight in making music for its own sake, the same enjoyment in
solving specific stylistic and technical problems as characterized the
Violin Concerto and the Duo Concertante. It is on an imposing scale
consisting of four movements, of which the first is remarkable for the
trenchant force of its rhythmic invention and its extraordinary dynamic
impulse. The Notturno excels in delicate lyrical writing, the ensuing
Four Variations are a locus classicus of Ше composer’s unremitting
search for novel construction, and in the four-part fugue all existing
contrapuntal devices are brought into vivid play. As in Mozart’s
Sonata for Two Pianos (K.448), which served Stravinsky as a point of
departure, the two instruments share the same material, but the
twentieth-century musician goes a step further in achieving a rare

Ex. 100
()

[^ v]

THE ‘SYMPHONY OF PSALMS’ AND LATER WORKS 227

degree of taut, close-knit texture, frequently cutting up a thematic idea
and dividing it between the two instruments, a style of writing that
creates the impression of a contest between two wrestlers (Ex. 100).

A feature of the Four Variations is the absence of an explicitly stated
theme, the first variation starting with a zigzagging motive of wide
intervals which only gradually takes on a firmer outline until it achieves
its fully developed shape as the vigorous subject of the final fugue. And
for all the wide range of keys touched in the course of the music there is,
nevertheless, a strong pull towards the note E as the tonal pole of the
entire work, which opens and closes in a clear E major.

228 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

In the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto in,E flat (1938), so called after the
place in America where it was composed, Stravinsky aimed at a work
which, on his own admission, follows the style of Bach's Brandenburg
Concertos. Yet his indebtedness to Bach is largely confined to emulating
the general shapes of themes and to the choice of a chamber orchestra
of fifteen players. The strings and wind are treated in concertante style
but, unlike his model, Stravinsky makes no attempt at writing a proper
concertino.

In concluding this section we may attempt a brief definition of the
general significance of Stravinsky's achievement during the period of
the inter-war years. A number of points emerge. In the first place,
Stravinsky was one of the first to exploit Debussy's rediscovery of the
primary nature of music, i.e. the meaningful organization of sound, and
liberate it from the extra-musical superstructure of psychological,
philosophical, and metaphysical notions and ideas imposed on it by the
romantics. He saw his role in terms of the medieval master-craftsman
for whom his material was something to be worked upon according to
its inherent properties—hence Stravinsky's concentration on texture,
design, harmony, counterpoint, and instrumentation. Іп this he was
guided by a most highly developed sense of order, discipline, and
adjustment of means to ends—the principal characteristics of the
Apollonian spirit at whose shrine Stravinsky worshipped after his
Dionysian ‘Russian’ period. Few modern composers have displayed
greater technical ingenuity, skili, and resourcefulness in handling and
moulding the raw material of music. If, for a time, Stravinsky adopted
an almost inhuman, coldly objective detachment from all emotion and
feeling, this was only a passing phase. While it lasted Stravinsky showed
a marked predilection for an orchestral style sec, trenchant and
coruscating in which, significantly, wind instruments, piano, and
percussion occupied the forefront while the expressive strings were
relegated to the background. Later works such as Oedipus Rex, the
Symphony of Psalms, and Perséphone, while ostensibly aiming at an
*alienation', in fact refute Stravinsky's theoretical axiom that music
was incapable of expressing anything at all and that construction was
both its meaning and scope.

Neo-classicism appears, in retrospect, to have sprung from a deep-
rooted urge to fuse the East with the West by bringing Western styles
and techniques to bear upon an intrinsically Eastern or Russian mode
of thought. (Bartók pursued a similar aim after his discovery of Hun-
garian folk-song, see p. 275.) For example, the constant reiteration of
short melodic-rhythmic fragments, though much attenuated in his neo-
classical works, derives ultimately from Stravinsky's Russian heritage

SERGEY PROKOFYEV 229

and was grafted on to devices common to European music of several
centuries. As with Bartók, this process of assimilation resulted in
compositions of a highly original order, which present a panoramic
view of musical history reinterpreted and used as a potent fertilizer.
Within the neo-classical framework Stravinsky developed an astonishing
diversity of styles and manners of projection, due to his particular
approach which considers each new work as a new adventure, a novel
and isolated creation demanding a novel and appropriate mode of
treatment. Stravinsky is the perfect stylist, in the sense that to each new
work he brought a wholly apt and commensurate technical apparatus.
In spite of the kaleidoscopic changes in his style, changes comparable
to Picasso's zigzagging evolution, a basic unity can be discerned in
Stravinsky's music of the inter-war years, the corollary of a fully
integrated artistic personality which pervades and holds together the
complex and variegated character of his utterance. Lastly, he stands
almost unrivalled in the harnessing of a crystal-clear, penetrating, and
highly analytical intellect strictly controlling the conscious part of his
creative processes, to a rich, vivid, and most versatile imagination.
A whole generation of younger composers benefited from his widening
of the horizon, and this was particularly true of the French musicians
of the 1920s whose country Stravinsky had adopted as his physical and
spiritual home and where his personality and influence were, therefore,
most strongly felt.

SERGEY PROKOFYEV

Born a decade later than Stravinsky and in many ways his opposite
in musical character, Sergey Prokofyev was the enfant terrible of his
generation at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, where he studied com-
position with Lyadov and orchestration with Rimsky-Korsakov and
became, under Anna Esipova's tuition, a brilliant pianist of a kind
hitherto unknown, an athlete rather than a poet of the keyboard. An
interest in neo-classicism was first prompted by the visit of Max Reger
to St. Petersburg in 1906, when he conducted a programme of his own
works including the Serenade in G major, Op. 95. Prokofyev's Ten
Pieces for Piano (1908—13) reflect this interest, and so even more clearly
does the eighteenth-century pastiche of his Classical Symphony (1916-
1917). He also admired the orchestral music of Richard Strauss and
Aleksandr Skryabin, making a piano transcription of the first movement
of Le Divin Poéme; and both admirations are reflected in his own First
Piano Concerto (1912). The music of Debussy and the early work of
Stravinsky had little attraction for the young Prokofyev, whose extra-
ordinary musical fertility and rough, irreverent high spirits resembled

230 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

those of the young Hindemith and made him all but totally unacceptable
to the cultured and sophisticated members of the Dyagilev set. Even so
Prokofyev's Scythian Suite (Ala and Lolly) (1914-15) was clearly
prompted by the same contemporary movement of interest in the
Russian past (Skifstvo) as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which it rivals in
aggressive ‘modernism’ of harmony and rhythm. There was to be little
in Prokofyev's music comparable with the French sophistication, and
later the erudite historicism, which played civilizing, westernizing roles
in Stravinsky's musical development.

The role of iconoclast and rebel was indeed an important part of the
young Prokofyev's image of himself, and his reputation as composer
and performer was predominantly one of ruthlessness and physical
energy. Certainly the public found these qualities in the first three piano
concertos and the 7occata, overshadowing the delicate and very per-
sonal Sarcasms and Visions fugitives and the almost Mussorgskian
Tales of the Old Grandmother, all piano works written between 1912 and
1918. His first ballet Shut (The Buffoon, 1920), the cantata Semero ikh
(Seven, they are seven, 1918) and two of his first three operas reveal
how deeply Prokofyev was rooted in the literary and artistic world of
pre-revolutionary Russia. The cantata is the setting of a hermetic
text by Konstantin Balmont, while the libretto of Lyubov k trem apel-
sinam (Love for Three Oranges, 1921) is taken from the sardonic and
fantastic Gozzi and that of Ognenniy Angel (The Flaming Angel,
composed 1919—27 but first performed 1955) from the 'decadent
Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov. Only his /grok (The Gambler, 1915-16)
was based on a realistic story by Dostoevsky.

Prokofyev's musical language during the years which he spent outside
Russia (1917—32), though even more strongly diatonic in basic character
than Stravinsky's, was marked by jagged tonal shifts, which often
replaced traditional modulation; wide-spaced and deliberately angular
melodic patterns; aggressive harmonies formed by chromatic added
notes often with distinct bitonal implications; and most notably by
rhythms of whirlwind force and motoric regularity and persistence. The
devil-may-care humour, mordant satire and sheer physical excitement
of this music have much in common with those of the young Hindemith,
and also of the younger generation of French composers (Milhaud,
Poulenc) who were among his friends during the years he spent in Paris
(1923-32). Much later in life he was to write “Тһе cardinal virtue (or
sin, if you like) of my life has been the search for an original musical
language, a musical language of my own. I detest imitation; I detest
hackneyed methods. I always want to be myself.’' That the lyrical gift

! Quoted in T. V. Nestyev, Prokofyev (Moscow, 1957, Eng. trans. 1961, p. 466).

THE OLDER GENERATION IN FRANCE 231

which he cultivated consciously after his return to Russia in 1932 was
from the beginning part of his musical character is clear from the First
Violin Concerto (1916-17) and the Third Piano Concerto (1917-21)
among many other works. But it was obscured by the consciously harsh,
‘constructivist’ character of many of the works of Prokofyev's Parisian
days—the Second Symphony and the ballet Le Pas d'acier (both 1925)
and the Third Symphony (1929) in which the composer reworked themes
from the hysterical Flaming Angel. Prokofyev was in touch with Russian
musical life for almost ten years before he returned finally to live there.
There were performances of his works in Russia as early as 1923 and he
paid a visit there in 1927. As he became increasingly disillusioned with
what seemed to him the artificial nature and narrowly restricted appeal
of contemporary music in Western Europe, it was natural that he should
become more aware of the ties that bound him to his native country and
the possibilities that it promised him as a composer.!

THE OLDER GENERATION IN FRANCE

The musical scene in France between the two wars presented a confusing
but extremely vivid picture. There was the old guard consisting of
Fauré, Roussel, and Ravel, who were the last representatives of
Че troisième аре d’or’ in French music and, with the exception of
Fauré, belonged to the same generation as Debussy. In strong opposi-
tion ‘Les Nouveaux Jeunes’ were inspired by new ideals and, under the
collective name of ‘Les Six’, at first rallied round the figure of the ageing
Satie making him their involuntary chef d'école. Lastly, in the mid-
1930s a new group, “Га Jeune France’, in its turn reacted against the
supposedly excessive cosmopolitanism of the previous generation and
sought a regeneration of French music on national lines.

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) was seventy-three when the war ended,
but in his few remaining years he composed six chamber works, chamber
music having always been a particular interest, a few piano composi-
tions, and three song cycles. Ап exclusive and reticent musician,
Fauré had always been inclined to write for himself and a select circle
of connoisseurs rather than for the large public, and during his last years
he became even more discreet, subtle, and elliptical in his utterance.
This latest development was partly due to his total deafness which may
account for the fact—as it does in the case of Beethoven—that Fauré's
last works reveal a marked attitude of self-communion and a tendency
to explore to its furthest limits an esoteric and ascetic manner of
expression. Аз his English biographer says,? in the chamber works ‘the

1 On his career in the Soviet Union, see Chapter VIII.
2 Norman Suckling, Fauré (London, 1946), p. 118.

232 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

opening movements are vigorous without protestation, their finales
without effervescence; and the intervening andantes in particular distil
an atmosphere of peaceful intensity where every vibration is significant
without being insistent, by means of a sensitiveness of Ше mind's ear’.
Fauré's textures become extraordinarily sparse and transparent, the
harmony achieves a new simplicity, and the thematic material shows a
remarkable condensation. True, the long flowing melodic lines so
characteristic of his previous style still occur here and there, as in the
slow movements of the First Cello Sonata (1918) or the opening
movement of the Second Cello Sonata (1921), but they are more often
than not replaced by cellular melodic units, as in the second movement of
the Piano Quintet (1921) and the String Quartet (1924), a transcendental
work and, like his late songs, tenuous and elusive. In the works for
piano, such as the Fantaisie (1919), the keyboard writing is so designed
as to achieve a measure of coherence by means of such typically
Fauréan devices as scale passages, crossing and recrossing of the melodic
lines and harp-like arpeggios; but there are exceptions as seen in the
antiphonal treatment of piano and strings in the Trio (1924) which for
a composer approaching his eightieth year is remarkably fresh and
vivid. In the two song cycles, Mirages (1919) and L'Horizon chimérique
(1922), a setting of four poems by Jean de la Ville de Mirmont, Fauré
captures the evocative power of the text and the significance of individual
sentences with an unexampled artistry. These songs exhale an air of
aristocratic refinement and discretion, a civilized tranquillity in which
the underlying emotions are but vaguely sensed. Together with Roussel,
Fauré was the last great traditionalist of French music, embodying the
spirit of French culture in its purest form and combining it with a
classical serenity of an almost Hellenic quality.

Albert Roussel (1869-1937), who was a pupil of Vincent d'Indy and
for many years teacher at the Schola Cantorum, allied the serious out-
look of his master and the technical solidity and discipline of that
School to a sensibility that, though increasingly affected by the new
post-war spirit, never lost its refined and poetic qualities. Roussel was a
fastidious and highly self-critical artist who aimed “о achieve music
which is self-contained, music which is divorced from any illustrative
and descriptive elements and is free from any localization in place...
Far from wishing to write descriptive music, I constantly try to obliter-
ate from my mind the memory of objects and forms capable of being
translated into musical terms. I want my music to be nothing but
music.’ Whether Rousse] adopted this austere attitude under the
influence of the neo-classical Stravinsky or followed his own inclination

1 Quoted in Arthur Hoérée, Albert Roussel (Paris, 1937), p. 66.

THE OLDER GENERATION IN FRANCE 233

the fact is that, with advancing maturity, he was more and more given
to an abstract conception rare in a French musician, yet his individual
style remained strongly marked and manifested itself, above all, in a
highly developed rhythmic sense and a natural ability for polyphonic
writing. The majority of his post-war works reveal a rough-hewn,
granite-like quality which is in sharp contrast to the subtle and seductive
textures of Debussy or the highly ornate patterns of Ravel; and they
possess a directness of expression that makes its points without circum-
locution. Roussel was an unsentimental, powerful figure in whom there
was an element of the peasant and the long, piercing glance of the sailor.

His descriptive Pour une Féte de printemps (1920), with its romantic
and impressionistic features, was the last work of Roussel's to look back
to his previous style, and it is only the bitonal clash of the opening
chord that gives an indication of the direction in which the composer
was to progress. With the Second Symphony (1921) begins what has
been termed his ‘classical’ period when he discarded earlier influences,
chiefly Debussy's. This was followed by the Suite in F (1926) and
the Concerto for Small Orchestra (1927), both of which are examples
of Roussel's growing realization of his mature self which found com-
plete and masterful expression in the Third Symphony (1930) and the
Fourth Symphony (1934). The Third manipulates a basic five-note
theme with an extraordinary resourcefulness, and the entire work is
remarkable for its extreme formal compression, the taut, clear-cut
texture and its tremendous rhythmic force—the embodiment, it would
seem, of sheer energy. The Fourth Symphony is more detached in out-
look and its salient stylistic features are to be seen in a sinewy counter-
point and bare astringent harmonies (tritone, major sevenths, and the
chord of the eleventh) which are the result of the uncompromising part-
writing. The robust vitality of the opening movement is offset by the
poetic quality of the slow movement for which is reserved the main
emotional climax of the work, while the finale brings the crowning
affirmation of the music's predominant spirit.

If Roussel’s later orchestral works are characteristic of the classical
bent of his art, his stage works pursue a more varied stylistic course.
Раатйуай, an opera-ballet in two acts (1918), to a libretto by Louis
Laloy, deals with a barbaric episode in Indian history of the thirteenth
century and is based on Hindu scales employed both in the melody and
harmony and organically integrated into Roussel's own individual
style, which is expanded and enriched through his free conception of
modality and a more varied and more supple application of rhythmic
patterns. In the classical ballet, La Naissance de la lyre (1924), which has
a scenario after Sophocles, the chief basis of the material is the ancient

234 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Greek modes. A second ballet with а classical subject, Bacchus et
Ariane (1930), is characterized by a vigorous rhythmic style and clear,
sharply defined melodic lines, while the orchestration echoes at times
the exquisite lights and shades of Debussy's impressionism. Aeneas
(1935), the composer's third classical ballet, is exceptional in that it is
more choral than orchestral music, and contains a percussion part for
piano in which Roussel pays homage to Stravinsky. He always wanted
to write an opera in a light and humorous vein which he achieved in the
delightful though perhaps rather risqué comedy, Le Testament de la
Tante Caroline (1933), which stands apart from the canon of his works.

Roussel showed no natural feeling for the piano. His Piano Concerto
(1927) is an introspective and technically forbidding work in which the
solo instrument largely explores the lower registers. The Cello Concerto
(1936), his last orchestral composition, resembles a concerto grosso in
that the orchestra is more individually treated than is usual in a con-
certo. Of Roussel's post-war chamber music, the String Quartet (1932)
and String Trio (1937)! stand out for the combination of a taut logical
thought with a fastidious taste and a highly refined sensibility.

Roussel’s chief achievement lies in the solidity and distinction of his
craftmanship with which he upheld the precepts of the Schola Can-
torum; in his purely musical approach to matters of form, design, and
texture, and in the way in which, emerging from the impressionism of
his early and middle periods, he fashioned a powerful personal style
that is deeply rooted in the time-honoured traditions of French culture
and art. Like Fauré, he belonged to what has been aptly called ‘the
silver age of Latin civilization',? but being a younger man than Fauré,
he survived into a time which saw the dissociation and even disruption
of traditional values.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), the youngest member of the older
generation, continued to enjoy the world-wide reputation which he had
established for himself by his pre-war works,? but in his own country he
was entirely out of favour with the young group of “Les Six’ who re-
proached his music for excessive refinement and ornateness, regarding
him as an exponent of obsolete aesthetics. Ravel felt a strong resentment
at losing his position among the leaders of musical fashion and strove
hard towards a transformation and even rejuvenation of his style and
technical methods. The results, however, were not altogether convincing.
Ravel had done his best work before 1920 and, although his extra-
ordinary refinement of taste, his perfect sense of form and his most

1 From which the first movement is recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x.
? Martin Cooper, French Music. From the death of Berlioz to the death of Fauré (London,
1951), p. 214. 3 See Chapter II, particularly pp. 101—5.

THE OLDER GENERATION IN FRANCE 235

fastidious and brilliant workmanship were as much in evidence as of
old, his creative energy now began to show tell-tale signs of impatience,
strain, and fatigue. As one of his French biographers implies,! Ravel
was touching the boundaries of his nature—boundaries around which
the very perfection of his technique had created all but impassable
barriers. This is already noticeable in the first of his post-war composi-
tions, the choreographic poem La Valse (1920), an evocation of the
atmosphere of a Second Empire ballroom in which an apotheosis of
the Viennese waltz is linked with the suggestion of a fantastic whirl of
destiny. Yet the febrile character of this danse macabre really sprang
from Ravel’s dissatisfaction with himself and the work is hardly more
than a brilliant technical essay in veiled pastiche, of which he was a
master unrivalled in skill and resourcefulness. In the Sonata for Violin
and Cello (1922), which is a cyclic work, the music is reduced to
essentials, the composer almost completely abandoning tbe fascination
of harmony and concentrating on purely melodic writing, the effect
of which is often harsh and angular. In the Sonata for Violin and
Piano (1927) the two instruments share some of the material, but Ravel
emphasizes their fundamental incompatibility by making them not co-
operate, but contrast with each other. The second movement is a blues
and shows the composer following the contemporary fashion for jazz.
The popular Bolero (1928), originally conceived as a ballet for Ida
Rubinstein, is a tour de force in the achievement of a long orchestral
crescendo which becomes more highly coloured with each return of
the two themes; there is no modulation and no development but a
persistent reiteration of the same ideas. The Piano Concerto in G
major and the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (both 1931) show a
distinct contrast in conception. The former is in the style of a magnified
chamber concerto (Ravel originally intended to call it a divertissement)
while the latter, almost in defiance of the limitation imposed on him by
having to write a solo part for the left hand only (for the one-armed
Viennese pianist, Paul Wittgenstein), is marked by a highly elaborate
virtuoso element. In both works the influence of jazz is conspicuous,
but through the light-hearted G major Concerto there also stalk the
ghosts of Couperin, Scarlatti, Mozart, and Fauré. In the left-hand
Concerto, which is a far more inspired and more forceful work, it is
Liszt and the sombre Spain of Mérimée whose echoes are heard.

It was largely in the opera, L'Enfant et les sortiléges (1925), to
Colette's fantastic and exquisite children's tale, that Ravel succeeded
in recapturing something of his former self and rediscovered something
of the enchanting world of his first opera L'Heure espagnole. In the

1 Roland Manuel, Maurice Ravel (Paris, 1938; Eng. ed. London, 1947), p. 86.

236 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

music of the Princess there appears again that note of shy, tender,
yet sophisticated lyricism by which the composer always attempted
to conquer his innate reluctance to express natural, full-blooded
sentiments; and each of the characters—animals and pieces of furni-
ture—is succincdy and most aptly delineated: the sardonic humour
of the Teapot in ironic jazz rhythms, the malevolence of the Little Old
Man in short acidulated phrases and the mewing of the Two Cats and
the croaking of the Frogs, in imitative music of the most brilliant inven-
tion. The vocal writing in this opera is of a remarkable flexibility and
predominates over the orchestra which, for all its virtuosity, is chiefly
characterized by light, aerated sonorities. Thematic development is all
but abandoned and the continuity of the recitative is frequently broken
up by arioso passages. Except for the music of the Princess, L’Enfant
is perhaps Ravel’s furthest attempt to rid himself of all subjective feeling
and portray the world of things as they appear in objective reality.

ERIK SATIE AND ‘LES SIX’

While Ravel tried to adapt himself to the spirit of the 1920s, no such
adjustment was needed by Erik Satie (1866-1925), the only member of
Debussy’s generation who all his life had held high the flag of heterodoxy
and rebellion. As a composer Satie was a minor figure, the intrinsic value
of whose work is far outstripped by his significance as a prompter of
tendencies which younger composers moulded into an artistic creed.!
He was an eccentric, an intellectual clown, a deliberate hoaxer and
mystifier—in short, an enfant terrible who under his clown’s mask con-
cealed, however, a certain child-like tenderness and gentle melancholy.
Throughout his life he had a horror of the style of the Establishment,
which was synonymous for him with stagnant and staid academic
authority. Satie thus fitted ideally into those Parisian circles before and
after the First World War in which "l'esprit frondeur'—the Frenchman's
instinctive resistance to all authority—was assiduously cultivated.

In 1915 Satie met the young Cocteau who combined in his person the
roles of poet, dramatist, painter, and animator and leader of the
literary avant-garde, and this encounter marked the beginning of
Satie's belated fame. For Cocteau found in his music all those elements
that corresponded with his own novel aesthetic ideals—simplicity,
brevity, ironic humour, unromantic melancholy, and a complete absence
of those ‘half-lights, muslin, enervating charms and scents’ with which
he reproached the symbolists and impressionists. Cocteau decided to
collaborate with Satie and the fruit of their united efforts was the
ballet Parade (1916), for which the poet wrote the scenario and Picasso

! For Satie's earlier music see p. 93.

ERIK SATIE AND ‘LES SIX" 237

designed the sets. The scene is a booth at a fair before which perform a
Chinese juggler, a couple of acrobats, a young American girl who is a
parody of the type then made popular by transatlantic films, and three
showmen or managers whose antics give a foretaste of what the public
are to see inside. The audience and the majority of critics were shocked
by what they supposed to be a manifestation of Cubism in the choreo-
graphy and the music; yet in reality the latter is disconcertingly simple
and naive, consisting mostly of two-bar phrases which are monotonously
repeated over and over again. The acrobats perform to circus music, the
first manager is given a theme evocative of the bustle of a fairground,
and jazz music accompanies the incredible feats executed by the
American girl. The orchestra contains such ‘instruments’ as а type-
writer, a revolver, a ship's siren, a Morse apparatus and the like, which
were added by Satie partly to give the work an exaggerated realistic
touch and partly to raise the hackles of the audience. Whatever the
intrinsic value of Satie's music, Parade was certainly a landmark in the
history of the modern theatre. The ballet Mercure (1924), subtitled
‘Poses plastiques', for which Picasso again provided the décor, deals
with an adventure of the Greek god and Satie's contribution repre-
sents only a subordinate part of the spectacle—the work was in fact
called “а painter's ballet'. The music is rather academic in treatment,
though it recalls the atmosphere of the circus and the music-hall which
was in deliberate contrast to the high degree of ingeniousness and
sophistication shown by Picasso's scenic construction. The surrealistic
ballet Reláche (1924), to a scenario by Francis Picabia, carries to what
then seemed the limit, the spirit of aesthetic nihilism, the incon-
sequential and crazy plot being seemingly devoid of all intelligible
meaning. For this Satie solemnly wrote a series of serious and dry
dance movements which are, however, occasionally relieved by popular
themes selected for their “еуосайуе” quality.

One of Satie's principal aims was to achieve authenticity and simpli-
city of expression and to cultivate *dépouillement' —the stripping down
of the music to bare essentials—and this led him in 1920 to compose his
‘musique d’ameublement’, ‘furnishing music’, which originated in a
remark by Matisse that “һе visualized an art without distracting subject-
matter and comparable to a good armchair’. The occasion was provided
by an exhibition of paintings at which a play by Max Jacob was staged
for which Satie wrote accompanying music. This consisted of well-
known fragments from Thomas's Mignon and Saint-Saéns's Danse
macabre juxtaposed with simple isolated themes of Satie's own inven-
tion, in stereotyped repetition and reminiscent of the patterns of a wall-
paper or carpet. It was intended as mere background music and the

238 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

composer went around urging the visitors to talk and not to take any
notice of what was being played. Satie applied the same kind of writing
to the film music he wrote for the entr'acte іп Re/áche.

Satie always maintained that in the setting of a text music should
never usurp to itself the dramatic and narrative elements but furnish
only a suitably coloured background, and he provided the best illustra-
tion of this self-denying ordinance in the cantata Socrate (1919), a
setting for four female voices and chamber orchestra of excerpts taken
from Victor Cousin's French translation of passages from the Platonic
dialogues. The voices progress in continuous chant-like lines, with a
monotony that is intentional, while the instrumental parts proceed in
often repeated figures (Ex. 101).

The quiet uneventful flow of this music is occasionally punctuated by
the expression of muted emotion, particularly in the last part—'The
Death of Socrates’. The work, which in Satie's words is ‘an act of
piety . . . a humble homage’, is his masterpiece and the apotheosis of
the style he had developed in reaction to the luscious harmonic
language and the enervating melodic refinement of impressionism.
It may be said to have paved the way for the neo-classicism of Stravin-

Ex. 101

SOS, ретин dM жз ax
^ В Е E

ou bien je pour -rais

ERIK SATIE AND ‘LES SIX’ 239

(Or I could also say that she fell from the rock of the Areopagus, for it is to that
spot that some transfer the scene.)

sky and other composers in the following years. Although Satie
belonged to no group, he had always manifested enthusiasm for what
was novel and adventurous in the music of his time, and this explains
why in the last four years of his life he became the champion of four
composers who were brought to him by Milhaud and who became
known as ‘L’Ecole d’Arcueil’—so called after the Parisian suburb where
Satie lived. The most distinguished member of this group was Henri
Sauguet (b. 1901) whose music showed the influence of Satie in its easy
fluency and a certain wit. Spontaneous and unpretentious, it eschews
profundity, seeking to please by its gracefulness and polished charm.

Far more important than ‘L’Ecole d’Arcueil’ was the group of six
young musicians who after the first performance of Parade had
gathered around Satie as the embodiment of the new spirit, a spirit of
invigoration and rejuvenation at which they all aimed in their different
ways. In 1926 the critic Henri Collet dubbed them ‘Les Six’, an analogy
to the Russian ‘Five’. ‘Les Six’ consisted of Louis Durey (b. 1888) who
had already left the group, Germaine Tailleferre (b. 1892), Darius
Milhaud (b. 1892), Arthur Honegger (1892-1955), Francis Poulenc
(1899-1963) and Georges Auric (b. 1899). If they formed a group at
all, with common aims and aspirations, this was only true in the early
1920s, after which each composer developed in his own individual
manner. Moreover much of the aesthetic doctrine considered as charac-
teristic of ‘Les Six’ belonged more properly to Poulenc and Auric
who, unlike the older members of the group, came to Satie without
being bound by any previous loyalties. The literary mouthpiece of
‘Les Six’ was Cocteau who provided them with a brilliant manifesto,
Le Coq et l'Harlequin (1918), in which he proclaimed their artistic
tenets and elevated the reluctant Satie to the position of a chef
d'école. The Cock of the title represented the new progressive forces,
while the Harlequin stood for everything that in Cocteau's view was

1 English translation by Rollo Myers (London, 1921).

240 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

antiquated and reactionary in the arts. What united ‘Les Six’ for a brief
space of time was their declared antagonism to romanticism and
impressionism, their emphasis on simplicity, clarity and terseness of
expression, and the avoidance of all pretentiousness and boredom in
music. They aimed at a masculine art and, stimulated by the enthu-
siasms for Negro art among contemporary painters, they discovered in
jazz what they perceived to be a potent antidote to the vague, static
rhythms and the sophisticated harmonic refinement of impressionism.
Poulenc and Auric in particular manifested a strong predilection for the
music of the circus, of the fairground and the music-hall in which,
according to Cocteau, they looked ‘not for the charm of clowns and
negroes but for a lesson in equilibrium. This school which teaches hard
work, strength, the exact use of force and a functional elegance is a real
haute école’. ‘Les Six’ deliberately cultivated the banal, the common-
place, and the brutal, yet at the same time they loved the prettiness of
musiquette, writing pastiches in the style of eighteenth-century French
ballet music and of French opera of the mid-nineteenth century, and
frequently all these disparate elements were amusingly but incon-
gruously brought together in one and the same work.

Durey and Tailleferre are the least significant members of the group.
Durey, after initially embracing the new aesthetic tenets, soon dis-
sociated himself from them and his later style showed an affinity with
that of Debussy and Ravel. Tailleferre wrote for the most part small-
scale, unpretentious, and rather short-winded works possessing, how-
ever, a typically Parisian chic and elegance. The two leading figures of
‘Les Six’ were Milhaud and Honegger. Milhaud, who was born at
Aix-en-Provence, was, as he suggests in his autobiography, conditioned
by Latin-Mediterranean culture, and as a young man he displayed
a strong aversion to German music, notably Wagner’s. Latin clarity of
form and Latin elegance and conciseness of melody combine in him
with an inveterate love for harmonic and contrapuntal experiments, and
he made polytonality, both in the harmonic sense and in the sense of
several diatonic melodies being superimposed on one another, a
characteristic feature of his style. Milhaud’s approach to his material is
purely musical, and one would be tempted to describe him as a ‘natural’,
were it not that he possesses an extraordinarily sharp musical intelli-
gence which permits him to essay an immense variety of genres with
great self-confidence, though he lacks the self-criticism characteristic of
less fertile composers. Writing with immense speed he has produced
an oeuvre enormous in volume but very uneven in invention, although
in technical craftsmanship he proves himself unfailingly resourceful

1 Darius Milhaud, Notes sans musique (Paris, 1949; English translation, 1952, p. 21).

ERIK SATIE AND 'LES SIX" 241

and accomplished. During the 1920s and early 1930s Milhaud was
attracted by extraordinarily various ideas and trends which account for
the curious zigzag course his style pursued—neo-classicism and South
American music, jazz and African ballet, ritual cult and classical-drama.

From 1917 to 1919 Milhaud was attached to the French Embassy at
Rio de Janeiro and this afforded him the opportunity to study Brazilian
folk-music on the spot. The creative result of these studies is seen in the
orchestral piece, Le Beuf sur le toit (1920)—the title derives from a
popular Brazilian song used in it—in which Milhaud transcribed
tangos, maxixes, sambas and a Portuguese fado linking them with a
theme of his own invention which recurs, rondo-like, a number of times.
Cocteau later wrote for it a choreographic scenario that is enacted in an
American bar during the Prohibition period. In the ballet La Création du
monde (1923), with choreography based on African mythology about
the creation of the world, the jazz element is pervasive:

Ex. 102

Тері.

Tromb.

Saxophone
іп Е

| )

D.B.

ІШЕ чыз

() кэй, на
Еа ЖЕКС A
[4 таи пее ни

242 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Milhaud, who wrote it after a visit to Harlem during his American
tour in 1922, adopted for it the identical orchestra of seventeen instru-
ments found in the Negro jazz bands of the time. Cing Symphonies
for small orchestra (1917-23), Machines agricoles (1919), and Catalogue
des fleurs (1920) are conceived in a predominantly neo-classic style. The
symphonies are marked by a rudimentary kind of counterpoint often
approaching heterophony and by polytonal passages in several simul-
taneous keys as, for instance, in the third movement of Symphony
No. 2:

Ex. 103

Г — Ди «f
EC
үе mus
2... БЕНЕН -

ІНЕ

һе” |

С.А.

Вп,

Celli

E
| |

ERIK SATIE AND ‘LES SIX’ 243

The harmonic idiom is rather acid but the melodic writing is frequent-
ly punctuated by simple folk-song-like themes of a Mediterranean
character. Machines agricoles and Catalogue des fleurs are settings for
voice and chamber orchestra of descriptions, respectively, of agricul-
tural implements and flowers from a seedsman’s catalogue, and they
combine a pastoral vein with an impersonal objective expression.
Milhaud intended them not as a joke but in the spirit of Virgil’s
Georgics; yet an element of incongruity cannot be denied to exist
between the dry, factual nature of the text and the inventive musical
treatment (Ex. 104).

One of Milhaud’s finest works is the opera Les Malheurs d’Orphée
(1925), a modern adaptation of the classical myth in which Orpheus is a
healer in the Camargue and Eurydice a gypsy girl; the music has the
luminosity as well as the intensity of the Provençal landscape and the
economy of means employed is most remarkable. In Le Pauvre Matelot
(1926), ‘une complainte en trois actes’, which is Milhaud's best-known
opera, Cocteau, who was the librettist, derived the subject from an
incident reported in a newspaper, and treated in a realistic, almost
veristic manner. А sailor returning home incognito passes himself off
to his wife as a rich friend of her husband and is murdered by her for
his money. In strong contrast to the character of the action Cocteau's
language imitates the detached and impersonal style of sailors' tales, and
this is matched by Milhaud's setting which is completely stylized and
objective and frequently creates an ‘alienation’ effect such as Stravinsky
achieved by similar means іп L’ Histoire du soldat and Oedipus Rex. In
the three miniature operas, L'Enlévement d'Europe, L'Abandon d' Ariane,
and La Déliverance de Thésée (1927), which together last about thirty
minutes, Milhaud followed the vogue fashionable at that time in
Germany for short one-act operas. The antique myths are treated in a
half poetic, half ironic, and off-hand vein, with a modern tango in the
second and jazz rhythms in the third opera. Christophe Colomb (1928),
to a libretto by his friend Paul Claudel, is Milhaud's most ambitious and
spiritually most profound stage-work of the inter-war period, in which
he achieved a remarkable fusion of a medieval mystery play with a
modern opera-oratorio, a fusion deserving the epithet *unique'. The
action concerns the life of Christopher Columbus as seen from the point
of view of posterity; and to enhance and intensify the stage drama, a
cinematographic film duplicates the stage scenes on a screen, presenting
images which vary in their degree of verisimilitude to the action,
ranging from a more or less accurate reproduction of the stage scenes to
unreal, dream-like pictures which concentrate on the poetic essence of
the subject. Accompanied by percussion, a Narrator, reading from an

1918-1939

MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE:

Le Begonia

Ex. 104

244

T
| | E
ШЕП У WD

|
|

fleur trés double,

Au-ro - ra,
rail,

de co-

Be-go -ni - a

| 1
M в a

|)
al

Voice
Vin.
con sord.
Vd
con sord.

Voice
Vin
Vcl.
D.B
D.B

(Begonia Aurora, very double flower, apricot mixed with coral, very attractive

Shades, unusual and interesting.)

ERIK SATIE AND 'LES SIX' 245

old chronicle, explains and links the twenty-seven scenes in a strictly
rhythmical recitation in which a speaking chorus frequently joins. There
is a numerous cast of singers but, with the exception of Columbus and
Isabella of Spain, these parts are all subsidiary and the singing chorus is
given the most important musical sections. Milhaud set Ше text to
grave, sombre, and exalted music, rather in the manner of a classical
oratorio, and effectively contrasts lyrical and epic elements with the
dramatic. The vocal style oscillates between recitative-like declamation
and arioso, while the predominantly diatonic character of the instru-
mental themes is concealed behind a bitonal and polytonal treatment.
Thus, in the nineteenth scene, Че Rédempteur', one orchestral part
consists of no fewer than seven superimposed thirds, another part
moves chromatically in block harmonies and a third part has a bell-like
ostinato to play; the first chorus sings an independent part in octaves
while the second chorus is given a five-part organum (Ex. 105).

Such tremendous complexities—and they are also to be found in
many of his later works—are difficult to reconcile with Milhaud's de-
clared aversion to German music. In fact Christophe Colomb and some
of his subsequent operas such as Maximilien (1930) and Medée (1938)
show an affinity with the ideals of the German expressionism rather
than with Milhaud's own ideals of clarity, simplicity, and economy of
means and attempt ‘not to render the visible but to render visible’ the
individuals deep-seated irrational instincts and drives. Yet in his
chamber music and song cycles with orchestra of the same period
(String Quartets nos. 5-9, 1920-35; Trois chansons de troubadour, 1936;
Les quatre éléments and Trois élégies, both 1938) Milhaud produced
music which, despite harmonic astringencies and complicated polytonal
passages, demonstrates that aspect of his artistic make-up which finds
expression in a delicate and often alluring Latin lyricism.?

Arthur Honegger, the son of Swiss parents but born and brought up
in France, shows in both his musical personality and in his aesthetic
outlook a mixture of German and French traits. It is significant that
he displayed no great sympathy for the anti-emotional, ‘objective’
tendencies of “Тез Six' to which he adhered only during the early
1920s, nor did he share the interest in the music of the fairground and
music-hall so characteristic of Poulenc and Auric. Unlike the other
members of this group, he favoured large-scale architectural designs
and linear polyphony; and, so far as his stage works are concerned, he
showed a strong predilection for grave, tragic subjects treating them in a
statuesque monumental fashion, yet at the same time revealing a highly
developed sense of dramatic gesture and theatrical effectiveness.

1 As in the slow movement of no. 6, recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x.

MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

246

Ex. 105

Chor. I

tus!

Sanc

=
D
в

REY
Ви

Chor. П

tus!

Sanc -

SH
8 е 8

Orch.

а "n
ШШ,

(y QI КҮ ШІ |
LLL in ІІ LLLI ІШІ

а N

—

5-4

e
8
>
D
о
Я
e
Nn

248 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Honegger was comparatively slow in developing a personal style.
In his early works (First String Quartet, 1917, and two Violin Sonatas,
1918 and 1919, respectively) he is seen to oscillate between homophonic
writing and a complex contrapuntal manner, a dichotomy which was to
persist though the demarcation between the two styles was to grow
less clear-cut in his maturity. A more personal note is revealed in his
Pastoral d'été for chamber orchestra (1920) which is unpretentious and
direct in its appeal and thus embodies one of the chief tenets of “ез
Six'. It is based on two themes, one lyrical and the other bucolic, and
displays a relatively simple texture in which a rhythmic ostinato serves
to generate the atmosphere of a pastoral idyll. Another aspect of
Honegger's musical character is shown in Pacific 231 (1923) and Rugby
(1928) both of which are symphonic movements with an illustrative
tendency, though the composer disclaimed any descriptive intentions.
Pacific 231 resembles in its form a figured chorale and one of its salient
features lies in the fact that, while the metronomical speed progressively
diminishes, the metric units are filled with increasingly more notes. The
piece translates the exciting visual impression created by a train engine
of 300 tons hurtling down the track at 75 miles per hour and captures
the sheer physical exhilaration aroused Бу this spectacle. Though
Honegger was probably the first to have attempted it in music, this
intoxication with speed and the impersonal beauty of mechanical objects
had been extolled as early as 1911 by the Italian Futurists. In Rugby,
sport and physical movement are made the subject for musical treatment
though in this Honegger was anticipated by Martin in his Half Time
(1925). The work hardly varies in speed and uses a swinging theme as its
main idea. Yet another and more intrinsic side of Honegger's per-
sonality is shown in the Symphony in Three Movements (1930)—
music of great muscular strength, rhythmic vigour and lean texture.
The String Quartets Nos. 2 and 3 (both 1936) display the same charac-
teristics as the Symphony but combine with their close formal control
and cogent thematic thinking a large measure of contrapuntal skill.
Honegger prefers to set the various themes against one another (mostly
in the recapitulation) rather than exploit any motivic kinship between
them. In the finale of Quartet No. 3 he appears to flirt with dode-
caphony, as illustrated in its opening:

Ex. 106
Allegro

ERIK SATIE AND ‘LES SIX’ 249

but he was too deeply anchored in tonality to go further in his experi-
mentation with serialism, and the movement closes in an unambiguous
E major.

Honegger wrote numerous stage works in the majority of which he
aimed at combining an appeal to large unsophisticated audiences with
an interest for the educated music lover and professional musician. They
are large frescos of a static, monumental character, whose subjects are
drawn from the Bible, Greek tragedy and French medieval history.
The best known of these is Le Roi David (1921) which was originally
written as incidental music to a play by René Morax but later trans-
formed into a Symphonic Psalm in three parts—in fact, a dramatic
oratorio in which a Narrator describes the intervening stage action.
Honegger had not yet quite found himself in this work and the stylistic
sources on which he draws are of the most heterogeneous kind:
Handelian counterpoint and folk-song-like melodies, exotic, oriental-
sounding music and Bachian chorale, simple diatonic harmonies and
polytonality. But whatever Honegger’s borrowings, the whole is more
than its constituent parts and the composer succeeds in re-creating the
spirit and atmosphere of the Old Testament with an impressive vivid-
ness and directness of expression. The music alternates between harsh,
barbaric grandeur and lyrical simplicity best exemplified in the various
choral psalms and solo numbers. Thus, the ‘Song of David the Shepherd"
employs a vocal melody of a simple diatonic character—combined,
however, with chromatic harmonies in the orchestra, while in the
*Lament of Gilboa' oriental arabesques and melismas are used for an
expressive purpose:

Ex. 107
Largamente

250 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

The ‘Invocation of the Witch of Endor' shows the composer as a
master of suggestive instrumental evocation, while the *Dance before
the Ark’ is a choral movement of tremendous vitality and primitive
corybantic power. Judith (1925)! was also originally conceived as inci-
dental music for a play by Morax, though subsequently Honegger
turned it into a three-act opera. The subject, which is taken from the
well-known biblical story of Judith and Holofernes, is set to music
remarkable for its evocation of a stark primitive atmosphere, notably
by means of highly dramatic choruses, and among the chief devices
used for characterization of the protagonists are oriental melismas and
psalmodic melodies with a marked modal tendency.

Compared with Le Roi David, the opera shows a far more homo-
geneous stylistic character. Honegger's most dramatic opera is un-
questionably Antigone (1927) whose glowing intensity of expression
stands at the opposite end to the hieratic grandeur of Stravinsky’s
Oedipus Rex. Cocteau's libretto, freely adapted from the tragedv of
Sophocles, strictly observes the three Aristotelian unities and is most
direct in its language. In character with this tragic subject the music is
marked by violent dissonances and atonal-sounding polyphonic
writing; the individual scenes are firmly held together by a close-knit
symphonic structure. The treatment of the text avoids the traditional
recitative which is replaced by a word-inspired melodic line such as the
composer had already attempted in Judith and which is comparable to
Jandéek’s realistic speech-song and Pizzetti’s declamatory arioso.
Jeanne d'Arc au bücher (Joan of Arc at the stake) (1935) is a vast and
spectacular stage oratorio in which Paul Claudel aimed at a synthesis
of ancient mystery play, chanson de geste and modern drama. Honegger's
music possesses the immediate graphic quality of a film but it more
often accompanies than interprets the action.

Francis Poulenc and Georges Auric were the youngest members of
the ‘Les Six’ and stood, as has been said, closest to the aesthetics of
Satie which they even carried a step further. Both composers gained an
early reputation as musical clowns who wrote with tongue in cheek.
Both were soon dubbed ‘les sportifs de la musique’, owing to the robust-

! See pl. V(a).

РГАТЕ V

HONEGGER'S JUDITH, 1925 (see p. 250)

A scene from the original production at the People's Theatre, Darmstadt

KRENEK’S JONNY SPIELT AUF, 1927 (see p. 340)

The station scene from the original production at the Neues Theater, Leipzig

ERIK SATIE AND 'LES SIX' 251

ness of the sentiments expressed and a sense of physical hustle and
bustle which emanates from their compositions. Poulenc felt the
pull of several influences—in the first place Satie's and in varying
degrees those of Chabrier, Ravel, and Stravinsky. Yet, as he matured,
his style developed an unmistakable personal cachet compounded of
playfulness and gravity, of simplicity and sophistication, while some of
his compositions exhale the flavour of Ча vieille France' lending them
a certain nostalgic charm. In his music spontaneous melodic invention
and a well-developed sense of pointed rhythmic structure are allied to a
neat and deft craftsmanship. Poulenc's preference was for the smaller
forms. He was eighteen when in the wake of Europe's ‘discovery’ of
American jazz he wrote the Rhapsodie négre (1917) and this was soon
followed by the Mouvements perpétuels (1918), three pieces for piano
which derive their title from the fact that each is based on a rhythmic
ostinato figure which is almost incessantly repeated. They are simple
two-part inventions of an unpretentious but vivid charm, with bitonality
as a characteristic feature. An effective interpreter of his own piano
music, Poulenc wrote a great number of pieces for the instrument
among which the Sept Nocturnes (1935) must be reckoned as the most
important; a tender and delicate melancholy (nos. 1 and 4) and calm
serenity (no. 6) are matched by the expression of ironic humour (no. 2)
and the exhilaration engendered by rapid physical movement (no. 5).
Some of his vocal chamber music reveals perhaps best the two pro-
minent aspects of Poulenc's artistic personality. Іп Cocarde (1919),
to poems by Cocteau which are intended as parodies of the style of the
French Symbolists, the music perfectly matches the spirit of the words
in a humorously inconsequential manner, the scoring for violin, cornet,
trombone, bass drum and triangle imitating the fortuitous ensembles
found in Parisian music-halls and dance-halls. On the other hand, Ле
Bestiaire for voice, string quartet, flute, clarinet, and bassoon (1919),
six settings of animal verses by Guillaume Apollinaire, is remarkable
for the blend of gentle irony and prettiness and for the delicate and
pointed texture in which each note seems to stand in its right place
(Ex. 108).

The individual songs are of the utmost brevity, with ‘Га Sauterelle’
extending to no more than four bars. In the ballet Les Biches (1923)
Poulenc conjures up partly the vieille France of the eighteenth century
(Rondeau and Adagietto), partly the spirit of the jazz age (Rag-
Mazurka), while the exquisitely wrought Concert champétre for
harpsichord and orchestra (1928) echoes the world of Chambonniéres
and Couperin. Outstanding among Poulenc's religious works is the
Mass for unaccompanied chorus (1937), which in its marked purity of

MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

252
"Ex. 108

L'Ecrevisse

есігін!

О!

bien chanté
- cer -ti- tude,

ux,

do
In

ERIK SATIE AND ‘LES SIX"

ПЕЙ

|
Is
u

|
|

nous nous

|
|

PNY

s doux

trè

cre - visses

me s'en vont

com

(Uncertainty, O! my delight, you and I go away as crayfish do.)

254 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

style and serenity of spirit provides a demonstration of the fact that this
composer was at times able to discard his tongue-in-cheek approach and
probe into more profound emotions. The Litanies à la Vierge Noire de
Rocamadour (1936), and Quatre Motets pour un temps de pénitence
(1938-39) belong to this same serious and often impressive vein.

Like Poulenc, Auric showed a precocious talent, composing, it has
been stated, more than 300 songs and piano pieces between the ages of
twelve and sixteen. His early admiration of Ravel led him first to
imitate the former's style but subsequently Auric came under the
influence of Satie and, partly, Stravinsky when he adopted Satie's
precept that the largest measure of audacity lies in simplicity. Thus, in
the Huit Poémes (1920), settings of wittily ironic verses by Cocteau, the
voice part is formed by a straightforward diatonic melodic line, rather
in the style of a French folk-song or popular tune, and is embedded in
an equally simple but very pliant piano accompaniment that often
serves to point the witticism of the text. But this phase of deliberate
simplicity soon passed and Auric, developing a more personal note,
harnessed a muscular rhythm and violent discordant harmonies to a
plain melodic statement. For instance, in Les Joues en feu (1921), a
setting of three poems by Raymond Radiguet, the voice part of the
first song modulates no further than the subdominant but the piano
indulges in the most dissonant clashes between E flat and B major while
the third song is characterized by first successive and then simultaneous
bitonality. Technically Auric avoids phrases of any length and elabora-
tion and, like Poulenc, he juxtaposes sections of the most heterogeneous
character in order to produce a violent shock of contrasts. Thus, in the
ballet Les Fácheux (1925), after Moliére, a highly adorned dance marked
*trés lente et expressive' is offset by a fast staccato movement suggesting
sheer motor energy. Since the great success of René Clair's film, А nous
la liberté, for which he wrote the music, Auric has been much in demand
as a screen composer. In his general artistic make-up a sense of comedy,
irony, and scepticism and a sharp intelligence are perhaps the most
salient features.

“ТА JEUNE FRANCE’

Since the time of the querelle des bouffons Parisian artists have shown a
strong inclination to group themselves into separatist bodies, each
representing a particular aesthetic creed and engaging in heated
polemics with their antagonists. This phenomenon is the manifestation
of a typically Gallic spirit of individuality and heterodoxy not en-
countered to the same extent in any other European country. We have
seen how in the years shortly after the First World War the short-lived

‘LA JEUNE FRANCE’ 255

group of 'Les Six' was formed in reaction against impressionism, and
sixteen years later, in 1936, four members of the rising young generation
grouped themselves into 'La Jeune France' whose chief aim was to
achieve yet another rejuvenation of French music by attempting to re-
instate those deeper and more permanent values which they found
lacking in the creations of their elders. At the same time they en-
deavoured, like the young Italian composers of the 1920s, to revive a
national spirit neglected by the older generation in favour of an excessive
internationalism, and in general they were opposed both to revolution-
ary tendencies and to faint-hearted academicism. АП four members of
“Га Jeune France' were born in the first decade of the twentieth century
—André Jolivet (1905), Yves Baudrier (1906), Daniel Lesur (1908), and
Olivier Messiaen (1908). The mature works of these composers do not
fall into the purview of this chapter but their early style demands a
brief consideration here.

From the first Jolivet and Messiaen were the outstanding members of
the group, a fact amply confirmed by their later achievements. Jolivet,
who was a pupil of Edgard Varése, first adopted Ше ‘hermetic’ style of
his teacher, with its constant search for extraordinary instrumental
timbres and novel effects in the field of rhythm. During his early period
Jolivet was much preoccupied with ideas about such primitive forms of
religion as magic and the appropriation of cosmic forces, believing in
vibrations from unseen psychical ‘fluids’ which he thought he could
detect in all manifestations of life and even in inanimate objects.
Already the titles of those works intended as an expression of these
psychic phenomena are indicative of Jolivet's ideas and his concept of
music as a ‘cosmic’ force endowed with magical properties!—the piano
suite Mana (1935), Incantation: Pour que l'image devienne symbole for
ondes martenot or flute (1937), the orchestral prelude Cosmogonie
(1938), and Cinq Danses rituelles (1939). The declared purpose of this
music was to cast a magic spell, and in pursuing this object Jolivet
evolved a personal style of great harmonic freedom and marked by a
wide range of novel rhythmic and dynamic effects, all with the aim of
generating in the listener an appropriate state of mind. After the Second
World War, however, Jolivet began to turn to music which is more
closely concerned with man and his natural feelings.

Messiaen, who was a pupil of Paul Dukas and the organist Marcel
Dupré, showed very early a strong leaning towards a particular form of
Catholic mysticism, a subject which, according to his note for the first
London performance (1938) of his La Nativité du Seigneur, ‘is the best
subject, for it encompasses all subjects. And the abundance of technical

1 Cf, the case of Skryabin, p. 34.

256 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

means allows the heart to open up freely.’ It was largely as a composer of
organ music that Messiaen made his name in the 1930s, and particu-
larly by £a Nativité du Seigneur (1935), a series of nine meditations on
Christian themes, and Le Corps glorieux (1939). These and some other
works of that period form the transition to Messiaen's later style, in
which plainsong, elements from Hindu music and a novel conception
of rhythmic structure play an important part. Yet what remained con-
stant in his music, whether vocal or instrumental, is the expression of
intense emotional sincerity, religious ecstasy and mystical contemplation.
Composers who remained more or less independent of the aesthetic
doctrines advanced by the group of “Гез Six' апа “Та Jeune France'
include Jacques Ibert (1890-1962), and Jean Frangaix (b. 1912) whose
prodigal fertility and extreme facility are matched by elegance and
brilliance of workmanship rather than any profounder qualities.

ITALY: LA GENERAZIONE DELL'80

In Italy the roots from which the new post-war ideas were to spring
were planted in the first decade of the present century and showed a
pronouncedly national bias. Under the intellectual leadership of the
musicologist Fausto Torrefranca, who published a fiercely polemical
book on Puccini,! the young composers of that time—chief among them
Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968), Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973),
and Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) representing the generation after
Puccini’s—gathered together. Theso-called generazione dell’80 shared the
conviction that native opera had run its course and become effete and
that a risorgimento, a renascence of Italian music, could only be brought
about by the assimilation of the spirit and style of the great instrumental
masters of the past: Frescobaldi, Vivaldi, Corelli, Veracini, and others.
The monopoly that opera occupied in the musical life of the nation was
deeply resented, vocalism was condemned and finally the stage was
reached when the young iconoclasts clamoured for a ban on all those
composers who had exclusively devoted themselves to opera (Puccini,
Mascagni, Leoncavallo). By diverting the creative energies from melo-
dramma to instrumental music the avant-garde hoped to achieve that
ristabilimento dell? equilibrio which it so much desired and which,
indeed, was restored by the large amount of instrumental works
composed in Italy during the inter-war period. But it is to be noted
that this process had already been begun, though in isolation, in
the 1880s by such composers as Martucci, Bossi, Sinigaglia, and
Sgambati. These however, had carried out their reform largely by imitat-

! Giacomo Puccini e l'opera internazionale (Turin, 1912).

ITALY: LA GENERAZIONE DELL'80 257

ing the German symphonists, whereas the new movement sought to
achieve the same object by a return to the instrumental forms of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian music. The new anti-
operatic tendencies were both idealistic and nationalistic. Idealistic,
because they set out to turn away from the bourgeois mentality of
realist opera, with its lack of spirituality and high moral values;
nationalistic, because they demanded an art exclusively nurtured in old
Italian soil and freed from the influence of both later German romanti-
cism and French impressionism. In a thoughtful book,! which includes a
fairly balanced study of Puccini, Pizzetti reproached the entire impres-
sionistic school for its over-refinement, its growing exclusion of the life
of the emotions and ‘its prodigious faculty of stifling the will to live’.?
On the other hand, he accused Puccini and the rest of the Italian
realists of having sinned in the opposite direction by their emotional
excesses and their superabundance of crude vitality which, according to
Pizzetti, defied full translation into satisfactory aesthetic expression.?
Yet the extreme position taken up by these young firebrands was
gradually relinquished with growing maturity when both Pizzetti and
Malipiero devoted their attention to opera, although guided by aesthetic
and stylistic principles totally different from those of verismo and
realist opera in general.

While the hostility towards this kind of opera, particularly as
represented by Puccini, was at its height, Puccini himself had been
undergoing, from about 1912, a certain change of outlook and began to
detach himself from the line he had pursued in Tosca, Madama Butterfly,
and La fanciulla del West. Тпе first milestone of this changed course was
Il trittico (1918) of which only the first episode, П tabarro, after a
French play La Houppelande, contained a strong touch of verismo in
its brutal ending. А piéce noire, this opera is a masterpiece of dramatic
concentration and in its evocation of a most unusual atmosphere—
the wretched life of bargees on the River Seine at the beginning of the
present century, which forms the background to a triangular drama
between husband, wife and lover. The second episode, Suor Angelica,
shared with the first an uncommon subject and uncommon setting—
the tragic frustration of maternal love and the suicide of a nun in an
Italian convent at the end of the seventeenth century. The opera, in
which all the characters are women, suffers from the quietism and
passivity inseparable from the monastic atmosphere. The final miracle,
too, remains only a stage spectacle, Puccini lacking the power to convey
mystic ecstasy and the cathartic force of Divine Grace. But the music

1 Ildebrando Pizzetti, Musicisti contemporanei. Saggi critici (Milan, 1914).
2 [bid., p. 130. 3 Ibid., p. 51.

258 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

is of impeccable craftmanship and particularly successful in its por-
trayal of the cruel aunt and of the monastic milieu. The third panel of
Il trittico, Gianni Schicchi, was Puccini's sole comic opera and shows
a most remarkable extension of his creative range. The subject, which
was drawn from a brief anecdote in Dante's Inferno, concerns the duping
of scheming heirs by the impersonator of the dead testator and is
turned into a riotous comedy of situation. The music, reviving the
spirit of eighteenth-century opera buffa, is brilliantly witty and ironic;
the only slight blemish in it is Lauretta's sentimental air “О mio babbino
caro'. Compared with Verdi's Falstaff, Gianni Schicchi shows a brand
of humour which is bitter, mordant, even harshly cynical. Turandot
(1924), after the play of the same name by Carlo Gozzi, is Puccini's
greatest masterpiece. Its larger theme is the liberating and uniting power
of true love which lends the work a universal significance absent from
the rest of Puccini's operas. Moreover, with the exception of the final
two scenes, left only in sketch by the composer and completed by Franco
Alfano, the dramatic structure is masterly, and the music represents a
synthesis and, with it, a consummation of the four separate aspects of
Puccini's previous style: the lyric-sentimental (Liü), the heroic-grandiose
(Turandot and Calaf), the comic-grotesque (Masks), and the exotic.
By the time Turandot was first produced (1926) both Pizzetti and
Malipiero had launched into opera; but their stage conception, condi-
tioned and guided by new operatic aesthetics, was entirely different
from those of both Verdi and the bourgeois dramatists of verismo. The
main point in Pizzetti’s theory of reform was the argument that if
opera is musical drama, then everything must be subordinate to the
tying of the dramatic knot, to the surmounting of the emotional crisis
and to the unfolding of the characters’ psychology. In such a scheme
lyricism must never be allowed to interrupt the flow of the inner action,
no lyrical halts should interrupt the development of the drama. “Еог
five centuries,’ Pizzetti wrote with dubious accuracy,! ‘from the four-
teenth to the nineteenth centuries, there was an uninterrupted tendency
in opera to lyricism at all costs. . . . It is not the characters who have
sung, or rather lived; the poets have spoken and the musicians have
sung.' Unless lyricism arises directly out of the dramatic context it has
no justification. In consequence of this theory Pizzetti developed a
style of operatic writing in which declamation is the paramount feature,
a kind of declamation encompassing both dramatic recitative and arioso
and thus providing a solution of the antithesis between drama and
lyricism. This heightened declamation, which combines drama and song
in a higher unity, follows the inflexions of the Italian language so

! Musica e dramma (Rome, 1945), p. 41.

ITALY: LA GENERAZIONE DELL‘80 259

accurately that it renders the translation of the text into other languages,
without distorting alteration of the vocal line, almost impossible, as for
instance in this passage from Debora e Jaele:

Ex. 109

Debora

Е ЕЕ NEIGE] SOEUR] pem) SU] рано CE A. Cee қүлы Г тт exa

га кукук hoi) dii атары

ST ПЛЕТЕНИЕ SST QU rt ту a Фе рез
[mue em mr ж 21

- tez-ze faran сап-рі di ru - i -ne pei gu - fi gli av-vol -

2 a и:
£ 5 D 21—249
Е Ара ЗЕ а Gal седи ұстары їй ТЫШ!
оре ela +. Нева ЕР НИ [escapan rmt pe с

toi Ein ma-no del mio po-pol sa-rà da - to — Si-se-ra,

(And they shall slay the slayers, and prey on the predators, the vultures shall
make of the towns and fortresses fields of ruins for the owls. And Sisera shall be
given into the hands of my people.)

This unity of words and music—different from Wagner's Wortvers-
melodie but similar to Debussy's word-inspired declamation—was in
Pizzetti's case greatly aided by the fact that he was his own librettist,
who created text and main musical themes and motives simul-
taneously. A further corollary of his theory is seen in the stripping
from the text of all verbiage, and in the projecting of the action without
superfluous episodes in which music could only play the part of an
adjunct, whereas it should be the vital and direct translation of the inner
drama. Although by these means Pizzetti succeeded in achieving a
remarkable continuity and pliancy of musical structure and expression,
it must still be admitted that his exclusive use of the declamatory prin-
ciple often creates a distinct feeling of monotony.

Fedra (1912), to a libretto by d'Annunzio, was the first opera in which
Pizzetti applied his theory, though as yet in a tentative manner; it was
not until he wrote the trilogy Debora e Jaele (1921), Lo straniero (1925),
and Fra Gherardo (1927), that he succeeded in putting it into full effect.
Pizzetti, a deeply religious man, went to the Bible for the subject of the

260 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

first two operas, while for the later part of the trilogy he chose a histori-
cal subject drawn from a Parma chronicle of the thirteenth century,
though the ultimate tragedy of Fra Gherardo was wholly invented by the
composer. The underlying theme of the trilogy is redemption through
the power of self-sacrificing love and the devotion of human beings
surrounded by an uncompromising, hostile, and fiercely dogmatic
world. Though in theory Pizzetti abjured the inclusion of purely lyrical
episodes, in practice he did not altogether banish them: Lo straniero,
for example, is marked by more static, sustained, and lyrically expressive
sections, and Fra Gherardo contains even self-contained vocal music
of a strophic character. In all these three operas as also in Orséolo
(1935) and L'Oro (1942), the chorus plays an extremely active role. With
the function of the chorus in Greek tragedy at the back of his mind,
Pizzetti treats it as a dramatis persona in its own right and with a
psychology of its own, assigning to it some of his most powerful music.

Hardly less important than the stage works which form the nucleus
of his output are Pizzetti's choral compositions. These represent a
synthesis of his own style with influences from Gregorian chant and
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian vocal polyphony. Outstanding
here is Ше unaccompanied Messa da Requiem (1922), a markedly lyrical
work in the Dorian mode and representing a serene meditation on
the theme of death which eschews all dramatic accents. Even the ‘Dies
Irae', the most extensive and most elaborate of the five movements, is
in a reticent, subdued vein:

ITALY: LA GENERAZIONE DELL'80 261

к= Tes- te— Па-\!4 сит Si - byl - la.

The magnificent ‘Sanctus’ is for three choruses, one of which is for
women's voices and the other two for male voices, which alternate
between antiphony and singing in concert. Most of Pizzetti's instru-
mental works are implicitly programmatic and conform to his aesthetic
tenet that music must stand in close relation to life and nature. On this
theory there is no room for ‘pure’ or ‘objective’ music, music that is not
evocative of nature or expressive of human emotions; and a whole
series of Pizzetti's instrumental compositions provides testimony to this
view. Thus, the Concerto dell'estate for orchestra (1928) consists of three
movements, ‘Mattutino’, ‘Notturno’, and ‘Gagliarda e finale’, which
are expressive, respectively, of the pristine freshness of a summer
morning, of the many voices with which nocturnal nature speaks to

262 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

man, and of the joys and the zest for life summer inspires in human
beings. In the Rondo veneziano (1929) the ritornello symbolizes the
pride and splendour of ancient Venice while the three episodes depict
scenes from Venetian life. Characteristic of these and other works,
such as the Canti della stagione alta for piano and orchestra (1930), is
the essentially vocal nature of the themes though their elaboration
conforms to symphonic principles.

Malipiero, as uneven and over-prolific in his production as Milhaud,
is nevertheless the most eminent among the generazione dell'80.
Profoundly steeped in the music of the Italian Baroque,! he derived
from it the austerity and nobility of his general artistic aspirations. To
baroque music he also owes something of his well-developed sense of
melody, while his studies of Gregorian chant bore fruit in the modality
and free structure of his melodic idiom. In his early work Malipiero was
subject to influences from German and, notably, French music
(Debussy); and although the latter influence diminished, his harmonic
style retained parallel shifts of triads, fauxburdons, and chords of
superimposed fourths and fifths. French impressionism is partly
responsible, too, for his marked inclination to evoke characteristic
states of mind and emotional attitudes aroused by the contemplation
of nature, people and places and by a nostalgic longing for the past.
Thus, in Pause del silenzio (1917) he describes in seven 'symphonic
expressions’ the different moods he experienced during the war when
the tension and turmoil of external life made it very difficult to achieve
peace of mind and spiritual serenity. In this work he applied for the
first time the principle of thematic non-development, themes being
stated and repeated in slight harmonic and rhythmic alterations, after
which they make room for fresh ideas. Each of the seven sections
has its own theme but, with no development, the texture is fragmentary
and kaleidoscopic, though an element of unity is provided by the
opening horn fanfare which recurs like a ritornello after each section.
This method of construction, for which a hint is to be found in the
instrumental works of the ancient Italian masters and also in Debussy,
may be compared to the psychological process of ‘association by
contrast’. The application of this method is seen at its clearest in
Malipiero’s first three string quartets—Rispetti e strambotti (1920),
Stornelli e ballate (1923) and Cantari alla madrigalesca (1931). The
titles of the first two works are derived from old Italian verse-
forms consisting of a series of short poems of different content and
mood to which unity is given by the verbal style. The music displays

1 Malipiero edited a complete edition of Monteverdi’s works and collaborated in the
collected edition of Vivaldi’s music.

ITALY: LA GENERAZIONE DELL’80 263

an analogous structure in that there are twenty sections in the first
quartet and fourteen in the second, all of the most diverse character—
grave and comic, tender and ironical, fantastic and bucolic. In both
works a unifying element is generated by a kind of ritornello, which in
the first quartet takes the form of a succession of quadruple and
double stops on the open strings (first violin and viola) evoking the
characteristic sound made by the tuning of strings.

Ex. 111

Un poco ritenuto
Ex

Ist Уо. еқ
МЗ!

Malipiero arrived comparatively late at pure symphonic composition
in his Prima sinfonia, in quattro tempi come le quattro stagioni (1933) and
Seconda sinfonia (Elegiaca) (1936) to which he later added seven more
symphonies. The First Symphony was largely inspired by a nostalgia
for Venice's great past and partly by Stagione, poems by X. Lamberti,
and is modelled on the Italian sinfonia of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, with a characteristic concertante treatment of woodwind and
horns, while the structure shows a return to the traditional symphonic
technique abjured by Malipiero in his previous period. In the Second
Symphony this feature is even more pronounced, and the work demons-
trates his art of achieving a close fusion between musical thought and
emotional expression.

In his operas Malipiero evolved a style diametrically opposed to that
of Pizzetti. While Pizzetti aimed at dramatic development, continuity
and flexibility by means of a half-declamatory, half-arioso recitative,
Malipiero's operatic aesthetics exclude all dramatic dialectics: action
and characters are not developed but are static like a bas-relief; there is
no before and no after. The recitative is abandoned as a naturalistic
device and as an obstacle to lyricism; in other words, lyrical melos is the
prime feature of Malipiero's operas. Despite the great variety of his out-
put, the stage works represent his most characteristic and, undoubtedly,
his most significant creations. It is in them that his northern romanticism,

264 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

his love of the fantastic, of the supernatural and of nocturnal mystery,
finds its most eloquent expression. This trait showed from his earliest
years and persisted through the radical changes which Malipiero's
artistic outlook underwent, changes which must be interpreted as a
rebellion against nineteenth-century music, notably German sym-
phonism and Italian melodramma. His operatic ethos is at once idea-
listic, romantic, and poetic—‘the classical ideal of an unquiet romantic
spirit’, as one of the composer's Italian biographers defined it!—and
this is already seen in Malipiero's choice of subjects from ancient
Italian poetry, Goldoni, Euripides, Shakespeare, E. T. A. Hoffmann,
and Pirandello.

Most typical of Malipiero's novel conception of opera are L'Orfeide
(1922) and Torneo notturno (1929). The first work is a trilogy of which
the central piece, Sette canzoni, written in 1919, is perhaps the most
noteworthy. The text of these ‘seven dramatic expressions’ is drawn
from verses by Lorenzo de' Medici, Poliziano, and Jacopone da Todi, to
which Malipiero invented a series of short incidents (some inspired by
personal experiences) which form independent tableaux or ‘panels’ and
follow one another in quick succession like a cinematographic sequence,
with exposition of the action and peripeteia unfolding in a few pages.
The seven episodes are realistic in essential character but tinged
with fantastic, dream-like colours, alternating between the tragic, the
macabre, and the comic-grotesque. Unity is achieved by the character
of the music which is almost exclusively lyrical and more or less inde-
pendent of the external stage action, but penetrates to the heart of the
poetic and psychological character of each episode. Malipiero made a
significant comment on this when he said that for him “һе dramatic is
what one sees while the music expresses that which one does not see’.
The musical centre and core of each episode is formed by a canzone
which is a simple straightforward song in the ancient Italian manner,
recalling the airs of native peasants and fishermen.

The first part of the trilogy, La morte delle maschere, though
written three years after Sette canzoni, is intended as a kind of prelude
and is in the style of the old opera buffa. The action is an allegory,
implying caricature and ultimate condemnation, of conventional atti-
tudes towards art, which are personified in seven figures from the
commedia dell'arte who, in a symbolical act at the end, are shut away
in a huge wardrobe. Then Orpheus appears embodying the idea of pure
idealistic art and introducing the characters who are to play in Sette
canzoni. The musical delineation of the Masks and of Orpheus is

! Guido M. Gatti, in the symposium L’Opera di Gian Francesco Malipiero (Treviso,
1952), p. IX.

ITALY: LA GENERAZIONE DELL’80 265

sharply contrasted in style and expression. The third and last part of the
trilogy, Orfeo, ovvero l'ottava canzone, is intended as a satire on the
indifference, incomprehension, or sterile enthusiasm which were shown
by the large public towards Sette canzoni. The opera presents a play
within a play, spectators on the stage watching the performance of a
puppet-show, with the Emperor Nero as an insane and ludicrous hero.
At the end Orpheus appears singing an impassioned air about his hap-
less fate which touches the Queen's heart, while the rest of the spectators
are fast asleep from boredom. The music is a most skilful parody of the
style of Italian grand opera and of Puccinian lyricism.

Torneo notturno shows the same dramatic and musical pattern as
Sette canzoni. As in the earlier work, the text is drawn from ancient
Italian poetry to which Malipiero invented incidents that are arranged
into seven night scenes, but the characters are far more static and
puppet-like than in the earlier opera. They symbolize elemental human
passions in conflict with one another, and the incidents unfold in the
unreal, fantastic sphere of some timeless myth or legend. In the two
main characters, the Disperato and the Spensierato, who appear in all
seven episodes, the composer portrays two fundamental and dia-
metrically opposed attitudes to life—despair and hedonism; the final
murder of the Spensierato by the Disperato is a symbolic act implying
the victory of the life-destroying over the life-asserting forces. The
ultimate scene shows a funeral procession in a shadowy distance
suggesting that the Disperato still continues his hopeless search for
happiness. Like Sette canzoni, Torneo notturno points to a profound
pessimism—life seen as a vale of tears and as the mirror of death.
As in the earlier work, a pronounced lyricism serves to create unity and
coherence, while a musical link between the individual episodes is
provided by the recurrence of the Spensierato's Canzone del tempo,
which, according to the composer, represents the dramatic centre:

Ex. 112
Andante

Chi һа tem - poe tem-po as - pet-ta, il

tem - po per-dei tem-po fug - ge

266 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

sei nel tem-po ver - de

(He who has time and awaits time, wastes time and time flies like an arrow from
a bow: thus even while you are in your youth . . .)

Although Malipiero's style in this opera is eclectic in the sense that
it draws on diverse sources—Gregorian chant, the ancient arioso, old
dance forms (ballate), Debussyan harmony and Stravinskyan rhythm—
these heterogeneous elements coalesce into an organic whole which
shows a distinct individual physiognomy.

In Те commedie goldoniane (1922), whose spiritual origin is to be
traced back to his nostalgia for the ancient splendour of his native
Venice, Malipiero aims at an illustration of the characteristic atmosphere
of Venetian life in the past: the streets and piazzette, in Bottega de caffé;
domestic life with its petty intrigues and complications, in Sior Todoro
Brontolon; and the hustle and bustle in the port and the lagoons, іп Le
baruffe chiozzotte. The subjects are taken from three of Goldoni’s plays
but Malipiero greatly simplified the dramatic intrigues, reduced the
number of characters to a minimum and, in the last opera, combined
incidents from several other Goldonian comedies. The three works
revive the spirit of the eighteenth-century comic opera on the basis of a
more or less symphonic treatment of the orchestra, and whereas the
recitative is all but completely banished from L’Orfeide, in Tre com-
medie it plays a more conspicuous role, while the number of lyrical
arias is restricted. In Le baruffe chiozzotte there is also a song sung in
Venetian dialect and the imitation of the cries of Venetian street-
vendors. Another notable opera is La favola del figlio cambiato (1933)
for which Pirandello provided the libretto. The ancient fairy-tale of the
changeling is so altered as to make the child of a poor mother, a young
boy sane and ambitious, become the son of the King while the King’s
true son is a poor demented creature. The story is to be interpreted as an
allegory demonstrating that absolute truth is unascertainable and that
what people believe passes as truth. The most impressive part of the
drama is the second act which plays in a port tavern, with harlots,
sailors, and street urchins as a vivid and colourful background to the
action. The musical treatment is on the whole less happy than in

ITALY: LA GENERAZIONE DELL'80 267

Malipiero's earlier operas, but there is sharp delineation of the chief
characters and some remarkable vocal effects, such as an ostinato
chorus of sailors and guttersnipes in Act II and internal voices singing
on one note in Act III.

Casella's works before the first German War displayed a wide range
of the most disparate influences—from Mahler and Richard Strauss to
Debussy, Ravel, and the *Russian' Stravinsky; and though he later
settled to a more personal style he remained a more eclectic composer
than Pizzetti or Malipiero. His essential strength lay in a neat and very
resourceful craftmanship applied either to straightforward pastiche
(Scarlattiana, 1926; Paganiniana, 1942) or to the resuscitation of older
music on the basis of modern technical devices. The neo-classicism of
the inter-war period found in Casella’s cool and speculative mind a
responsive echo (Concerto for strings, 1927; Concerto for Orchestra,
1937; Sinfonia, 1940)—all the more so since he was an assiduous student
of the music of the ancient Italian masters. Apart from his work as a
composer, Casella was very active in the propagation of music by
contemporary foreign composers and combined in his person the roles
of conductor, pianist, writer and lecturer.

With his orchestral compositions Casella was instrumental in
establishing a school of Italian symphonic music. The theatre also
held a great attraction for him and he wrote a number of works all
marked by a shrewd instinct for theatrical effectiveness. His ballet
La Giara (1924), to his own scenario, based on a novel by Pirandello,
aims at a synthesis of ancient opera buffa and rustic comedy and deftly
employs some Sicilian folk tunes. His most ambitious stage-work is
the three-act opera, La donna serpente (1932), after Carlo Gozzi’s
dramatic fable of the same name, and this represents a summary of
Casella’s mature stylistic development. True, elements from Baroque
opera, comic opera of the eighteenth century (especially Pergolesi’s),
Spontini and neo-classicism are juxtaposed, but they are most skilfully
used to interpret and accompany the dramatic action. The work is set
in a legendary and spectacular Orient and combines the atmosphere
of a fairytale with the simple human emotions displayed by the
characters of the King and the fairy Miranda. The orchestral score
presents an almost uninterrupted succession of vivid, brilliant, and
rhythmically inventive ideas though Casella’s imagination remains
fundamentally cold and dry. In the same year in which he completed
La donna serpente, Casella wrote the one-act chamber opera, La favola
d’Orfeo (1932), to a text by Poliziano which follows with slight devia-
tions the antique myth. The bulk of the work consists of laments, sung
by Aristeus and Orpheus, which lean towards the manner of Caccini and

268 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Monteverdi. An epic and objective. character predominates, the
exception being the ferocious and rhythmically agitated dance of the
Bacchantes with which the opera closes.

OTTORINO RESPIGHI, GIORGIO GHEDINI, MARIO
CASTELNUOVO-TEDESCO :

Of the composers who belonged to the generation of Pizzetti,
Malipiero, and Casella and who contributed their share to the national
renascence of Italian music but show a less sharply defined musical
profile, three are noteworthy—Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), Giorgio
Federico Ghedini (1892-1965), and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895—
1968). Respighi's musical pedigree can be traced to Rimsky-Korsakov
(whose pupil he was at St. Petersburg), Strauss, Debussy, and, after the
war, Stravinsky; at the same time he was much attracted to ancient
Italian music and Gregorian chant. Italian critics divide Respighi's
mature period into a ‘Roman’ and a ‘Gregorian’ phase, though the two
overlapped in reality. The first phase, lasting roughly from 1916 to 1926,
is characterized by sumptuousness and a highly coloured sensuality of
expression which make Respighi the musical counterpart of d'Annunzio.
Into those years fall the symphonic poems Fontane di Roma (1916),
Pini di Roma (1924), and the Trittico botticelliano (1927), which
represent a combination of mood-pictures, nature impressions, and
descriptive music. In these works the passages of more intrinsic value
occur in those parts that are in a muted poetic vein and tinged with a
slight melancholy, such as in ‘Fontana di Villa Medici’ and ‘Pini
presso una catacomba’, and ‘L’Adorazione dei Magi’ of the Trittico.
The Concerto gregoriano for violin (1922) and the Concerto in modo
misolidico for piano (1924) anticipate Respighi’s later concentration on
Gregorian chant and modality. Of his eight operas, at least three claim
attention. Belfagor (1922), to a diverting libretto after the play of E. L.
Morselli, displays great vivacity and a marked sense of comedy, with
vocal writing that owes something to Puccini and an orchestral brilliance
that echoes Richard Strauss. The one-act Maria egiziaca—trittico per
concerto (1931), which belongs to Respighi’s ‘Gregorian’ phase, has no
proper action but represents tableaux vivants showing incidents from
the conversion of St. Mary of Egypt. The music is in a predominantly
static, lyrical vein and distinguished by a rare transparence of orchestral
colours. The scene of the sombre and starkly dramatic La Fiamma
(1933), after The Witch by G. Wiers-Jenssen, is laid in Ravenna in the
seventh century and makes use of both Gregorian and Byzantine
liturgical chant, notably in the choral sections of the first act and in the
music of the Exarch Basilio and of Eudoxia. In Lucrezia (1935), which

RESPIGHI, GHEDINI, CASTELNUOVO-TEDESCO 269

was his last opera, the composer reverts to the dramatic recitative of
the oldest Italian opera, reducing the role of the orchestra to a minimum
and entrusting the narration of the plot to a singer who is placed in the
orchestra pit.

Ghedini's chief distinction lies in a finely controlled sense of form and
texture and in his extremely solid workmanship best seen in the deft
manipulation of a close-knit polyphony. These qualities tend, however,
to outweigh his imaginative power which is rather academic and drily
abstract. Ghedini has devoted himself to opera, chamber music, and
choral and orchestral works of which the Symphony (1938) and
Archittetture for orchestra (1940) are characteristic examples of his
general style during the inter-war years.

Castelnuovo-Tedesco, a pupil of Pizzetti, began to develop a more
personal style during the First World War. His song cycles, Stelle
cadenti and Coplas (both 1915), are marked by extreme melodic fluency
and refinement of the technical means of expression, against which must
be set a lack of emotional depth and intellectual vigour. In his vocal
compositions Castelnuovo-Tedesco is not merely content to throw into
relief the imagery of the text but attempts to reproduce its poetic essence
by the creation of a distinct musical atmosphere. He has set all the songs
from the Shakespeare plays in the original English (1926), a notable
undertaking for a foreign composer and all the more remarkable as his
treatment of the prosody is impeccable. Of the three operas which he
wrote during the inter-war period, La Mandragola (1926), after Machia-
velli’s comedy, is perhaps the most successful, and by employment of
actual folk-songs skilfully re-creates the atmosphere of Renaissance
Florence. The Overtures to seven Shakespeare plays (1931-42) are
noteworthy examples of Castelnuovo-Tedesco's orchestral style while
the Concerto italiano for violin (1924) is a work of great euphony in
which the earlier arioso is applied to modern instrumental music; but
it suffers from a certain tonal monotony, all three movements being
cast in a modal G minor. Castelnuovo-Tedesco's awareness of his
Jewish origin can be traced in the Second Violin Concerto (subtitled
The Prophets) (1938), which combines the concerto form with elements
from the symphonic poem, the three movements characterizing Isaiah,
Jeremiah, and Elijah. In the Guitar Concerto (1939), written for
Andrés Segovia, the temptation to imitate a Spanish manner is success-
fully avoided and much play is made of the contrast between the
fragile and subtle sonority of the solo instrument and the more compact
sounds of the orchestra which is, appropriately, of a modest size

270 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

LUIGI DALLAPICCOLA AND GOFFREDO PETRASSI

The next generation of Italian composers, who came to full maturity
in the post-war years, did not ignore the stylistic and spiritual premises
of old Italian music on which their predecessors had built, but they
proved equally receptive to many ideas and ideals common among their
contemporaries outside Italy. Two musicians stand out here— Luigi
Dallapiccola (b.1904) and Goffredo Petrassi (b.1904). Dallapiccola, who
shows the most sharply defined artistic profile among the composers of
this later generation, began with the exploration of sixteenth-century
polyphony whose technique and spirit he assimilated in a highly indivi-
dual manner. Characteristic of this phase of his development are the
three sets, Cori di Michelangelo Buonarotti il Giovane (1933—36), of which
the first set is for unaccompanied mixed chorus while the two remaining
sets are, respectively, for a female chorus and seventeen instruments and
mixed chorus with large orchestra. In the choral writing Italian vocalism
is paramount, though allied to a strongly marked rhythmic feeling and
to a texture which displays the signs of a mind steeped in counterpoint:

Ex. 113
Vigoroso ;

Wee с
Г. е жн тота Ses Sd
TERLAMAR. IANUSSEREEEE.I.E 1 - аған С |
Е Е ОЕ ПИН
EE NR OMNEM ссп ae)

di - ciam che chi 1а to - glie, da - toa-

e di - ciam che chi 1а to - glie da - toa-

271

DALLAPICCOLA AND PETRASSI

ve - dràin du-o. ai

da - to a-ver

to - glie,

asd
[NT

-ver уе --ага іп duo

da - to a.-|ver ve

ve-dra in duo аі, ve -

duo di,

drà

-уег ve-

Бо На = in-fer-na -

dia

=~ VO

- па dia

Ми -

fer -

= 05а ІП -

na dia

MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

272

vo-la in-fer

vo-la in:fer

dia - vo-la

- fer

-Ja in

іші

vo-la in - fer.

- fer

la in

ТЕ

(And we say that he who takes her away shall see her become, іп two days, а

hellish devil.)

DALLAPICCOLA AND PETRASSI 273

Тһе more or less straightforward polyphony of the first set (see Ex. 113)
is offset by the complex vocal and instrumental density of the later sets.
In the mid-1930s Dallapiccola came into contact with the music of the
Viennese dodecaphonic school and this was of decisive importance for
his subsequent development, though in adopting the twelve-note
method he did not go against his native temperament, which is out of
sympathy with decadent romanticism and leans towards a Mediter-
ranean brand of neo-classicism, such as was advocated by Busoni. An
instructive instance of this are the three Canti di prigonia (1938-41),
written for mixed chorus, two pianos, and percussion—a combination
evidently suggested by Stravinsky’s Les Noces—in which Dallapiccola
handles the serial technique with considerable freedom, combining it
with pure diatonic writing. Despite their ancient texts (Mary Queen of
Scots, Boethius, and Girolamo Savonarola), these choral songs are a
testimony to the composer’s profound social conscience and that com-
passionate response to the sufferings of political victims in totalitarian
countries—a compassion to which his second opera, П prigioniero,
written after the war, gives even more eloquent expression. As a com-
poser for the stage Dallapiccola displays a remarkable dramatic instinct,
especially in suggesting states of nightmare and anxiety which he
achieves partly by the characteristic nature of his thematic material,
partly by vocal and orchestral devices. This is already seen in his first
opera, Volo di notte (1939), after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novel. This
is the story of a South American airline company, prepared to sacrifice
the life of a pilot in order to inaugurate night flights, thus hoping to
serve the advancement of modern technology. The action is symbolic of
the relation between man and machine, the machine taking full posses-
sion of the human mind. Like Canti di prigionia, the opera is written
in a free serial style mixing tonality with atonality. Thus, it opens in
B major and ends in E major but a very large part of the work resorts
to dodecaphony, the music being based on the following note-row:

Ex. 114

Like Berg in Wozzeck and Lulu, Dallapiccola harnesses the individual
scenes to ‘closed’ musical forms such as “Tempo di blues’, ‘Pezzo
ritmico', Chorale and Variations. Pure singing is interspersed with the
Schoenbergian Sprechstimme to which Dallapiccola, following Berg,
adds a rhythmic declamation half-way between speech and singing.

274 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Petrassi's development was chiefly determined by his early friendship
with Casella, who not only influenced him directly but guided his
artistic outlook towards contemporary movements outside Italy.
Hindemith and Stravinsky are the two composers who, apart from
Casella, have contributed most to the formation of Petrassi's style—the
first with his contrapuntal complexity and ‘motoric’ rhythm and the
second, more generally, with his non-emotional, objective approach to
musical composition. The first work demonstrating Petrassi’s essential
manner was the early Partita for orchestra (1932) which showed a
remarkable technical maturity, especially in the assurance of the instru-
mental treatment, firmness of structure and unity of expression. The
thematic material is sharply defined and this, combined with rhythmic
vigour, lends the music a sinewy, athletic quality. While here Petrassi
still leans on the form of Baroque dances (‘Gagliarda’, ‘Ciaconna’,
“Сіса”), in the Concerto for Orchestra (1934) he penetrates into the
intrinsic spirit of Baroque music, which is that of an antithesis. Apart
from the broad contrast between the individual sections, the concerto
principle is carried further in that the thematic ideas are allotted to
different instrumental groups, and thus stand out with great clarity of
outline while, as a corollary, the scoring avoids the blending of colours.
As in the Partita, the tonal style is that of Hindemith’s “diatonicized’
chromaticism. The Piano Concerto (1939), however, shows simplifica-
tion of both tonality and texture, particularly in the expressive second
movement—an air with variations in B flat major. For a number of
years, beginning with 1934, Petrassi concentrated his chief energies on
choral composition, such as the Ninth Psalm (1936), the Magnificat
(1940) and the inspired Cori di Morti (1941) which is a dramatic madrigal
set to a text by Leopardi. The first two works are expressive of a deeply
religious vein and distantly echo the style of Italian vocal polyphony of
the sixteenth century, with which Petrassi had come into direct contact
as a young Roman choirboy.

BELA BARTOK

As we have seen, Stravinsky began his career as a nationalist and after
the First World War shed the national traits in order to evolve a style
on Western lines. But there were contemporary composers in Eastern
Europe and in Spain who cultivated and sustained a latter-day nationa-
lism half a century after the first outbreak of national consciousness in
music in Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Scandinavia. The case of these
twentieth-century nationalists was put in a nutshell by Manuel de Falla
who in speaking of Debussy said that ‘folkmusic is most satisfactorily
treated by the cultivated musician, not by using authentic tunes but by

BÉLA BARTÓK 275

"feeling" them, by realizing the foundations on which they rest and
conveying the essence of them in music which is all his own.’! Bartók,
Kodály, Janácek, Szymanowski, Falla, and others have all done this in a
deliberate manner; theirs is a nationalism which is more a matter of
essential thought and general aesthetic attitude than a manifestation of
concrete, tangible features though all have occasionally drawn on native
folk material.

Of these composers Béla Bartók? (1881—1945) is the personality who
combined nationalism and a highly original personal style in the most
remarkable manner. It is true that Bartók's early training was Western,
and throughout his career he availed himself of Western forms and
techniques, especially sonata and variation form, and linear counter-
point; but the substance of his creative achievement is to be found in the
close amalgamation of Hungarian elements with his own way of musical
thinking. His researches into Hungarian folk-song, begun with his
friend Kodály in 1905, revealed to him rich untapped sources which
increasingly fertilized his own style and taught him a number of funda-
mental differences from Western art music. In his Selbst-Biographie,*
Bartók has enumerated some of these differences:

The study of this peasant music was for me of decisive importance, for
the reason that it revealed to me the possibility of a total emancipation from
the hegemony of the major-minor system. For the largest and, indeed, the
more valuable part of this treasure-house of melodies lies in the old church
modes, in ancient Greek and certain still more primitive scales (notably the
pentatonic), and also shows the most varied and free rhythms and time-
changes in both rubato and tempo giusto performance. This was evidence that
the old scales, which are no longer in use in out art-music, have by no means
lost their vitality. Their application also makes novel harmonic combinations
possible. This treatment of the diatonic scale also led to a liberation from
the petrified (erstarrt) major-minor scale and, as an ultimate result, to a
completely free handling of each single note of our chromatic twelve-note
system.

To this must be added the characteristic syncopation (quaver-dotted
crotchet and semiquaver-dotted quaver, comparable to the 'Scottish
snap") which is so prevalent in Bartók's and Kodály's rhythmic style and
derives from the peculiarity of the Hungarian language, in which the

17. B. Trend, Manuel de Falla and Spanish Music (London, 1925), p. 55. In the Debussy
number of the Revue musicale (December 1920) p. 209, Falla wrote: ‘Mais tandis que le
compositeur espagnol [Felipe Pedrell] fait emploi, dans une grande partie de sa musique,
du document populaire authentique, on dirait que le maítre frangais s'en est écarté pour
créer une musique à lui, ne portant de celle qui l'a inspiré que l'essence des éléments
fondamentaux.

? For Bartók's early works see Chapters I-III.

3 Musikblütter des Anbruchs, iii (1921), p. 89.

276 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

tonic accent falls invariably on the first syllable of the word. On the
other hand, Bartók's technique of repeating short melodic-rhythmic
units with the effect of creating a ‘strange feverish excitement’ may have
originated in his studies of Arab music (see pp. 281-2); it forms one of
the primitive traits of his style comparable to Stravinsky's melodic
structure in his *Russian' period.

Bartók began with simple transcriptions of authentic Hungarian,
Rumanian, and Slovakian folk-songs and went on to use these tunes as
*material'—varying, breaking them up, and developing them according
to Western technique. He finally arrived at the invention of themes
bearing the melodic and rhythmic characteristics of genuine folk-songs;
in other words, he wrote what have been called ‘imaginary folk-songs’.
To put it differently, in this last stage the folk element entered the very
fibre of Bartók's own creative thought and was sublimated into a very
personal utterance. In order to appreciate fully this fusing of East and
West in his music, it will be necessary to look more closely at this
process of gradual amalgamation.

Up to 1905, the year in which he started to collect and to research into
Hungarian folklore, his nationalism expressed itself in the use of what
was then considered to be authentic folk music but was in reality greatly
distorted, westernized music. Such were the tunes employed by Liszt
in his Hungarian Rhapsodies and Brahms in his Hungarian Dances.
These tunes had been adapted to the major-minor system and, since
they were mostly played by gypsy bands, they were decked out with rich
embellishments, trills, and grace-notes and often made to conform to
the so-called ‘gypsy scale’, ‘natural’ minor but with the fourth and
seventh degrees raised. Bartók himself used such a melody, complete
with ornaments and augmented intervals, in his Rhapsody for piano of
1904:

With the discovery of Hungarian peasant music, which up to 1905 had
been entirely unknown to professional musicians, a new chapter opened
in Bartók's creative career. He profoundly appreciated these long-

BÉLA BARTÓK 277

forgotten melodies: 'In their small proportions [the Hungarian folk-
songs] are as perfect as the large-scale masterpieces of musical art. They
are, indeed, classical models of the way in which a musical idea—in all
its freshness and shapeliness—can be expressed in the most concise form
and with the most modest means: in short, in the most perfect way
possible." As established by Bartok, there are two fundamental types
of Hungarian folk-song: the first, the more ancient type, which was on
the point of dying out by the time he and Kodály began their studies,
shows different features in different regions, though certain traits are
common to all. By contrast, the more *modern' type, flourishing in the
nineteenth century, was identical in all regions of the country. What
are the characteristics of the old songs? First, they are isometric,
i.e. each line of the verse consists of the same number of syllables and,
since most of the settings are syllabic, of the same number of notes.
Secondly, they all show a quaternary structure, one section to one line
of the quatrain; in other words, a chain-like arrangement patterned
ABCD, ABBC, ABAB, or AABC in which A never occurs in the last
section. Thirdly, the majority are pentatonic, others again are modal.
Fourthly, they invariably show a downward tendency and never start
with an anacrusis, in conformity with the first-syllable accentuation of
Hungarian words. Here are two examples to show a pentatonic and a
modal tune, respectively :?

Ex. 116
P Parlando

1 Das ungarishe Volkslied (Berlin and Leipzig, 1925), p. 4; English translation, London,
1931.
* [bid., Exs. 15 and 45.

278 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

As to the general character of folk-song, Bartók distinguishes two
major kinds. The first is a slow song in parlando-rubato, free in rhythm
and of an improvisatory nature:

[На] Кош - lotttestim а Ъо-Ког - ba,
=.
Piros vérem hull - а hó-ba;

(I lie wounded in the thicket,

My red blood trickles on the snow.)

Of Bartók's own music it is particularly the quartets where we find
movements in the style of these slow improvisatory songs, e.g. the third
movement of Quartet No. 4 (Ex. 133) and the ‘night music’ of the
Andante of Quartet No. 5. Occasionally these slow songs repeat (like
the related Rumanian дота, see below) the same note, as illustrated
by the Andante of Quartet No. 5, the Più adagio section of the Second
movement of the Piano Concerto No. 3, and the opening of the Adagio
in the Music for strings, percussion, and celesta.

The second type of authentic Hungarian peasant music is represented
by tempo giusto songs in strict time and dance rhythm:?

which like the previous example shows the characteristic Hungarian
‘snap’. There are instances in which Bartók uses tempo giusto and
rubato in alternation, notably in works of his early period, an instructive
example of which is the Introduction to the finale of his Quartet No. 1
of 1908.

As to the more *modern' folk-song, Bartók sees its main difference
from the authentic type in that the first section of its quaternary struc-

ТЫ Ех. 21. * Ibid., Ех. 61.

BÉLA BARTÓK 279

ture is always repeated in the last section (АААА, AABA, ABBA, or
ABCA), and the song employs modality more frequently than the old
Кіпа

Ех. 119 E EN

Otherwise, the ‘modern’ type is identical with the authentic, having
absorbed most of its features.

Bartók also refers to a third type, the ‘mixed’ folk-song which
possesses certain traits of the authentic song, such as the quaternary
structure, but reveals the influence of the West in its major-minor
tonality :?

Ex. 120

This ‘mixed’ type, commonly described in the nineteenth century as airs
favoris, was especially popular with the upper classes of Hungarian
society—it is the kind used by Liszt and Brahms—and Bartók himself
occasionally resorts to it, as in the Improvisations for piano (1920)? and
even as late as 1944, in the fourth movement of the Concerto for
Orchestra:

Ex. 121

ibid), ЕХ 105. 2 Ibid Ех оте
3 Nos. 3, 4, 5, and 6 are recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x.

280 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Inevitably, Hungarian folk music engaged Bartók's main interest. But
he also made valuable studies of the musical folklore of Rumania,
Slovakia, and the Arabs round Biskra, and occupied himself with the
folk-songs of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, the Ukraine, and Turkey. In
Rumania he found four different kinds: the colindă or Christmas song,
the dirge, instrumental dance music, and music not associated with any
particular occasions. To this last variety belongs the doind or horă
lungă preponderant in the regions of Maramures and Ugocsa, which is,
perhaps, together with the dance music, the most important product of
Rumanian folk music. Like the slow Hungarian song, the doind is in
parlando-rubato style, free in rhythm and improvisatory but, in addition,
marked by chant-like, incantatory passages on the same note! and the
fairly frequent use of the downward third :?

Ex. 122
Parlando, rubato

hei - hai - hai Te-ai te-mut de me-ste - rit.

(Hey, my sweetheart, when I talked to you you were afraid I might bewitch you.)

How Bartók uses Ше doind іп a stylized, highly individual form may be
seen, for instance, from the first movement of his Violin Sonata No. 2
and, particularly, the Trio in the Marcia of the Quartet No. 6, in which
the falling third is very prominent:

1 These are sometimes also found in the Rumanian dirge.
2 Bartok, Die Volksmusik der Rumänen von Maramures (Munich, 1923), Ex. 23.

BÉLA BARTÓK 281

Ex. 123
@ Molto moderato DN => ж
f) m mM A y З E

In his tempo giusto movements Bartók resorts very frequently to the
characteristic dactylic-trochaic pattern of the Rumanian folk dance.!

while his other favourite rhythmic pattern originates in Slovakian
music:

Ex. 125

24. 4 JU - E

In the summer of 1913 Bartók made a journey to the region of Biskra,
in Algeria, to study Arab music which he found to be very limited in
compass, mostly moving between two or three neighbouring notes and
constantly repeating tiny melodic fragments. This primitive structure,
however, is strongly counterbalanced by the complex polyrhythmic
character of Arab music as seen, for instance, in a woman-kneja or
nuptial song:?

! Tbid., Ex. 166.
? Bartók, Die Volksmusik der Araber von Biskra und Umgebung (Leipzig, 1920), Ex. 26.

282 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939
Ex. 126

Voice

Percussion

Bartók fastened on this polyrhythmic aspect and applied it, for instance,
in the Sonata for two pianos, notably the second movement, while the
perpetual reiteration of short melodic-rhythmic figures of narrow
compass is found in many of his works and is strikingly illustrated by
the opening of the finale of his Dance Suite of 1923:

Ex. 121

Bartók's researches into the folk music of the Ukraine, Yugoslavia,
Bulgaria, and Turkey were not carried far enough to allow him to arrive
at any definite conclusions. What he wrote, for instance, on the irregular
*Bulgarian rhythm' has now been shown to be true also of the music
of the Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Berbers and Hindus.! Here is an
example of a Bulgarian folk-song in an ‘irrational’ rhythm:?

1 John W. Downey, La Musique populaire dans l’œuvre de Béla Bartók (Paris, 1964),

ӘЗІРЛЕ
? Quoted p. 154, from Vasil Stoin, Narodni pesni ot Timok ао Vit (Sofia, 1928).

BÉLA BARTÓK 283

Bartok introduces such rhythmic patterns into the Six Pieces in Bulga-
rian Rhythmin Vol. VI of his Microcosmos, in the Scherzo and Trio of his

Quartet No. 5 E and et and the finale of Contrasts

(8 +5).

As regards Serbo-Croat folk-song, Bartók began to study it system-
atically only in 1941-2, when he examined various collections by
other investigators. There he found one type, particularly widespread in
Dalmatia, which is in two parts, the second voice holding a pedal or
moving, heterophonically, in seconds and sevenths with the first voice.
The following example opens with two sopile, double-reed wind instru-
ments, which are always used in pairs:!

Ex. 129

2 Sopile

Bartók had used seconds and sevenths to thicken out a line and thus
lend it greater pungency long before these studies, in fact as early as
1907, in his 14 Bagatelles for piano. But his late occupation with Serbo-
Croat folk music bore fresh fruit in the two-part writing in major
sevenths and minor seconds in the Giuoco delle coppie of his Concerto
for Orchestra.

1 Quoted in Bartók and A. Lord, Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (New York, 1951), p. 63.

284 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Another fingerprint of Bartók's harmonic style also had its origin in
folk music. In the folk-songs of the Balkan peninsula there is no clear
major and minor third but a ‘neutral’ interval higher or lower in pitch
than the Western interval. This is the natural coroliary of the absence
of a definite feeling for a major or minor key. Bartók absorbed this
feature into his own music in two ways. He either combines the major
and minor third in a single chord as, for instance, in Хо. 143 of his
Microcosmos and the finale of his Quartet No. 5 (Ех. 130, i and ii); or he
extends this ‘neutralization’ by casting one part into major and the
other into minor, thus arriving at a simple bitonality, as in No. 59 of
Microcosmos (Ex. 130, iii):

TEE PORE RES
hihi р mw

EI А o 2 ee м НЕ
ть зи

АЕ ре rec

To sum up, Bartók's amalgamation of East European folk-song
with his own style was a gradual process, beginning with simple
transcriptions and arrangements in which a peasant tune is taken

BÉLA BARTÓK 285

either unchanged or only slightly modified, a piano accompaniment
and, perhaps, a few bars of introduction and postlude added. Bartók
himself compared this to Bach's treatment of the Protestant chorales
some of which were originally popular songs.! In a later stage he
took the native tune as 'material to be altered, developed, and
elaborated; and the final phase was the invention of ‘imaginary’
folk tunes, ie. melodies springing from the composer's mind and
bearing characteristics of both his own individual style and that of
authentic folk-song fused into an organic, indivisible unity. Pointers in
this direction can be clearly discerned in his Quartet No. 2 and the ballet
The Miraculous Mandarin (1919); but it was not until the First and
Second Violin Sonatas (1921 and 1922 respectively) that Bartók's
advance towards a realization of his new ideal became manifest. The
more obvious Hungarianisms are confined to the last movements which
are in the nature of primitive folk dances, while in the remaining move-
ments he applies a novel expressionistic manner. The First Sonata is
larger in scope than the Second, and has an opening movement bursting
with a passionate and sweeping melodic line in the violin and with
savagely percussive chords in the piano. The obscuring of the underlying
tonality—an infinitely extended C sharp minor—is almost complete and,
availing himself of the advanced harmonic devices of contemporary
Western music, Bartók acquired a tonal sense very different from
that shown in his previous compositions. The individual notes of some
themes imply a kind of ‘diatonicized’ chromaticism which in appearance
is almost identical with serial writing and greatly differs from the
intense, Wagnerian chromaticism encountered in such an early work
as the first movement of the First String Quartet (1908). The Second
Sonata is more concentrated and more economical, consisting of
two parts only, which stand to each other in something like the relation
of lassú and friss of the verbunkos style—popular Hungarian music
of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which was played at
army recruiting (German, Werbung). The first part is in tempo rubato,
slow and recitative-like, while the second is in fact tempo giusto and
shows a rondo-like arrangement of varied dance sections. The two
parts have the main thematic material in common; but in contrast to
the practice of the classical and romantic duo sonatas, the violin (which
is leading) and the piano of Bartók's two sonatas are allotted for the
most part separate material, which emphasizes the individual character
of the two instruments. Instead of interweaving them Bartók makes
them complementary to each other, which has the effect of apparent
contrast but ideal unity of thought. Both works show classical sonata
1 The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music (New York, 1959), p. 71.

286 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

form, but Bartók varies the expository thematic material in the recapitu-
lation almost beyond recognition and thus achieves a psychological
rather than actual reprise.

In the Dance Suite (1923), which consists of five dances with a
ritornello and a finale, Bartók reverts to the half authentic, half ima-
ginary type of Hungarian folk-music, but the following Piano Sonata
(1926), the suite Out of Doors for piano (1926), and the First Piano
Concerto (1926) show a modification of the style initiated in the
violin sonatas. The predominant feature of the Piano Sonata is its
extreme percussiveness, with explosive chord-clusters compounded of
seconds, fourths, sevenths, and ninths, and the structure built up by the
ostinato-like repetition of short melodic phrases of a limited compass,
whose connexion with Hungarian folk-music is so attenuated as to be
almost non-existent. The dynamic thrust and power of the music leaves
no room for lyricism and even the meditative slow movement avoids all
sustained melody; in spirit the work is akin to Ше Allegro barbaro of
fifteen years earlier, but the writing is far more concentrated and un-
compromising. Although Out of Doors shows the same application of
percussive and repetitive devices as the Piano Sonata, it is a more
ingratiating composition and programmatic in character. The five
pieces of which it consists are mood-pictures of which the fourth,
‘Night Music’, is the first fully developed example of Bartók's extra-
ordinary sensitiveness to the sounds of a nocturnal world, with the
chirpings, twitterings, and calls of night animals and insects reproduced
in an impressionistic manner that owes almost nothing to Debussy but
represents the composer's individual contribution to evocative music.
The First Piano Concerto continues in the percussive martellato style
of the Piano Sonata, but the sounds produced are less harsh and spiky
than in the former work. This is due partly to the chordal texture being
largely colouristic, and partly to the fact that a great deal of writing is
dissolved into contrapuntal lines, whose clashes refuse to be interpreted
in a vertical sense and pass very quickly. The individual strands of the
polyphonic fabric are drawn succinctly and stand out with great clarity,
features which may be traced back to Bartók's intense study of Bach
and to his editing of Baroque music (Couperin, Frescobaldi, Scarlatti,
and other composers). The influence of the Baroque concerto can be
seen in the relation between the piano and the orchestra in which there
is no clear-cut division and, though there are passages (as in the Baroque
concerto) where the piano becomes a true solo instrument, especially in
the slow movement, the general effect remains one of a competition
between equals, the piano playing the role of a primus inter pares. As in
the Piano Sonata, the material is fragmentary, with a predominance of

BÉLA BARTÓK 287

scale motives that are very much alike, and the feeling for a definite
tonality is very vague: to say that the Concerto is “іп” E minor is merely
to indicate a general tendency of the music towards a tonal pole.
During this period, initiated by the two violin sonatas and lasting till
about 1930, Bartók advanced to the utmost limits of his intellectual
exploration, cultivating an expressionistic, abstract, and esoteric style
of utterance. He appears during these years to be almost exclusively
concerned with the projection of an inner world in which the dividing
line between the conscious (rational) and the instinctive (irrational) is
virtually non-existent. This is perhaps best seen in the Third String
Quartet (1927) which in style represents a ne plus ultra in concentra-
tion and subtilization of thought. Like the Beethoven of the late
quartets and piano sonatas, Bartók in this work seems to be communing
with himself rather than attempting communication with the outside
world. This is the main reason why this string quartet is the least
accessible of his six, making extraordinary demands on the listener's
perceptive powers; yet it 15 no less a masterpiece than the subsequent
quartets, differing from them only in the inaccessibility of its aesthetic
and technical premises. The six quartets occupy a central position in
Bartók's creative career and may be likened to a diary to which the artist
confided his most intimate intellectual and emotional experiences and
adventures. Each of the six quartets stands at the culmination of a
different phase of Barótk's artistic growth, summing up the essential
problems, tendencies, and aspirations characteristic of each stylistic
stage. Just as Beethoven's seventeen quartets represent the apogee of the
classical form, so does the series of six Bartók quartets mark the con-
summation of the modern genre. For profundity of thought, imaginative
power, structural logic, diversity of formal and textural features, and
enlargement of the technical scope, they stand unrivalled. This quality
of uniqueness is further enhanced by the following consideration: one
of the mainsprings of Bartók's art was the attempt to achieve a perfect
synthesis between East and West, and in his quartets this synthesis may
be said to have been most nearly achieved. We can realize the full
measure of this imaginative feat if we bear in mind that this fusion
between two different musical cultures was brought about in a medium
which has come to be regarded as the purest and most subtle manifesta-
tion of Western musical thinking. To have harnessed the instinctive
primitive forces residing in Hungarian music to the most intellectual of
Western musical forms—therein lies the historic significance of Bartók's
quartets. This fusion, however, was achieved at a price. The criticism
that must be levelled against Bartók's quartet style, as it may be also
advanced against Beethoven's from the Razumovsky quartets onwards,

288 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

is that it frequently bursts the framework of the medium. In Beethoven's
case this was due to a powerful symphonic urge, while with Bartók it is
the dynamic percussiveness of his harmonic and rhythmic language
that contradicts the intimacy and ‘inwardness’ associated with the
quartet medium.

The Third String Quartet is the shortest and, in expression, most
intense of the six, consisting of one continuous movement of a highly
unusual formal design. It is divided into four sections which follow one
another in the simple pattern slow-fast-slow-fast and these are themati-
cally closely related in a manner best illustrated by two interlocking
arches:

Part 1 Part 2 Recapitulation Coda
of Part 1

Part 1 furnishes a striking example of Bartók's technique of developing
virtually an entire movement from a single germ-cell—here a pentatonic
figure consisting of a rising fourth and descending minor third. As the
last section of the ternary Part 1 proves, this basic idea derives from a
broad sustained theme of Hungarian flavour which was probably
Bartók's initial idea, but, instead of stating it at the beginning, he seizes
on its most characteristic motive and evolves from it the major part of
the movement before revealing the source from which it sprang. The
immense regenerative force inherent in this germ-cell may be seen from
the following examples: |

ал
dii) : (iv) =

BÉLA BARTÓK 289

The recapitulation of Part 1 condenses the expository material to such
an extent that a few bars have to do duty for a dozen bars or so of the
exposition (the recapitulation is seventy bars long, as against 122 bars
of Part 1). Part 2 clearly springs from native dances, with the main
theme harmonized in ‘primitive’ parallel triads, and the music is
driven along by an elemental rhythm in which percussive chords and
syncopations predominate. Its form is that of a sonata-cum-variations.
The treatment of the main subject proceeds by imitation and stretto;
and while the melodic structure undergoes comparatively minor altera-
tions, there are frequent changes of the metric units (2/4, 3/4, 3/8, 5/8,
and 6/8). The second subject provides the material for the ‘development’
which takes the form of a series of variations culminating in a charac-
teristic Bartókian fugue—a fast scurrying piece in /eggiero style and with
subdued dynamics. (Unlike the fugues of Beethoven’s last works,
Bartók's do not serve a dramatic purpose nor are they intended as an
intellectual catharsis; they are motoric in character and serve to
intensify the rhythmic drive of the movement in which they occur.) The
coda 15 a much transformed reprise of Part 2, changing from Allegro to
Allegro molto, with the contrapuntal texture becoming denser still
(canons and inversions in stretto), until towards the end the music
takes on a savagely aggressive character through the use of percussive
note-repetitions, incessant ostinatos, double-stops, glissandi, and rising
and falling arpeggios. The work closes on a chord of three superimposed
fifths based on the note C sharp—the ‘tonic’, which, except for the very
beginning and a brief passage in Part 1, is never in evidence until the
concluding bars.

If the Third String Quartet represents Bartók's farthest advance in
the direction of intellectual severity, uncompromising harshness of
emotional expression and formal experiment, the Fourth (1928) marks
a certain retreat from this extreme position, though it still has some hard
things to say. Not that Bartók's advanced style undergoes an intrinsic
change. The writing remains predominantly linear, without regard
for the violent dissonances produced in the vertical texture; and

290 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

there is a predilection for scholastic ‘automatic’ devices (canon, imita-
tion, stretto, inversion and retrograde motion) which at times creates
the impression of excess, a feeling that Bartók is straining these devices
and making too self-conscious a use of them. But he does handle them
with a remarkable freedom and it is not often that he sacrifices the
shapeliness and equipoise of his melodic lines to Ше demands of strict
contrapuntal logic. Moreover, the gains acquired in the Third Quartet
are now consolidated on a broader formal basis, and such sections as
the wonderful elegy of the third movement and the delightful serenade
of the fourth suggest that Bartók's personality was maturing and
becoming accessible to gentler and more relaxed moods. But the quest
for unity and for correspondences between the movements by novel
means continues. In the Third Quartet Bartók interlocks what are in
fact two different movements. In the Fourth Quartet he resorts to the
so-called Bogen or arch form in that its five movements follow in the
pattern A-B-C-B'-A' in which the two outer and the two inner move-
ments, respectively, mirror one another while the central piece C stands
by itself. In other words, the music progresses from A to C and then
retraces its steps back via B' to A':

Allegro — Prestissimo — Non troppo lento - Allegretto — Allegro molto

(A) ni (C) LP (А)

The links between Ше respective outer and inner movements are по!
simply confined to thematic correspondences but also embrace the
general structure and the character of the music. The first and last
movements derive their entire material from a germ-cell of six notes
in the seventh bar of the opening Allegro:

Ex. 132
1st movement bar 16

BÉLA BARTÓK 291

Ex. 132 (i) looks an unpromising enough motif but it is the measure of
Bartók's art of organic thinking that from it he evolves a wealth of
thematic ideas with which he builds up the constantly changing texture
of the first and last movements. This he does by stretching and contract-
ing the intervals, forming diatonic or chromatic versions of the same
figure, subjecting it to fragmentation, inversion and retrograde motion,
and rhythmic variation. It would be extremely hard to detect the
inner connexion between the original idea and some of its meta-
morphoses, without hearing the intervening stages. As one of his recent
biographers remarks,! it is because Bartók allows us to share his
thought-processes rather than leaping from the basic motive to its
furthest transformation that his music carries with it such utter
conviction. The first movement is an abstract piece wholly concerned
with problems of form, design, and texture; the finale, on the other hand,
is a ferocious Hungarian dance which at times oversteps the proper
string quartet medium by producing an almost orchestral sonority. The
relationship between the second and the fourth movements is on
several levels: both share the same thematic material, both are light-
weight scherzos, and both are played in a special manner—the Prestis-
simo with muted strings and the Allegretto pizzicato. Yet there is
a marked contrast of mood between these two movements: while the
former is a kind of moto perpetuo to which the muted strings lend
a strange shimmer (not unlike the effect produced by the Allegro
misterioso of Berg's Lyric Suite), the latter has a delicate, guitar-like
accompaniment in the manner of a serenade. It 15 in this fourth
movement that Bartók first uses the ‘snap’ pizzicato in which the
strings of the instrument are to be plucked with such a force that they
rebound off the fingerboard with a percussive sound. The only point of

1 Halsey Stevens, The Life and Music of Béla Bartók (New York, 1953), p. 188.

292 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

repose in this dynamic quartet is provided by the lyrical espressivo of the
slow central movement, with its grave, wistful cello recitative of Hun-
garian character in the first section. Here Bartók recalls music peculiar
to the tárogató, a woodwind instrument of ancient (Eastern) origin
whose dark colour is akin to that of the chalumeau register of our
clarinet: s

Ex. 133
Non troppo lento

()
Ist & 2nd EAE
Vins.

The middle section is an exquisite atmospheric study of the sounds of
nocturnal nature. The Fifth String Quartet (1934) followed the fourth
after an interval of six years, yet intrinsically they are sister works,
though in the later composition the process of intellectual relaxation

BÉLA BARTÓK 293

and lyrical expansion is carried a stage further. Significantly, it has two
slow movements whereas the previous quartet had only one; and its
melodic lines show a more clear-cut articulation and grow in amplitude
almost in the manner of themes in the established sense, while the
harmonic style is on the whole less astringent. Yet the formal organiza-
tion is the same as in the Fourth Quartet—again an arch form,
A-B-C-B'-A', in which C is now a scherzo flanked by two slow
movements in which Bartók achieves a new height of evocative lyrical
poetry. The correspondences between the opening movement and the
finale comprise the sharing of the same thematic material, the casting of
both movements in sonata form, and a clear definition of tonality (B
flat). Both movements show an abundance of inversion, canons, stretti,
and passages in invertible counterpoint—the recapitulation of the
Allegro, for instance, reintroducing the expository material in its
*mirror' form. The finale is notable for the inclusion of a fugue which in
its percussive note-reiteration on the two violins, col legno, and a
drone-like ostinato on the cello, constitutes an illuminating example of
Bartók's fusion of an Eastern and Western style. It also contains a
strange episode, marked 'Allegretto con indifferenza', with a trivial
tune in А major and harmonized in deliberately commonplace fashion
with alternating tonic and dominant chords, the whole to be played
*meccanico'. The barrel-organ effect thus produced is like a grimace or
mocking sneer, recalling Mahler's use of banal tunes to suggest the
commonplace aspect of life. The second and the fourth movements—
an Adagio and Andante—share the same ground plan (A-B-A plus
coda) and the same material. Both open in an atmospheric manner, the
fragmentary motives and trills of the Adagio corresponding to the re-
peated pizzicato notes, slurs and gruppetti of the Andante, and both
movements contain a chorale, a feature almost invariably associated
with Bartók's *night music'. The central piece is an engaging scherzo in
alla bulgarese rhythm for which Bartók showed a special predilection in
his late period. The asymmetrical rhythmic pattern of the scherzo proper,
(4--2--3)
8
feature of the latter is a delicate arabesque formed by а ten-note
ostinato which is repeated fifty-nine times, with an enchanting melody
in the vein of Hungarian children's song set against it. With the Sixth
String Quartet (1939), written five years after the Fifth, we reach the
‘classical’ stage of Bartók's development, which also includes such
works as the Music for Strings and Percussion, the Sonata for Two
Pianos and the Violin Concerto. This last period is characterized by a
greater simplicity of form and technical devices, by the invention of

, grows more complex in the trio and a most noteworthy

294 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

themes of a broader, more sustained character, by a marked reduction
of grating dissonances, by a greater transparency of texture and a
sharper tonal perspective. These changes, which were first noticeable
in the Fifth Quartet, reach their consummation in the Sixth. Thus it is
significant that Bartók reverts to the classical scheme of four contrasting
movements, that he anchors the work in a D major-minor tonality
and that he employs a simpler, less intellectual device than the arch
form in order to achieve formal unity between the movements. He
resorts to a motto theme first announced at the very beginning by the
viola which is a mournful melody of a marked drooping tendency, most
beautifully shaped and balanced and (like the variation theme of the
Violin Concerto) constituting an exquisite example of Bartók's skilful
fusion of the melodic and rhythmic inflexions of a Hungarian melody
with his own personal manner:

Ex. 134

Each of the first three movements is prefaced by this motto theme, but
on each successive occasion it appears in a slightly different and tex-
turally richer form, until in the finale it becomes the actual material of
the movement, expanded and subjected to elaboration and at last
revealing its full emotional significance. At the other extreme stands the
gay, even exuberant opening movement. With the Marcia and Burletta,
however, Bartók returns to the style of his expressionistic period; the
march is harsh and aggressive and the Burletta's humour is grim and
sardonic, with the first violin playing quarter-tones against the 'true'
notes of the second violin and vice versa, thus creating a deliberate ‘out
of tune’ effect. In the Burletta Bartók's ‘barbaric’ tendency is particu-
larly emphasized in the fierce harmonic clashes, in glissandos and
percussive chords to be played ‘at the heel’ of the bow. Indeed it is hard

BÉLA BARTÓK 295

to resist the impression that the work possesses an extra-musical
significance or an implicit programme.

The Second Piano Concerto (1931) is permeated by a feeling of
extrovert exuberance comparatively rare with Bartók, its sinewy
athletic strength proclaiming the composer at the height of his creative
powers. Its tonic is an.unambiguous С major and though the themes are
still short and fragmentary, their outline is clear-cut and readily re-
tained in the listener's mind. The formal structure is more articulate
than in the First Concerto, the first movement being in sonata form,
with the themes inverted in the recapitulation, while the finale consists
essentially of the varied alternation of two ideas, recalling Haydn's
favourite principle of construction. The slow movement combines an
Adagio with а Scherzo in the form А-В-А, section А being an example
of the composer’s ‘night music’ style in which a string chorale, harmon-
ized in five superimposed fifths, alternates with recitative-like passages
of an improvisatory character on the piano. The work may be said to
stand halfway between the Baroque type of the First Concerto and the
classical layout of the Violin Concerto, with the solo part frequently
rising from an obbligato to full individual status, though the allocation
of separate material to the piano and the orchestra still points to the
eighteenth-century model.

Bartók's interest in the rhythmic and colouristic possibilities of a
percussion ensemble in combination with other instruments first
showed itself in the two piano concertos; but it was not until the second
half of the 1930s that he composed two works in which he explored to
the full the potentialities of such a combination. Although the Music
for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) and the Sonata for Two
Pianos and Percussion (1937) belong together as bold experiments
with novel and fascinating sonorities, in the first work the percussion is
intimately integrated with the rest of the orchestra, while in the second
the percussive instruments are frequently treated in opposition to the
two pianos. The Music for Strings is in effect a chamber symphony in
four movements and is the more highly organized of the two works,
demonstrating Bartók's ingenious use of Lisztian cyclic form and
theme-transformation. The entire composition springs virtually from a
single theme which in its narrow, mostly chromatic, intervals and its
emotional expression is similar to the motto theme of the Sixth String
Quartet. In the first movement it forms the subject of a five-part fugue
and the successive entries of the fugal subject are on alternating rising
and falling fifths from the initial A to the final E flat, the 'key' in which
the climax is reached after being approached simultaneously from
both the higher and the lower circle of fifths. The process is then

296 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

reversed in a condensed form, with the fugal subject now turned
upside down, and in the coda both its original and inverted versions
appear in combination in the *key' of A, the tonal pole of the movement.
Dynamically, the movement represents a long crescendo-decrescendo,
blazing into white heat at the climax and mirroring on a large scale the
arch described by the fugal subject in four bars. There are no counter-
subjects, no episodes, and no free contrapuntal lines—the whole
fabric is woven into a single closely-knit organic structure. The remain-
ing three movements, though introducing some fresh material, are
essentially an exploration of the implications of the fugal subject in
different directions.

The choice of a double string orchestra in combination with piano,
harp, celesta and percussion instruments of definite and indefinite pitch
provided Bartók with an immensely wide and varied range of timbres
which he exploits with uncanny resourcefulness. The two string orches-
tras are used both in combination and antiphonally, with and without
the percussion, which is employed to produce both traditional and novel
sound effects. Just as the Music for Strings exploits both the expressive
and percussive qualities of a chamber orchestra, so does the Sonata
exploit these qualities within the more confined medium of two pianos
and percussion. Bartók was himself a distinguished pianist and a wealth
of characteristic piano devices are applied to the two instruments, which
are treated on a completely equal footing. The percussion comprises
three kettle-drums, a bass drum, two side drums, two cymbals, triangle,
tam-tam, and, as the only melodic instrument, a xylophone, the whole
to be handled by two players. In the opening movement the percussion
is largely used for underlining and emphasizing the piano rhythm,
while in the two remaining movements it acquires a solo role, the
xylophone being entrusted with numerous passages of thematic impor-
tance. In 1940 Bartók transcribed the work as a Concerto for Two
Pianos and Orchestra, and in this version the role of the percussion is
less conspicuous, with a corresponding loss of the particular sonorous
quality characteristic of the original version.

From the same year as the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion
dates the completion of Microcosmos (1926-37) which consists of 153
piano pieces of varying length and of progressive technical difficulty.
Microcosmos is in the first place a didactic work intended to develop a
pianist's facility at specific stages of his technique, but it is also a com-
pendium of the essential devices of modern music as seen in the light of
Bartók's own style—chords of the fourth, major and minor seconds,
cluster harmonies, modality, bitonality, whole-tone and other scales,
contrapuntal techniques such as canon and inversion, and special

BÉLA BARTÓK 297

rhythmic patterns such as syncopation and asymmetrical rhythms, of
which the Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm are the finest examples.

The Violin Concerto (1938) illustrates the perfect equilibrium of all
that is characteristic of Bartók's mature style. Thus, the Hungarian
elements are subtilized to such an extent that they become intangible;
they are like the scent that clings to a plant transplanted from an exotic
soil. And while the music is immensely virile and shows that intellectual
passion peculiar to Bartók, it is punctuated by a powerful expressive
emotional note; this amalgamation of the dramatic with the lyrical is
perhaps the most remarkable feature of the concerto. Bartók's mellow-
ness is also evident in a number of technical features. Instead of short
fragmentary ideas we now find song-like themes of a sustained character;
the formal design is spacious, yet it creates the impression of the utmost
concentration on account of the extraordinary vitality and cogency of
the composer's musical thinking; there is a clear feeling of tonality (B
minor), a less pronounced use of contrapuntal devices, and the soloist
assumes a dominating role in a part marked by great virtuosity. The
orchestral texture shows a noticeable increase in transparency, Bartók's
former style of block instrumentation being replaced by a more indivi-
dual treatment of single instruments with much subtle blending of
colours, especially in the second movement. The work is conceived as a
kind of variation; in addition to the second movement, which consists of
theme and six variations, all the thematic material of the opening move-
ment is repeated in varied guise in the finale, and this correspondence
extends also to the architecture, the finale duplicating the formal design
of the first movement (which is in sonata form) almost section by section.

In America Bartók wrote four major works—the Concerto for
Orchestra (1943), the Sonata for Solo Violin (1944), the Third Piano
Concerto (1945) and the Viola Concerto (1945), which remained un-
finished. The Concerto for Orchestra was written for the Boston
Symphony Orchestra which explains the extraordinary brilliance of the
writing, single instruments and groups of homogeneous instruments
(strings, woodwind, and brass) being treated in a virtuoso concertante
style. The work is in fact a symphony or, better, a symphonic suite in
five movements. Like the Violin Concerto, it represents a crystallization
of all the features of Bartók's maturity—lucid textures in which contra-
puntal devices are manipulated to vivid effect, trenchant rhythms and a
strongly affirmed, though still widely extended, tonality. If anything,
the Hungarian-inspired character of certain themes is more pronounced
than in the previous work; the chain-like arrangement of the second and
third movements also follows the pattern of multiple structure charac-
teristic of old Hungarian folk-songs (p. 277). Thus, in the second

298 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

movement, *Giuoco delle coppie' (Play of the Couples), which takes the
place of a symphonic scherzo, the chain structureis seen in the successive
introduction two by two, each pair with its own theme, of bassoons in
sixths, oboes in thirds, clarinets in sevenths, flutes in fifths, and muted
trumpets in major seconds. The Sonata for Solo Violin stands apart
from Bartók's ‘American’ work in that it reverts to Ше ‘difficult’
expressionistic style of the Third and Fourth String Quartets, at any
rate so far as its first two movements are concerned. The work is severe
both in emotional expression and in intellectual content, and to this
severity must be added the deliberate angularity and austerity of the
style. This is partly the corollary of this particular medium, which is
restricted by the absence of a bass to provide tonal balance, the impos-
sibility of sounding more than two notes together and the consequent
necessity of breaking chords in triple and quadruple stops. The whole
work represents a technical tour de force of extraordinary Ди сийу.
Extremes of range are employed in all four movements and much use is
made of simultaneous arco and pizzicato and of harmonics and
glissando. The Fugue (second movement), whose subject, Ex. 135, with

Ex. 135
Risoluto, non troppo vivo

its narrow compass and chromatic steps, is most characteristic of Bartók,
makes perhaps the greatest demands on the player though the first
movement, in ‘Tempo di ciaccona’ but in sonata form, is scarcely less
exacting. It is in the Melodia, whose long-spun chromatic line is
subsequently subjected to variation treatment, and in the final Presto, a
rondo with three episodes, that a more “ореп” style of writing and a
more relaxed mood are discernible. The influence of Bach's solo violin
sonatas is felt not only in the technical treatment of the instrument but
to some extent also in the neo-classical conception of the Tempo di
ciaccona and the Fugue. Hungarian memories affect the melodic and
rhythmic invention of the last two movements in a most subtle way.

The Third Piano Concerto was the last work Bartók was able virtually
to complete before his death. It illustrates a further move towards
structural and tonal simplification characteristic of Bartók's late style,

ZOLTAN KODÁLY 299

the texture being light and the orchestration of great transparency,
especially in the chorale and the ‘night music’ of the slow movement.
The solo part is far less percussive and less exacting than in the first two
piano сопсегіов yet it is of sufficient brilliance to stamp the work as a
true virtuoso concerto.

Looking back at Bartók's total achievement, one sees that several
features stand out with great clarity. First, like Stravinsky but to a
higher degree, he succeeded in an organic fusion of Western art-music
with Eastern folk music, bringing all the technical resources of the West
to bear upon native material. In his technique of composition Bartók
was one of the most sophisticated Western composers, but his spiritual
allegiance belonged to the ‘primitive’ East, whence he derived much of
the freshness and seeming spontaneity of his melodic style and the
immense vitality of his rhythmic invention. Secondly, while adhering
to the traditional forms of sonata, rondo, and variation, he displayed
supreme mastery in designing novel schemes and patterns best illus-
trated in his six string quartets, the Sonata for two pianos, the Music for
strings, celesta and percussion, the Concerto for orchestra and the
Sonata for solo violin. The same consummate command is shown in
his management of the rhythmic and instrumental texture and his use of
orchestral timbre, notably in the genre of his impressionist ‘night
music’ which sprang from Debussy, but which Bartok developed into a
highly original utterance. And thirdly, of the three musicians who
dominated the musical scene during the first half of the twentieth
century—Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartók—it is the Hungarian
master who, despite his immense intellectual control, remained nearest
to the instinctual, the irrational in music and thus to the Dionysian
spirit in art. He is the supreme example of the artist who, in the dialectic
between emotional ‘primitivism’ and intellectual sophistication, never
allowed the second ascendancy over the first.

ZOLTAN KODALY

Zoltan Kodaly (1882-1967) was intimately associated with Bartok in
his researches into Hungarian folk-music and also absorbed its charac-
teristic melodic, rhythmic and tonal inflexions into his own idiom; but he
shows a greater dependence in his melodic invention on folk material
and is, altogether, a composer of less marked individuality than his
compatriot. Less intellectual than Bartók, Kodaly was a more direct and
more sensuous musician whose early works show some allegiance to
French impressionism. His strength lay in his lyricism, in a sustained,
expressive line of melody; and it is, therefore, no accident that his best
work is to be found in vocal music, particularly songs and choral

300 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

compositions. In these he seems strongly influenced by Palestrina's
ideal of transparent contrapuntal texture and clear part-writing. His
outstanding choral work is the Psalmus Hungaricus for tenor solo,
chorus and orchestra (1923), with a text based on Psalm 55, in which the
sixteenth-century author identified his own sufferings and sorrows with
those of King David and, indirectly, with those of the Hungarian people.
The spirit of this archaic text is recaptured in lyrico-dramatic music of
extraordinary power and vision, showing a tense melodic style, harmonic
directness and great ingenuity in the choral writing. Rich in incidents
and episodes, the work consists of a choral prelude and choral interludes
which use identical pentatonic material modelled on the style of
sixteenth-century Hungarian minstrel songs! and with the Hungarian
fourth prominent in the cadences.

These interludes constitute the refrain for the various solo passages
employing different themes, so that the form represents a freely treated
rondo on a large scale; the vocal parts are reinforced but never over-
whelmed by the orchestral accompaniment. By contrast, the Te Deum
(1936), written in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the
relief of Buda from the Turkish occupation, is conceived in a triumphant
vein and with a judicious balance between contrapuntal and more homo-
phonic choral writing. And, while in the Рзатиз Hungaricus the
Hungarian element is conspicuous in the general melodic style, in the Te
Deum it is largely confined to the subjects of the two fugues, and there
are also references to plainsong melodies.

With Háry János (1926) and Székelyfonó (The Székely Spinning
Room) (1932) Kodály made important contributions to national Hun-
garian opera. Both works employ native subjects, the first the legendary
exploits of a kind of Hungarian Baron Munchausen and the second
scenes from the life in a Transylvanian village. In contrast to Bartók,
who adopted in his opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle the Wagnerian
principle of musical continuity, Kodaly adheres to the older ‘number’
design, with solos, duets, and choral ensembles separated by spoken
dialogue, as in the Singspiel of Háry János, or orchestral bridge passages
linking the various numbers, as in The Spinning Room. The music of the
latter consists mainly of a succession of Transylvanian folk-tunes whose
texts are so arranged as to imply an action, though the whole character
of the work is rather that of a scenic cantata. Both operas are true folk-
operas of a distinctly popular nature and with a strong Hungarian flavour,
but in Háry János Kodály mixes the native element with ingredients
from other sources: in the Hungarian scenes, a song from the Bukovina,

1 See article ‘Kodaly’ in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Sth ed. London,
1954), iv, p. 801.

LEOS JANÁCEK 301

verbunkos, and gypsy music; in the Austrian scenes, a Viennese carillon
tune, an eighteenth-century minuet and Austrian marches. Kodály's
orchestral music shows a highly developed sense of brilliant colouring,
particularly in the concertante treatment of woodwind and the richly
decorated style of the string writing. Characteristic examples of this
are the Dances of Marosszék (1930) and Dances of Galánta (1933), the
former based on Hungarian peasant tunes and the latter on verbunkos
music. The Variations on a Hungarian Folk-song (1939) uses a penta-
tonic tune, *The Peacock', which provides the theme for sixteen varia-
tions and a finale that combines a wide range of contrasting expression
with orchestral virtuosity. The Concerto for Orchestra (1939) shows a
contest between the different instrumental groups that emulates the
style of the eighteenth-century concerto grosso.

LEOS ТАМАСЕК

Turning to Czechoslovakia, the outstanding figure after the death of
Smetana and Dvořák was Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) who cultivated a
nationalism more intrinsic, more ‘intensive’ than that of his two
predecessors. Like Bartók and Kodály in Hungary, he modelled
his style on the characteristics of native (chiefly Moravian) folk material,
and showed a natural gift for inventing melodies in genuine folk style.
In his vocal compositions he assimilated with immense skill the verbal
rhythms and tonal inflexions of his native tongue, imitating Mussorg-
sky's similar musical treatment of Russian speech—as in this passage
from Příhody Lišky Bystroušky (The experiences of the little vixen
Sharp-Ears, generally known as The Cunning Little Vixen):

Ex. 136

Ze sta- ry Spa-Cek, ne-sty da-ty zá - let - nik,

ЕЕ

pro - vá - dí ne-prí-stojno-sü v ko - ги - né bu - ku.

(They accused each other of horrible things, indecent and immoral—that the old
starling was a shameless philanderer who did unseemly things in the crown of the
beech)

302 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Janáček was the first Czech composer to emancipate himself from the
prevailing Western influences and he gradually arrived at an entirely
personal and, in some aspects, highly original style that opened up new
musical territory. The characteristic features of Janácek's language are
an aphoristic melodic utterance and a kaleidoscopic change of short
themes and motives; a continual variation of the melodic and rhythmic
material; an elliptical harmony in which linking modulatory chords are
abolished; a fluid tonality which is largely modal and avoids tonic-
dominant relationships and the leading-note; and a rhythmic idiom in
which the employment of the smallest metric units (2/8, 3/8) is very
prominent. Janáček, who belonged to the generation of Mahler,
Strauss, and Debussy, matured very slowly and did not reach the
height of his creative career until he was in his sixties. The peak of his
later achievement is to be found in his five operas, each of which
treats an unusual subject and provides testimony to the composer's
interest in psychological conflicts.

The great success of his early opera Jenůfa (1903)! at the Prague
production of 1916 appears to have released pent-up forces in Janáček
and in the next twelve years he composed no less than five works for the
stage. The first was Výlety Páné Brouckovy (The Excursions of Mr.
Brouček) (1917), to a libretto by Frantisek Prochazka (after Svatopluk
Cech), a good-humoured but sharply observed satire on the petit
bourgeois mentality, with its narrow, smug, materialistic outlook,
personified in the Prague landlord, Matéj Broucek. Apart from word-
inspired motives in both parts, in the first (on the moon) it is the lyrical
element that prevails, while the second part (in the fifteenth century) is
characterized by a dramatic and ejaculatory style, and the thematic bur-
den is carried by the orchestra, short and clear-cut phrases being repeated
or varied on different degrees of the scale. Some phrases play the role
of leitmotives and are transformed according to the external and psycho-
logical changes of the action; but Janácek employs them in such a free
manner that they stand simultaneously for different characters and
different situations. Katya Kabanova (1921), to Janaéek’s own libretto,
derived from A. N. Ostrovsky's play The Storm, is the first of his two
operas with Russian subjects. The story illustrates the conflict between
the rights and the freedom of the individual, and the rigour of tradition
in old Russia as seen in the despotism of family life, the servile status of
married women and the iron grip of moral and social customs, Katya
representing the urge of the individual to escape from the fetters
of antiquated modes of life. In spite of the title of the opera, the ideo-
logical, if not actual, heroine is her mother-in-law Kabanicha, the

1 See рр. 179-82.

LEOS JANÁCEK 303

embodiment of conservatism, and around her are grouped two contrast-
ing pairs of lovers: Katya and Boris, Kudrjá$ and Varvara. The
psychological differences between these pairs are clearly reflected in the
musical characterization, the ill-starred lovers being depicted in broad
flowing themes with, frequently, wide intervals in the vocal parts while the
bright, happy pair are portrayed in short, dance-like figures mostly in 2/4
and 3/8 metres of a distinctly Slavonic flavour. Janácek's mature genius
is seen not only in his succinct delineation of these characters but in his
rich invention and the absolute technical mastery of a work which,
despite its predominantly objective treatment, soars at moments into
tense dramatic life, as for instance in the last duet between Katya and
Boris. The interplay of human drama with nature, which is a salient
characteristic of this opera, affords the composer opportunities for
atmospheric music, such as the magnificent storm of Act III or the
wordless humming chorus of the last scene personifying the River Volga,
which forms the background to the tragedy and is to be taken as the
symbol of eternal unchangeable life.

Nature in both its human and animal manifestations is also the
theme of The Cunning Little Vixen (1923) in which Janácek's pantheism
and his idea of the essential unity of creation finds full expression. 'My
themes,’ he once wrote, ‘grow out of the earth, out of animals, out of
people.’ The truth of this dictum is seen not only in the music which
transmutes human-speech inflexions, the calls and cries of animals and
nature sounds into imaginative utterances, but also in the action which
unfolds at two levels—the actual and the symbolical. The opera repre-
sents a kind of modern fairy-tale for grown-ups and some scenes have
the naive air of a Christmas charade; but the Gamekeeper's apostrophe
to Nature in the final scene is one of the finest lyrical passages in
twentieth-century opera. Véc Makropulos (The Makropulos Affair)
(1924), after Karel Capek's comedy, is a strange mixture of everyday
reality with fantasy. The fantastic element is represented by Elena
Makropulos who, thanks to an elixir given her by her father, an
alchemist at the Prague Court of Rudolf II of Habsburg, survives for
three hundred years into modern times when we meet her as the opera
singer, Emilia Marty. The opera suffers from too involved a libretto,
with a complicated legacy-lawsuit in the centre and much dialectics
arising from the heroine's long past, which impair the conciseness of
the dramatic action. The music, however, shows an advance on the
previous stage-works in the greater suppleness and plasticity of the
orchestral comment accompanying the declamatory phrases of the
singers, and, significantly, the traditional operatic cantilena is all but
completely absent. All this heralds the style of Janaéek’s last opera,

304 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Z mrtvého domu (From the House of the Dead) (1928), his most
powerful realistic drama. The subject, adapted by the composer from
Dostoevsky's autobiographical novel, has no coherent story but sets
out to show various scenes from life in a Siberian prison, in all its
terror, brutality, and desperation relieved only by occasional touches
of humour and comedy. Instead of a real plot we are given three
great narratives told by prisoners about the crimes that brought them to
Siberia. Grouped around these three tales are two episodes—the arrival
(first act) and the release (third act) of a political prisoner, and an inter-
lude which takes the form of a pantomime Don Juan, performed by some
prisoners for the amusement of the rest. The cast is, with one exception,
all male. Most characteristic of the music are stark, bare motives of a
violently dissonant nature produced by clashes of minor and major
seconds, parallel shifts of chords and long metrical units (6/4, 9/4, and
4/2). The orchestral style is marked by sharply drawn instrumental lines
and shows an unusual feature in that treble and bass instruments are
set against each other at the extremes of their range, with no inter-
mediate texture (anticipated in Тйе Makropulos Affair), which serves to
intensify the starkly dramatic character of this opera. The title-page
bears the inscription: “Їп every creature there is a spark of God'. The
opera is a most eloquent summing-up of Janaéek’s deep-rooted belief
in the essential goodness of man and an expression of his profound
compassion for the sufferings of humanity.

A word or two must be said about the state of incompletion in which
Janáček left From the House of the Dead. He had worked directly from
Dostoevsky's Russian text and had prepared from it a synopsis of
the action on four loose pages from which he wrote the libretto straight
into the score—some lines in Russian, others in Czech, and yet others
in Lachian dialect. After his death this had to be unified in Czech and
adapted to the vocal line. Moreover, Janáček did not live to complete
all the orchestration, often writing only the top line and bass which he
intended to fill in later. This task was performed by two Brno musicians,
the composer, Osvald Chlubna, and the conductor, Břetislav Bakala,
both intimately acquainted with Janácek's late orchestral style; the latter
conducted the first performance of the opera at Brno on 12 April 1930.

The majority of Janácek's choral music dates from his early, pre-war
period, but he did not write his greatest work in that genre until 1926,
two years before his death. This was the Glagolska mše (Glagolitic Mass)
for soli, chorus, orchestra, and organ: that is, а Mass using, instead of the
Latin text of the Ordinary, the equivalent text in Church Slavonic.! The

1 In Croatia Glagolitic Masses have been written by such composers as Božidar Sirola
(1889-1956), Albe Vidakovié (1914-1964), Krsto Odak (1888-1965).

LEOS JANÁCEK 305

liturgical use of Old Slavonic had been banned by the Roman Church in
the eleventh century, although permitted again temporarily under
Charles IV (1316—78). In 1920 an edict was issued allowing the Slavonic
Mass to be celebrated in Bohemia on the Feasts of St. Cyril and St.
Methodius and other patron saints, and it was soon after this that
Janáček first contemplated a Glagolitic Mass. He took the text from the
church-music periodical Cyril, xlvi (1920) which reproduced it in a
linguistically inaccurate version. Moreover, he ignored the characteristic
semi-vowels and nasals of Church Slavonic and set the words according
to the accentuation of modern Czech. It consists of the traditional five
choral sections (the equivalent of Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and
Agnus Dei) and of three instrumental numbers—an Introduction, an
organ solo after the ‘Agneée Вой] (Agnus Dei), and a final Intrada.
Both the Introduction and the Intrada have a fanfare character, and
Janaéek visualized the performance of his Mass іп the open, with the
congregation returning to the church in solemn procession to the music
of the Intrada. The style of the work is boldly simple and at times
picturesquely dramatic—in a word, entirely original. The vocal melodies
frequently spring from the verbal rhythm and in the ejaculatory passages
for soloists and chorus the tessitura for the solo soprano and solo tenor
is often high, as for instance in the Kyrie:

Ex. 137

[yn e be |
Sop. Solo К ісіме.)

Go- spo -di po - mi - luj!

Go - spo-di po-mi - №)!

MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

306

Go - spo - di

[ +

Go- spo-di

Xu
—ч
1
..“
Е
1
о
OR
44
m
o
A
Pus
ON
o

(Lord have mercy!)

The essential themes are entrusted to the orchestra on which the vocal
superstructure rests, sometimes based on the instrumental material,

other times set against it chordally. As in Stravinsky's Les Noces, a few
tiny motives pervade the Mass in various metamorphoses. As Hans
Hollander has shown,! they are marked by some of the characteristics

1 Leos Janácek (London, 1963), pp. 99-100.

LEOS JANÁCEK 307

of Moravian folk-song. Moreover, Slavonic dance rhythms are as
peculiar to the Credo and the Intrada as are incisive aphoristic themes
to the remaining movements. The organ solo is an agitated piece in
ostinato technique symbolizing the Last Judgement, while the ensuing
Intrada is intended to conjure up the vision of the assembly of the
Czech people before the throne of God. There is nothing comparable
to the Glagolitic Mass in the whole of Western religious music and,
though it must be accounted a Christian work, in its expression of
primitive elemental joy and jubilation it sounds an unmistakably
pantheistic note. Of Janácek's orchestral compositions written during
his late period, the Rhapsody Taras Виа (1918), inspired by Gogol's
novel, and the ballad B/anik (1920) bear witness to his ardent Slav
patriotism. More intrinsically characteristic of his late-style, however,
is the Sinfonietta (1926) which grew out of a fanfare for thirteen
brass instruments intended for the Prague congress of the Sokols.
Despite its title, the work is hardly symphonic in the established
sense, themes being rarely developed but mostly repeated with slight
variations, and no sooner is an idea introduced than it is discarded for
another. The texture is mosaic-like and much use is made of pedals and
ostinatos, as for instance in the fourth movement which is almost
exclusively based on the incessant reiteration of a theme of folk-dance
character. The progress of the five movements shows a suite-like order
of sequence, and the form is rhapsodically loose, often creating the
impression of an improvisation. There are no thematic connexions
between the movements, but in order to provide an effective rounding-
off Janácek repeats the opening fanfare in the finale. The orchestration
is marked by novel and, in some instances, extraordinary sound-effects.
The first movement, for example, is scored for eleven trumpets, two
bass tubas, and drums, while elsewhere the composer aims at the trans-
parent style of chamber music, with much concertante writing for wood-
wind and brass. The Sinfonietta is a typical illustration of Janácek's
laconic and deliberately ‘primitive’ manner and is опе of his few works
which have no explicit or implicit programme.

Among Janácek's chamber works for vocal ensemble the Zápisník
zmizelého (Diary of One Who Vanished) (1918) occupies a unique place.
The anonymous verses, which were published in the Brno newspaper
Lidové noviny in 1916, are in the vein of genuine folk-poetry telling of a
young peasant, Jan, who yields to his love for the gypsy girl Zefka with
whom he deserts his native village. The subject fascinated Janáček,
partly because of its social implication—the lifting of the barriers that
separate an inferior race (gypsies) from the rest of the community—
and partly because its ardent passion and sensuality strongly echoed

308 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

a relationship in his own private life. The verses, which are set for
tenor, contralto, three women's voices, and piano, present sharp-
edged dramatic vignettes in which the entire gamut of a young man's
erotic sentiments are blended with nature moods and descriptive
passages, for all of which Janácek found an immense variety of musical
expressions. Yet the work, not unlike the Glagolitic Mass, is virtually
monothematic, being based on a single brief idea, consisting of a
rising or falling fourth and a major second, which undergoes permuta-
tions according to the dramatic and emotional progress of the text:

Ex. 138
(i) Original motive

Ne - Се-Ка)

ne-vyj-du

(v) no. 17 1 3

Со ko-mu sti-ze-no__ to-mu ne-u - te-Ce.
(vi) no. 21

де в Ж о ~ Ze-nim, — ke-rá mi zvo - lí - te.

( (ii) she carried herself like a hind; (iii) Don't wait, I’m not going out; (iv) Now
already dawn appears in the sky; (v) If something is one's fate, there's no escape;
(vi) that I marry her whom you chose for me.)

There are twenty-two songs,! the majority of which are for the tenor,
mostly short in length and oscillating between a declamatory style and a
more expressive arioso. Small metric units (2/8, 3/8, 4/16, 6/16) combine
with short incisive figures to lend the vocal phrase a high degree of
plasticity while the piano points and comments on the moods and
incidents of the verses. Of Janácek's purely instrumental chamber music
the First String Quartet (1923) (which owes its inspiration to Tolstoy's

1 Nos. 15, 16, 17, and 18 are recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x.

OTHER CZECH COMPOSERS 309

The Kreutzer Sonata) is rhapsodic in form but creates a feeling of organic
coherence largely due to the derivation of its main material from the
opening dance theme and the use of a motto that itself presents a fore-
shortening of the initial dance theme. The Second String Quartet (1928),
written six months before his death, is, like Smetana's From My Life
Quartet, of an autobiographical nature, its subtitle, Intimate Letters,
referring to the composer's intimate friendship with Kamila Stósslová.
Characteristic of the work are the abrupt changes of mood, from
a tranquil and inward lyrical expression to dramatic outburst and im-
passioned ecstasies. The writing, though not devoid of contrapuntal
passages, tends towards a more homophonic treatment.

OTHER CZECH COMPOSERS

If Janácek's prime significance lay in a conscious and deliberate
nationalism, the next generation of Czech composers stood in a less
pronounced, looser relationship to native musical lore and took their
chief bearings from movements in contemporary Western music. The
most important figures here are Bohuslav Martinü (1890-1959) and
Alois Hába (1893-1972). Martinü was a pupil of Roussel in Paris
at a time (1923) when Milhaud, Honegger, and Poulenc were emerging
as individual personalities. He soon came under their influence, notably
Honegger's. Stravinsky's neo-classicism also exercised a considerable
attraction on him. He was essentially a musical ‘natural’, writing with
immense facility and great technical skill, but he did not avoid the com-
monplace and the trivial, with the result that his output shows great
unevenness. Martinü was a craftsman who did not aim at a settled style
but was primarily concerned with the potentialities inherent in his
musical material, notably structure, formal design and rhythmic move-
ment. The majority of his Parisian works (before 1940, when he emi-
grated to America) reveal an unemotional, objective attitude of mind
from which vitality and a certain degree of originality are not absent. A
composer of great versatility, Martinů devoted himself to the cultivation
of all types of composition—opera, ballet, choral and orchestral works,
chamber music, and music for violin and piano. He first made his name
with an orchestral work, Half-Time (1925), an impression of a soccer
game with which he anticipated Honegger's Rugby (1928); while noisy
and even brutal in sound, it has an invigorating, sinewy rhythm. This
was followed by La Bagarre (1927), commemorating the occasion of the
landing of the American aviator Lindbergh at Le Bourget and is charged
with the atmosphere of the movement of big crowds. In both these
works the mere physical excitement created by a shifting mass of people
was the primary incentive for the music. The Partita (1931) and the more

310 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

ambitious Sinfonia Concertante (1932) show Martinů pursuing a neo-
classical style into which he assimilated the melodic characteristics of
Czech folk-song, which lend his works freshness and earthy vigour.
Among his most successful compositions in the neo-classical vein are
his Concerto Grosso (1938), a virile and dynamic piece in which the
*concertino' is the piano, and the Double Concerto for two string
orchestras, piano, and timpani (1938) where the manipulation of the
two groups of strings—now in opposition, now in concert and now
alternating with each other—shows remarkable resourcefulness.

For Martinü opera does not present philosophical or psychological
problems or a fragment of real life, but is a theatrical spectacle trans-
formed by music into something sui generis, in all of which one strongly
senses the potent influence of Stravinsky's operatic aesthetics. His most
ambitious opera, illustrating Martinü's attitude in a startling manner, is
Juliette (1937), to a libretto adapted from a play of the same name by
Georges Neveux, the theme of which is the conflict between reality and
the illusion of dreams. The work is in the nature of a lyrical poem that
avoids all dramatic effect. The one-act radio opera, Comedy on the
Bridge (1937), is written in an attractive light-hearted vein which com-
bines a pastiche of eighteenth-century comic opera, notably Mozart's,
with melodic-rhythmic elements from Czech folk-music. The trans-
parent scoring guarantees the clear audibility of the singers’ words.

Alois Hába, who was a pupil of Franz Schreker in Vienna and, later
Berlin, was not a Czech nationalist in the proper sense, but belonged
rather to the wider orbit formed by Central European music, and was in
particular associated with an athematic style of writing and with micro-
tonal experiments. Convinced that Western music must be liberated
from the principle of thematic development, he developed a new manner
in which he gradually rejected all traditional means of formal and melo-
dic design and harmonic structure, such as sequence, repetition, recapi-
tulation, and the polarity of harmonic zones. In his athematic works
(string quartets and piano music) Hába aimed at a vigorous and con-
tinuous flow of free invention, though frequently at the expense of
musical logic and structural coherence. As for his microtonality, his first
ideas were suggested by his observations as a violinist, when he noticed
the slight variations in pitch characteristic of the solo playing on stringed
instruments. Moreover, his studies of Czech folk-song, notably of his
native Moravia, made him aware of microtonal deviations in the
singing of this music. These facts, combined with examples of
oriental music and with the influence of certain of Busoni's aesthetic
theories (which advocated the division of the semitone into third-
and sixth-tones) induced Hába to experiment with the possibilities of

KAROL SZYMANOWSKI 311

microtonality. As a result, some of his works are based on quarter-
tones, such as the opera Matka (The Mother) (1929), the String
Quartets, opp. 7, 12 (Ex. 139), and 14, and the various Fantasies for
piano, ор. 25 to op. 31, for which the Czech piano firm of Förster con-
structed special instruments; other compositions use the sixth-tone, such

Hog; RF Fa

TE perp раа |
раста EET п и ar E — а г В
1 EMSS Баш EE | ЕЕ ЕЕ ЕАН ШП E нен pa [mme co ES}
Ше сее В се t я exem аса ста сіре шта аа ғы

L = quarter tone up, В = three-quarter tone up,d = quarter tone down

as the opera Přijď království Туё (Thy kingdom come) (1942) and the
String Quartet, op. 15. Yet, interesting and ingenious as are Hába's
attempts to introduce novel notions of composition, neither his
athematic style nor his microtonal experimentation has proved a signifi-
cant pathway to the future.

KAROL SZYMANOWSKI

Unlike Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Poland did not develop an
advanced national movement until after the First War. Its acknow-
ledged leader was Karol Szymanowski (1883-1937), the most eminent
composer that Poland had produced since Chopin. Beginning his career

312 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

under the influence of Skryabin, he subsequently modelled his style on
Reger and Richard Strauss, whose thematic complexity he took over
until acquaintance with the music of Debussy and Ravel led to the
emergence of a personal manner. A native Polish element is already
manifest in the nostalgia and brooding melancholy of the works written
before and during the war,! but it was not until the early 1920s that
Szymanowski began to take a keen interest in authentic Polish folk-
music, which was of decisive consequence for the further development
of his style. Yet, notwithstanding this acquisition of national traits,
Szymanowski preserved a wide European outlook and availed himself
of features of contemporary Western music, skilfully absorbing them
into his own language. А stay at Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains in
1921 brought him into first direct contact with native folk-music, the
songs and dances of the highlanders, which reflected their wild un-
inhibited temperament and the rugged beauty of their mountains. This
inspired him to write the ballet Harnasie (1926) whose title refers to the
legendary robbers of the Tatra Mountains. Into this work he introduced
a number of highland dance and song tunes and, more importantly,
allowed his personal idiom to be coloured by a harsh barbaric element
and by the remarkable irregularities of rhythm and accentuation
characteristic of Tatra folk-music (Ex. 140).

In the same year (1926) Szymanowski wrote a Stabat Mater for
soloists, chorus, and orchestra whose masterly polyphonic writing owes
something to his study of Palestrina; it is significant that its idiom
appears more simplified in comparison with that of the works of his
previous period. Archaic harmonic progressions (parallel motion of
triads) alternate with genuine three- and four-part writing. There is

Ex. 140

1 See Chapter I, p. 36.

KAROL SZYMANOWSKI 313

()
ILLO есеге ж шыл НЕ шыт. 2 аре ШУ.
Те еее ы а із
eS a *

SS eee re
Шы іс G
ее р
а ди

ee ай ee лаг тюше РЕ]
т” —ы ГА
Т =ч ше. И ТИ а Res eee
РН re F Н® Ца 40705" 2 6 ЕЕ ЕЕ LER

b
f)
——— ЕЕЕ ER EAM

ee р — s —7-w |]. —4—]
LÁ ERAI (ВО р
| Бати” ЗЕ парене. 2] с авайс а / ору Ic stas

314 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

perhaps an excess of pure lyricism in the Stabat Mater but, with this
qualification, the work is an impressive example of the individual
projection of a profound religious emotion.

In King Roger (1924), a three-act opera to a libretto by Jaroslaw
Iwaszkiewicz, Szymanowski produced one of his most distinguished
works. The subject is the conflict between Christianity and Hellenic
paganism and the action takes place in twelfth-century Sicily centring
on King Roger (the historical Roger II lived in the eleventh century) and
a shepherd who casts a spell on Queen Roxane and in the last act reveals
himself as the god Dionysus, to whom Roger, in a symbolic act,
sacrifices his own soul. The opera contains overtones of Eastern
mysticism and philosophy which, combined with an erotic sensualism,
inspired the composer to some of his most characteristic and imaginative
music. Тһе sensual element is associated with the shepherd and Roxane
and reaches its climax in the second act, in Roxane's melismatic song:

Ex. 141
Andante

and the orgiastic dance in 7/8 of the shepherd and his musicians. This
is contrasted with the hieratic Byzantine grandeur of other portions,
especially the music characterizing Roger and the court atmosphere.
The style of the work is intensely dramatic, often taking on a starkly
barbaric expression in which the role of the chorus is most important,
but there are other episodes in which an ecstatic lyricism prevails.
The organum-like progressions in much of the choral writing, thematic
complexity, bitonality, and a tense involuted chromaticism are as
typical of the music as are the chord-derived melodies of an impres-
sionistic character.

The Symphony concertante for piano and orchestra (1936), frequently
referred to as the Fourth Symphony, shows a change of manner. Instead
of the romantic lyricism that informs Szymanowski’s general style, most

MANUEL DE FALLA 315

of the music is brittle, dry, and brilliant, with the piano treated in a
percussive manner which owes something to Stravinsky. But the second
of the three movements, with its dreamy arabesque for the solo flute
and an ornate, slightly overladen piano part, recalls the composer's
earlier style. Of the two string quartets, the First Quartet (1917) is
musically perhaps the more substantial, showing themes of great
plasticity and a varied contrapuntal texture in the first two movements.
The mood of the opening movement, which begins with an expressive
Lento introduction, fluctuates between the exhilaration of the dance-
like first subject and the melancholy lyricism of the second while the
working-out section turns to a vein of grotesque mockery. The finale, a
*Scherzando alla burlesca’, is an example of polytonal writing before
Milhaud exploited this technique, the four parts being written in the
respective keys of C, E flat, F sharp, and A major. The Second Quartet
(1927) is of a more complex texture than the first, containing much linear
counterpoint, with two fugato passages in the finale, but there are also
passages of an impressionistic (chordal) character, and bitonality and
polytonality play a conspicuous part.

MANUEL DE FALLA

Nationalism in Spain developed in a continuous line from Felipe
Pedrell and Isaac Albéniz in the second half of the nineteenth century to
Enrique Granados and Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) in the first half of
the present century. It was Falla, the outstanding personality among
those composers, who put Spain once again on the musical map of
Europe, with works which are intrinsically as well as extrinsically
Spanish and yet transcend the purely national element, by their
combination of imaginative power and a clear-sighted, penetrating
technical acumen. The basic feature of Falla's style is the brilliant
application of an essentially impressionistic technique, which he learned
before the war from Debussy, to the treatment of strongly nationalistic
material, notably of his native Andalusia. Yet, like Janácek and the
later Bartók, he scarcely ever introduced authentic folk themes into his
music; it is rather that his essential thought 15 moulded by the spirit of
Spanish folk-music and by some of its technical features. Apart from a
handful of folk-song arrangements, Siete canciones populares españolas
(1922), it was only on very rare occasions that Falla employed actual
folk tunes: a few phrases associated with the Miller and his Wife in
the ballet E/ Sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) (1919),
and two melodies in the puppet opera E/ Retablo de Maese Pedro
(Master Peter's Puppet Show) (1923), based on an incident in Cervantes’
Don Quixote—the Catalan dance when Don Quixote smashes the

316 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

puppets to pieces, and the song of Melisendra in the tower, whose
tune derives from an old Spanish ballad sung at the time of Cervantes.
In this last work and in the Harpsichord Concerto (1926) Falla shed
virtually all superficial nationalist traits, but conveyed its essence in
music that bears his own entirely individual stamp. His chief means of
expression are not so much harmony as melody and rhythm; short
incisive phrases are presented in contrasting and unblended instru-
mental colours while the juxtaposition of accent and cross-accent
results in conflicting rhythms of a fascinating effect (Ex. 142).

The guitar conditioned toa large extent Falla's harmonic idiom and his
piano writing, as in the Fantasía bética (1919), and it is responsible for
the internal pedals and the clear, percussive style of the Harpsichord
Concerto. There is in this latter work something of Domenico
Scarlatti's Italian clarity and coruscating brilliance, and it is significant

Ex. 142
^

Ob.

Clar.
inA

Harpsichord

ESPLÀ AND TURINA 317

that Falla made prolonged studies of Scarlatti's music before he com-
posed the Concerto. During the last twenty years of his life Falla was
occupied with a vast choral work, At/ántida, whose text deals with the
story of the lost continent, Atlantis, sunk in the sea beyond the Western
coast of Spain. This was performed at Milan in 1962 (completed by
Ernesto Halffter) and proved to contain music of a high order of inven-
tion, though nothing that added to Falla's reputation.

ESPLÀ AND TURINA

Falla’s relationship to Andalusian folk-music was paralleled by
Oscar Espla’s (b. 1886) to the music of his native Alicante. Like Falla,
Espla made only rare use of authentic folk tunes—to the exceptions
belongs his cantata, La noche buena del diablo (The Devil’s Christmas
Eve) (1931), based on traditional Spanish children’s songs. A composer
of a pronounced intellectual cast of mind—Espla was originally an
engineer who later turned to music, musicology and philosophy—he
cultivated the symphonic form in the tone-poems Don Quijote velando
lus armas (Quixote keeping vigil by his arms) (1925) and Fiesta (1931).
After his studies in Germany he adopted a scale of his own invention
(C-D flat-E flat-E-F-G flat-A flat-B flat) on which he built a har-
monic system that lent his music a regional, Spanish-Mediterranean
flavour, without incorporating any genuine folk-song material, as for
instance іп the symphonic poem, Ciclopes de Ifach (1937), one of
Espla’s most important works. Joaquin Turina (1882-1949) was
largely inspired by Andalusian scenes (Danzas fantásticas for orchestra,
1920, and Sinfonia sevillana, 1921). A musician of limited range,
endowed with a facile and rather superficial pen, Turina is best known
outside his country for his many songs and piano pieces, notably the

318 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Cuentos de Espafía (Spanish Tales) (Set I, 1918; Set II, 1928) in which
picturesqueness and charm are evenly balanced. With the exception of
Esplà and Gerhard, the composers of Falla's generation, including Falla
himself, considered Paris the Mecca of Music to which they made their
pilgrimage after completing their studies in their native land.

LATER SPANISH COMPOSERS

Among the musicians of the next generation, Federico Mompou (b.
1893) and Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970) have attracted most attention.
Mompou, born in Barcelona, is an exponent of Catalan nationalism,
with an output largely confined to the miniature form of piano pieces
and songs, the main characteristics of which are intimacy of feeling and
refined, subtle workmanship (6 Impresiones intimas, 1914; Cants magics,
1919; Quatre Mélodies, 1926). Mompou has been called a primitivista
on account of the marked simplicity of his technical style. Thematic
development, foreign anyway to a miniaturist, and harmonic complexity
he avoids in favour of a static lyricism of an evocative impressionist
nature. Gerhard, who was of Swiss origin and after the end of the
Spanish Civil War settled in England in 1939, was first а pupil of
Pedrell, the founder of documentary Spanish nationalism, and then
studied with Schoenberg in Berlin ftom 1923 to 1928, a fact that would
partly account for Gerhard's remarkable technical savoir faire. Despite
his adoption of the 12-note method his ties with his native Catalonia
remained at first very close, as in the cantata, L'alta naixença del Rei
En Jaume (The high birth of King James) (1931) and Аааа, interludi y
аапса for orchestra (1936). In contrast to the predominantly contra-
puntal character of dodecaphonic music, Gerhard initially stressed the
vertical (harmonic) element, as in his Wind Quintet (1928) which adopts
the same combination as Schoenberg's Op. 26, but with an instrumental
timbre tinged with a Spanish (Catalan) flavour. Also in the music
written after taking up residence in Britain, Gerhard continued to treat
serialism in such a way as to allow a pronounced Spanish note to make
itself felt as, for instance, in his ballet, A4/egr'as (Festivals) (1942) and the
opera, The Duenna, to a libretto after Sheridan (1948; rev. 1950).
Gerhard was the first Spanish composer to harness thinking in 12-note
terms to genuine Spanish feeling. Joaquin Rodrigo (b. 1902), who was
blind from the age of three, is a prolific composer of minor stature who
follows Falla yet cultivates a more advanced harmonic idiom. Outside
Spain Rodrigo is perhaps best known by his Concierto de Aranjuez for
guitar (1939). There remains a group of Spanish composers who, like
Les Six in Paris, banded themselves together and under the intellectual
leadership of the influential critic and writer, Adolfo Salazar (1890-

SWITZERLAND 319

1958), formed what became known as e/ grupo de los ocho or el grupo de
Madrid where this association was founded in the spring of 1930. They
were: Ernesto Halffter (b. 1905), its most eminent member; his older
brother, Rodolfo Halffter (b. 1900); Salvador Bacarisse (1898-1963);
Juan José Mantecón (b. 1896); Fernando Remacha (b. 1898); Gustavo
Pittaluga (b. 1906); and the woman composer, Rosa Maria Ascot (b.
1906). (Mantecón, the oldest member, was like Salazar in the first place
a writer.) What united this group of eight post-Falla musicians was a
bond of far stronger fibre than that which had originally brought the
Parisian six together. This was the total rejection of all nationalism and
impressionism. In a lecture given in Madrid on the aims of e/ grupo de
los ocho, Pittaluga, the youngest of this group, took a completely nega-
tive view of Spanish musical folklore and stressed the necessity of
composing ‘authentic’ music, i.e. music free from all ethnic roots and all
association with literary, philosophical and metaphysical ideas. They set
out to write works the sole criterion of which was their intrinsic musical
and technical qualities. For the rest fno romanticism, no chromaticism,
no divagations—and no chord of the diminished seventh!

This advocacy of a kind of New Objectivity in Spanish music demon-
strated the distance these younger composers had travelled from their
nationalist predecessors (Pedrell, Falla, Esplà, and Turina), and had
become receptive to the main trends in European music, notably to the
neo-classicism of Stravinsky and Hindemith.

SWITZERLAND

Owing to its peculiar geographical position, Switzerland has for many
centuries been subject to the cultural influence from its great neighbours
in the North-East, South, and West and it is therefore not surprising
that its musical history should be closely bound up with that of Ger-
many, France, and, to a lesser degree, Italy.

Of the German-Swiss composers born between 1880 and 1900,
Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) was the outstanding artistic personality
and occupies an intermediate position between the late romanticism of
Wolf and Reger (his master) and the modern world. It is as a song
writer and musical dramatist that Schoeck made his most important
contribution to Swiss music. His strong lyrical vein manifests itself in a
prodigious number of songs in which the choice of poets, such as Goethe,
Eichendorff, Uhland, Hebbel, Keller, and Lenau, proclaims his affinity
with the great German song composers, notably Wolf. In his various
operas (Venus, 1920; Penthesilea, 1925; Vom Fischer un syner Fru (The

1 Quoted in Gilbert Chase, The Music of Spain, (New York, 1959). p. 203.

320 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Fisherman and his wife), 1930; Massimila Doni, 1935, and Das Schloss
Dürande, 1939), he achieved, through the exploitation of the con-
siderable emotional tension inherent in his subjects, a rare combination
of dramatic power with terse lyrical expression. If there is a common
theme running through his operas it is that of man's better self in conflict
with his evil, demoniac powers, and, owing to the particular psychologi-
cal problems posed in his libretti, Schoeck's musical language in his
operas appears to be more austere and more uncompromising than in
his songs.

Schoeck was the acknowledged leader of the younger generation of
German-Swiss composers which includes Albert Moeschinger (b. 1897),
Conrad Beck (b. 1901) and Willy Burkhard (1900—55) whose oratorio,
Das Gesicht Jesajas (The Vision of Isaiah) (1935) impresses by its direct
forcefulness and the woodcut simplicity of its utterance. With these and
other composers the influence of Busoni, who lived in Zürich from 1915
to 1920, as well as of Hindemith is noticeable, but their common
denominator is their typically Swiss quality of ruggedness, severity, and
economy of expression.

Of the musicians of French Switzerland, Frank Martin (b. 1890) pre-
sents the sharpest and most individual profile. Martin's early works
show the strong influence of Franck and Fauré, and some leaning
towards Ravel. During the inter-war years, however, he gradually
developed an individual style and grappled with the technical problems
raised by the New Music. А teacher for many years at the Jaques-
Dalcroze Institute in Geneva, Martin was in close contact with eurhyth-
mics which accounts for the fact that his chief interest was at first
concentrated on rhythmic experiments, of which the Trio sur des chants
populaires irlandais for violin, cello, and piano (1925) and the orchestral
Rhythmes (1926) are notable examples. In 1930 Martin began to study
Schoenberg's twelve-note technique, freely using this method with tonal
implications while rejecting the aesthetic premises of the dodecaphonic
school. In an article! he defined his attitude to Schoenberg's aesthetics
by saying that ‘every rule has for its sole aim the enrichment of style...
the observation of rules is nothing but an elegance, a pleasure of the
mind which is independent of any (aesthetic) value'. Characteristic of
this stage in Martin's development are the Piano Concerto (1934), the
Symphony (1937), and the first four Ballades for various solo instru-
ments and orchestra (1938-40). The outstanding work of this period is
the dramatic oratorio, Le Vin herbé (The magic potion) (1941), based on
the Roman de Tristan et Yseult by Joseph Bédier, which made Martin's
name known beyond the confines of Switzerland and in which he applied

1 Schweizerische Musikzeitung, lxxxii (1942), no. 3.

SCANDINAVIA AND HOLLAND 321

the serial technique in conjunction with tonal and homophonic effects
of a novel kind. The legendary atmosphere is recaptured by means of a
chorus of twelve reciting voices, from which the two protagonists detach
themselves as singing characters. The accompaniment consisting of a
small orchestra of seven strings and piano shows a great variety in the
thematic and rhythmic treatment. In two subsequent works— Der Cornet
(1943), after Rilke, and the Six Monologues (1943) from Hofmannsthal's
Jedermann—Martin achieves a still closer synthesis of serial technique
with tonal writing in the service of an intense lyrical expression.

SCANDINAVIA AND HOLLAND

Music in Scandinavia and Holland during the inter-war years showed
the same dichotomy as in other countries between conservative ten-
dencies (which meant adherence, chiefly, to German romanticism) and a
strong movement towards the assimilation of stylistic and technical
features of contemporary music in Germany (Hindemith, Schoenberg)
and France (Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky). Of the composers, who
adopted technical devices and, to some extent, also the aesthetic creeds
of the New Music, the Norwegian Fartein Valen (1887-1952) is note-
worthy for his atonal style which he began to evolve in 1924 indepen-
dently of Schoenberg's tone-rows. While occasionally employing a strict
serial technique as, for instance, in the Piano Variations Op. 23 (1936),
Valen most cultivated a texture characterized by combination of various
independent lines in which the same note series occurs constantly; in
some works an identical ‘theme’ pervades each of the parts.

The Dutchman Willem Pijper (1894—1947) was first influenced by
Debussy but in his subsequent works he achieved a measure of indivi-
duality, making use of polytonality and polyrhythms and evolving a
complex, elaborate style of writing which owes something to Schoen-
berg. In his later period, however, Pijper aimed at simplification and
economy of means as in the Trio for flute, clarinet and bassoon (1927),
the String Quartet no. 4 (1928) and the Six Symphonic Epigrams (1928).
He also devoted himself to the study of Dutch folk-song, the chief
creative fruits of which are two unaccompanied eight-part choruses,
Heer Halewijn (1920) and Heer Danielken (1925). Henk Badings (b.
1907), a pupil of Pijper, is a prolific composer who has written orchestral
works, concertos, and chamber music in which a neo-classicism, largely
based on Bach's style, prevails and which combine experiments in form
and tonality.

322 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND ОЕ EUROPE: 1918-1939

RICHARD STRAUSS'S LAST YEARS

The musical scene in Central Europe between the two wars presented a
picture more complex and varied in its aesthetic and stylistic aspects
than that of post-war France and Italy. Three main currents may be
distinguished. There was the older generation, led by Richard Strauss
and Hans Pfitzner, which in varying degrees continued the romanticism
of the pre-war period. There was the avant-garde under the leadership of
Hindemith, violently anti-romantic in its attitude, avoiding all sub-
jectivity and cultivating *New Objectivity' with a concentration on the
technical and structural potentialities of the musical material per se and,
so far as opera was concerned, seeking a close link with the political and
social climate of its time. And there was, lastly, the Second Viennese
School, essentially romantic in its aesthetic outlook and aims but work-
ing with Schoenberg's twelve-note system, a revolutionary method
of composition that radically altered the face of music.

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)! had written his most significant
works before the First World War. With the audacities of Salome
and Elektra he had proved himself the most advanced German com-
poser of his time, a position from which, partly under the influence
of his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, he began to retreat in
Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos. In his subsequent operas
he completely shut himself off from all contact with the modernism
of the post-war period. At the same time an increasing falling-off
became noticeable in his earlier vitality and invention, though his
immense fertility and sovereign technical command continued un-
diminished to the end of his life. What also remained intact was Strauss's
innate and restless intellectual curiosity and his ready response to the
challenge of problems of style, form, and dramatic treatment. This
explains the curious zigzag course of both his pre-war and post-war
operas. Die Frau ohne Schatten (Тһе Woman without a Shadow) (1919)
is an oriental fairy-tale not wholly unlike Mozart's Die Zauberflóte, but
Hofmannsthal's libretto is packed with a number of obscure symbolisms
and allegories—the ‘Shadow’ of the title stands for female fertility
—and the language, for all its poetic imagination, is involuted and full
of esoteric semantic subtleties. Strauss treated this subject in the style
of spectacular grand opera, with big ensembles and finales and with
broad symphonic interludes, and the best part of the music lies in the
refined, technically resourceful evocation of the magic element. Ever
since Der Rosenkavalier Strauss had been exercised by the problem of
word-setting in opera, and in Intermezzo, ‘A Bourgeois Comedy with

! For Strauss's early and middle years see chapters I and III.

RICHARD STRAUSS'S LAST YEARS 323

Symphonic Interludes' (1924), he found for it an original solution.
The singing parts are largely treated in a light conversational manner
imitating everyday speech and are accompanied by a remarkably
transparent orchestra. It is only in the finales of the two acts that
the vocal writing turns to sustained cantilena, with the lyrical ele-
ment and also symphonic elaboration being mainly confined to the
orchestral interludes. Despite the utterly banal nature of the libretto,
which was Strauss's own, the work constitutes a brilliant experiment in
the creation of a new type of German comic opera. In Die aegyptische
Helena (1928) he returned to the mythological Baroque opera such as
he had essayed in Ariadne auf Naxos, but with this difference that now
both the protagonists are human characters. Hofmannsthal places
in the centre of the action the matrimonial drama of Menelaus and
Helen seen in the light of modern psychology; but he surrounds it with
the trappings of the ancient myth, magic potions, supernatural figures,
and the splendour and opulence of an imaginary Orient. Strauss re-
sponded to this strange concoction with music of the most luxuriant and
richly proliferating character, in which a heroic hymn-like element pre-
dominates; but the score lacks truly significant utterances. In Arabella
(1933), the libretto of which was the last Hofmannsthal wrote before his
death in 1929, poet and composer endeavoured to repeat the style of
Der Rosenkavalier. 'The story has much of the period charm and the
poetic sentiment of the earlier work, Hofmannsthal returning in it to his
favourite theme of youth's awakening to full awareness of itself through
the experience of true love. Yet the psychological richness of Der
Rosenkavalier is absent, and the work contains no dramatic character
comparable to that of the Feldmarschallin. Arabella's suitor, a Slovene
aristocrat, who is conceived as a kind of inverted Ochs von Lerchenau—
young, noble, and generous—fails to inject into the plot the irresistible
comic vein of Hofmannsthal’s earlier character. The music is instinct
with a rich lyricism, with a sensuous vocal melody of a melting, at
times cloying, sweetness; and, since the action takes place in the
Vienna of the 1860s, Strauss’s waltzes are not felt to be incongruous
with the period as they are with Maria Theresa’s Vienna in Der Rosen-
kavalier. Yet, strangely enough, the composer here favoured the rustic,
coarse-grained Lündler of Bavarian origin rather than his namesake
Johann's elegant, town-bred waltzes. On the other hand, the orchestral
texture of Arabella, if compared with that of Der Rosenkavalier, is more
refined and more supple, frequently achieving the effect of chamber
music, and the use of leitmotives is more subtle in the psychological
delineation of the characters. The composer shows his age in the
paucity of memorable melodic ideas, but the work has proved the most

324 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

successful of his later operas. Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman)
(1935), to a libretto by Stefan Zweig who adapted it from Ben Jonson's
Epicoene, represents Strauss's excursion into pure opera buffa, with
vivacious ensembles and an immensely fluent parlando style which are
testimony to his incomparable technical mastery. Themes from old
English and Italian masters are most skilfully interwoven to suggest the
atmosphere and time of the action.

The one-act Der Friedenstag (The Day of Peace) (1938) has a libretto
by Joseph Gregor dealing with an episode at the end of the Thirty
Years’ War; but the subject takes оп a universal human significance
in the dramatic confrontation of the Commander, bound by his military
duty to blow up the fortress rather than surrender it, with the population
craving for peace. Less opera than dramatic oratorio, Der Friedenstag
has big choral scenes at the beginning and end, and indeed concludes
with a grandiose hymn for peace that owes something to the last-act
finale of Fidelio. In Daphne (1938) and Die Liebe der Danae (1940), both
to libretti by Gregor, Strauss returned for the last time to mythological
Baroque opera of which he was particularly fond. The first, a one-act
work, mingles tragedy with idyll, with the ancient myth interpreted in
terms of modern psychology while the music, though devoid of potent
melodic invention, is among Strauss's technical masterpieces—subtle,
refined, rich іп motivic work, and imbued with a feeling of Мед!-
terranean serenity. Die Liebe der Danae, a‘Cheerful Mythology in Three
Acts', based on an unfinished scenario by Hofmannsthal, telescopes the
separate myths of Midas and Danae, the underlying theme being the
victory of true love against which even a god is powerless. The musico-
dramatic treatment of Jupiter is strongly reminiscent of that of Wotan
in Die Walküre; and indeed the opera as a whole echoes the Wagner of
the Ring, notably in its harmonic and orchestral idiom, though the vocal
writing for Danae and Midas bears in its sustained cantabile Strauss's
own individual signature.

Strauss's last opera, Capriccio (1941), is the culmination of the light-
handed conversational manner which he cultivated in Ariadne, Inter-
mezzo, and parts of Arabella. The subject, taken from a libretto by
the Abbate Casti for Salieri's now forgotten opera, Prima la musica e poi
le parole, was elaborated by the composer and the conductor Clemens
Krauss into a play dealing with the problem of words and music in
opera. The action, which takes place in a cháteau near Paris about 1775,
centres on a young countess who is to decide which of her two im-
petuous suitors—the poet Olivier and the musician Flamand-—she is to
marry. In the end she cannot decide for either, a symbolism implying
the perfect equality of text and music. According to the dramatic

RICHARD STRAUSS'S LAST YEARS 325

exigencies, now the words, now the music must prevail and now again
both will be poised in equilibrium. Strauss moves with the most natural
ease between parlando, arioso, and more sustained lyrical styles, while
the orchestral writing is in the sparse and supple style of chamber
music.

Strauss was seventy-eight at the time of Capriccio, which he intended
to be his last work. But his Indian summer continued and saw the
composition of seven more works—the Second Horn Concerto (1942),
the First and Second Sonatina for sixteen wind instruments (1943 and
1945, respectively), the Metamorphosen for twenty-three strings (1945),
the Oboe Concerto (1946), the Duet Concertino for clarinet and bassoon
(1947), and the Vier letzte Lieder (1948). Strauss jestingly referred to
these works as ‘wrist exercises’ and ‘snippets from my workshop’. With
the exception of the Metamorphosen, they are all slight in musical
substance and in a simple unassuming vein, written with the aim of
keeping his hands busy and of delighting the senses. They are moulded,
more or less closely, on classical (Mozartian) principles and thus
Strauss's creative career came full circle: for a classical tendency, mani-
fest in the young Strauss, showed itself again in the octogenarian, yet
greatly enriched and mellowed by the artistic and human experiences
of a life-time. The neo-classical tendency is displayed in a number of
features: in the turn to pure instrumental music; in the avoidance of an
emotionally charged expression and the emphasis on exquisitely refined
and polished workmanship; in the symmetrical cut of thematic ideas
(mostly in regular four and eight bars) and ‘old-fashioned’ cadences; іп
the marked preference for simple diatonic writing, and in the transparent
scoring, whose ѕрагѕепеѕѕ and economy—already to be found in Daphne
and Capriccio—is in strong contrast with the sumptuousness and lavish-
ness of Strauss's symphonic poems and the majority of his operas. Meta-
morphosen, which is the most important of Strauss's late compositions,
shows all these features at their most characteristic, to say nothing of
a formidable skill displayed in the polyphonic interweaving of the parts.
Written at the end of the last war and using as one of its four themes the
first four bars of the Funeral March in Beethoven's Eroica, the work is a
moving expression of the composer's sadness and grief at the catas-
trophe that had overtaken Germany and at the same time a nostalgic
and melancholy reflection on his past life. Equally autobiographical is
the cycle of the Four Last Songs, tinged as it is with a gentle melancholy.
The soprano solo part is closely integrated with the orchestra, singer and
instruments forming an organic whole and weaving a continuous finely
drawn tapestry of sound from which the voice stands out merely by its
different timbre. The cycle represents a miniature emotional drama,

326 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

moving from the subdued animation of ‘Im Frühling’ to a complete
withdrawal in the closing ‘Im Abendrot’.

PFITZNER AND SCHREKER 5

In Hans Pfitzner (1869-1949) Strauss encountered his one serious
rival to the claim of being the most representative German operatic
composer of his time. Pfitzner’s music is little known outside Central
Europe, where he is generally considered as one of the great masters.
Pfitzner described himself as ‘the last Romantic’ and advanced a theory
that Germany's last great period in music was the Romantic era and that
in the twentieth century the country had outlived its musical hegemony
over the other nations. Not unexpectedly, this philosophy was accom-
panied by a declared enmity to all modern tendencies and trends, which
Pfitzner expressed in two pamphlets—Futuristengefahr (1917) and Die
Neue Aesthetik der musikalischen Impotenz (1919) which were both
written in reply to Busoni's Entwurf einer Neuen Aesthetik der Tonkunst
(1907). Pfitzner's music expresses a profound longing for the German
past and is pervaded by a melancholy and a pessimism to be fairly
expected of a composer so deeply steeped in Schopenhauer and Wagner.
Characteristic of this attitude of mind are two works both of which look
backward in their sentiment and style. In the ‘romantic cantata’, Von
deutscher Seele (1921), to poems by Eichendorff, Pfitzner seeks to convey
the mystical yearnings of the romantic artist for the ineffable and the
transcendental. The opera Palestrina (1917), to his own libretto,
presents a Künstlerdrama in which, freely adapting the life-story of the
great sixteenth-century Italian church composer with whom he
identifies himself, Pfitzner demonstrates the spiritual solitude and isola-
tion of the artist amid the worldliness and the intrigues of his surround-
ings. The work is unquestionably Pfitzner's masterpiece and perhaps
the only one by which posterity is likely to remember this conscious
follower of Schumann and Wagner.!

The chief reputation of Franz Schreker (1878-1934), whose name was
bracketed with those of Strauss and Schoenberg in the Germany of the
1920s, rests upon his operas of which the most important are Der ferne
Klang (The Distant Sound) (1913), Die Gezeichneten (The Branded)
(1918) and Der Schatzgrüber (The Treasure-Digger) (1920). They are
eclectic in style, much indebted to Strauss (orchestral style), Puccini
(melody), and Debussy (harmony), and, while dramatically and sceni-
cally effective, suffer from an obscure erotic symbolism based on ideas
from Freud and Wedekind.

1 See also p. 195. ? See pp. 185—7.

FERRUCCIO BUSONI 327

FERRUCCIO BUSONI!

One of the first champions of the New Music in Germany was
Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), who sought to achieve an individual
*Young Classicism' by the fusion of Latin clarity of form with German
technical solidity, a fusion in which form, content, and expression
should be in equilibrium. The conflict between Italian and German in
Busoni's heredity was reflected in his double life as performer and
composer. He was one of the greatest piano virtuosi of his day, and a
sense of kinship with Liszt found expression in studies, arrangements,
and, perhaps most notably, іп the Chamber Fantasy оп Bizet’s Carmen,
the last of six piano ‘sonatinas’ written between 1910 and 1922. The
fifth of these (‘In signo Johannis Sebastiani Magni’) reflects the other
major influence in Busoni’s own music, that of J. S. Bach, though the
contrapuntal writing is unambitious compared with that of his Fantasia
Contrappuntistica (four versions, the last for two pianos, 1922). This
started as an attempt to solve the problem of the unfinished fugue in
Die Kunst der Fuge, but proliferated to include a choral prelude and a
quadruple fugue on the Bach fragment. Busoni’s design leads gradually
from the procedures of baroque counterpoint to the most daring poly-
phonic complexities, and the work represents а twentieth-century
counterpart to Die Kunst der Fuge.

The same intellectual curiosity and intensity that prompted Busoni’s
writings are reflected in the second sonatina (1912), while the fourth
(‘In die Nativitatis Christi MCMXVII’) shows a rare equilibrium
between the classicizing formal tendencies and the deeply romantic
kernel of Busoni’s character as a creative artist. There are echoes here
of Beethoven’s last manner (especially of the Diabelli Variations), and
the style is not unlike that of Fauré’s last works in harmony and lay-out.
The cerebral experimentation, which makes much of Busoni’s music
interesting rather than satisfying, is almost wholly absent.

PAUL HINDEMITH

Paul Hindemith (1895-1964) was outstanding in the generation of
German composers which came to maturity during the late 1920s and
whose works display the diverse facets of all that is implied in the term
‘New Music’. If Hindemith became its acknowledged leader, this was
for two main reasons: first, because the various modern tendencies in
post-war German music crystallized in his personality with extra-
ordinary clarity and force; and second because of his superior musical
gifts, his tremendous fertility and vitality, his truly extraordinary
technical resourcefulness and industry. Hindemith provides an illustra-

! On Busoni's operas, see pp. 192-5.

328 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

tion of that rare combination of a sheer Musikant—a musical ‘natural’—
with a seemingly inexhaustible fund of creative energy and a technical
command that recalls the supreme craftsmanship of the great masters
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His own attitude towards
composition has indeed a great deal in common with the approach of
the pre-nineteenth-century composers. Like them, Hindemith regarded
himself as primarily a craftsman who pursues his métier with the utmost
of his skill and intelligence and with whom purely musical problems—
invention, form and design, balance and proportion, texture and instru-
mentation—take precedence over expressive qualities. The latter he
considered during his early period as merely incidental to his funda-
mental conception of the musical work as an edifice, a construction in
sound. In his younger years his artistic personality found its chief
expression in music characterized by a reckless iconoclastic spirit, an
irrepressible buoyancy and masculine vigour, a sense of irreverent fun
and a good-natured cynicism. At the time he was regarded as an enfant
terrible, thumbing his nose at established traditions and conventions and
disconcerting the public and the critics by his unpredictable antics.
With the beginning of the 1930s his more serious side came gradually to
the fore—a Hindemith high-minded and lofty in his attitude to art and
concerned with things of the mind, with general human problems and
with philosophical and metaphysical themes.

Hindemith started as a spiritual disciple of Brahms and even more
Reger, adopting the latter's use of Bachian counterpoint as a regenera-
tive constructive means and soon a marked individuality begins to
show, as in the Second String Quartet, Op. 10 (1919), and the Kammer-
musik, Op. 24, no. 1 (1922), which display three salient features. First,
Hindemith is seen to establish an autonomous melodic principle: the
lines become energy-laden and take on a dynamic ‘motoric’ character
in which movement per se is the main concern:

PAUL HINDEMITH 329

Secondly, functional harmony is in the process of being destroyed by
an emphasis on seconds, fourths, and sevenths as constructive melodic
and harmonic intervals which implied an equality between consonance
and dissonance, though even in his extreme ‘atonal’ period Hindemith
never accepted the complete ‘emancipation of the dissonance’ envisaged
by Schoenberg. And thirdly, he now discarded Reger's harmonic
counterpoint in favour of a bold linear style, in which the vertical
factor was almost invariably the incidental result of the part-writing.
At the same time jazz, which became known in Germany about 1920,
begins to colour Hindemith's manner, as in the Piano Suite, Op. 26
(1922), and in the finale of the above-mentioned Kammermusik which is
scored for a small orchestra, including nine percussion instruments.
This was partly in imitation of a jazz band, partly to ensure the
utmost clarity of the melodic and rhythmic patterns. The Kammermusik
is the first instance of Hindemith's interest in orchestral chamber music,
largely in reaction against the lavish orchestral style of the romantic
period. The Third String Quartet, Op. 22 (1922), representsthesumming-
up of all the stylistic aims pursued by the young Hindemith, yet at the
same time it is also a transitional work paving the way for the neo-
classicism which finds its first clear expression in the song cycle Das
Marienleben, Op. 27, for voice and piano (1923). This setting of poems by
Rainer Maria Rilke consists of fifteen songs divided into four groups,
each with a character of its own: idyllic and lyrical in the first group,
dramatic in the second, growing in tension and emotive expression in the
third, until the fourth group is marked by an almost abstract treatment of
the text, the musical structure completely absorbing the dramatis per-
sonae and the action. In the majority of these songs the voice is handled
in a rather unvocal, instrumental manner and often forms with the piano
a two- or three-part polyphonic texture. The various forms employed are
those of Baroque music: ‘Die Darstellung Мапа im Tempel’ (no. 2)
for instance is а passacaglia, and “Уот Tode Мапа IP (по. 14) is
designed as a theme with five contrapuntal variations. The setting, in
avoiding all descriptive and picturesque elements, expresses the poetic
essence of the words in a more or less stylized and objective way. Das
Marienleben is a significant landmark in Hindemith's technical develop-
ment, and evidence of the importance he attached to it may be seen in
the fact that in 1948 he subjected the music to a fairly extensive revision,
smoothing down the harshness and angularity of the voice part and
clarifying the harmonic and contrapuntal texture, but in the process
sacrificing youthful boldness and spontaneity.!

1 No. 12, ‘Stillung Мапа mit dem Auferstandenen’, the only song completely unchanged

in the new version, is recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x. And see Ex. 189,
pp. 407-8.

330 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Hindemith's indebtedness to the spirit of Bach reached its highest
point in the contrapuntal complexity and compactness of the Fourth
String Quartet, Op. 22 (1924), with a fugue in the first movement and in
the finale a passacaglia and fugato, which constitute a ne plus ultra in
close polyphonic thinking. In subsequent works Hindemith began to
free himself of this dense contrapuntal writing; texture becomes
gradually looser, more clearly defined in the disposition of the parts, and
a decorative element is seen to play an increasingly important role. In his
orchestral style Hindemith more and more resorts to the concertante
principle, with a resulting gain of clarity in the general texture; and,
possibly influenced by Stravinsky, he tends to replace, within the single
movement, construction-by-contrast with construction-by-similarity.
Typical of this phase are the Piano Concerto, Op. 29 (1924), the Concerto
for Orchestra, Op. 38 (1925) and the Kammermusik, Op. 36, nos. 3 and 4
(1925 and 1927 respectively) which are essentially concertos for violin
and viola, the latter being a demonstration of Hindemith's concertante
writing at its most felicitous.

His temporary interest in the “Neue Sachlichheit’ (New Objectivity)
prompted Hindemith to devote himself to Gebrauchsmusik—utility’ or
functional music conceived for special purposes such as the film, the
radio and the school. His various Kammermusiken are in a sense also
‘utilitarian’ in that, like so much eighteenth-century music, they were
written for special players or special occasions. Both he and Kurt
Weill! composed works which are wholly subservient to those uses and
also intended to bring music to the home and tempt the amateur to play
it, thus trying to bridge the ever-widening chasm between the composer
and the ordinary music lover or between ‘the producer and the con-
sumer of music’, as Hindemith put it in the language of the economist.
Works of this kind include the Schulwerk fiir Instrumental-Zusammen-
spiel (1927), the school opera, Wir bauen eine Stadt (We are building a
town) (1930) and the Sing-und-Spielmusik ftir Liebhaber und Musik-
freunde (1928-31). In a preface the composer points out that it is not
written for the concert hall or the professional musician, but is intended
to provide modern studies for those ‘who wish, for their own pleasure,
to sing and play or to perform before a small circle of people who share
their taste’. Yet, after an initial vogue for this kind of music, which
found its most concrete expression in the music festival held by and for
young people at Plón in the summer of 1932, enthusiasm waned and the
whole movement gradually petered out, though in retrospect it must be
seen as a genuine attempt to win the interest of the ordinary music lover
for contemporary music.

1 On Weill, see infra, p. 339.

PAUL HINDEMITH 331

Although opera might seem alien, or, at any rate, not as congenial to
Hindemith's cast of mind as 'absolute' instrumental music, his versa-
tility, his strong creative energies, and his intellectual curiosity prompted
him to a number of operatic works. He started with three one-act
operas, all written in 1921: Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, hope
of women), to an expressionist libretto by the painter Oskar Kokoschka,
the subject of which is symbol-laden to the point of unintelligibility;
Sancta Susanna, whose libretto by August Stramm portrays female
eroticism in conflict with the rigours of monastic life; and Das Nusch-
Nuschi, a satirical play for Burmese marionettes by Franz Blei, treated
by Hindemith in buffo style and with a great deal of musical parody.
With the exception of the last work, there is a very noticeable incon-
gruity between the involved and obscure libretto and the clear-cut,
stylized nature of the musical setting.

His next opera, the three-act Cardillac (1926), to a libretto by
Ferdinand Lion drawn from E. T. A. Hoffmann's story, Das Früulein
von Scuderi, demonstrates Hindemith's tendency towards objectivity and
stylized treatment. All psychological and descriptive elements are
avoided in favour of a strictly musical response to the drama, whose
stage action frequently runs on a different plane from that of the music.
Hindemith here aims at a return to the aesthetic of late baroque opera,
the music having the first say and the individual scenes being not much
more than a peg on which to hang such 'closed' autonomous musical
forms as arias, duets, and ensembles. But it has to be admitted that
the opera suffers from the immobility of these forms in relation to
the dramatic happenings recalling the style of an oratorio, and from
too rigid an application of polyphony that often creates the im-
pression of being written for its own sake, as in the final chorus—a
passacaglia of considerable length. Also Hindemith's portrayal of the
chief dramatis personae as objective types is in conflict with the charac-
ters of the libretto, especially that of the title-hero—a Parisian goldsmith
who, in his pathological mania to retrieve by murder the jewels pur-
chased from him by his customers, is a truly romantic and very indivi-
dual figure. Moreover, the differentiation in the musical delineation of
the various characters is not carried far enough, though there is an
attempt to depict Cardillac and his daughter in particular colours—
the former by a tortuous, darkly scored theme and the latter by florid
writing. In 1952 Hindemith subjected the opera to some dramatic re-
visions: a great deal of the text was entirely rewritten, the vocal lines
were rendered more singable, parts of the score were amplified to
match the alterations in the plot, and the orchestra was made to yield
а richer and more varied quality of sound, in keeping with the

332 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

composer's later style of instrumentation.! Yet, as in the case of Das
Marienleben, much of the direct and uncompromising character of the
original version was lost in this process of improving what Hindemith
regarded as the indiscretions of his youth. The tragedy of Cardillac
was followed by two comic operas both of which reflect the contem-
porary inclination to deal with topical subjects. The first of these was the
one-act Sketsch [sic] mit Musik, Hin und zurück (There and Back)
(1927), an example of the miniature type of opera then in vogue as a
reaction against the ponderous seriousness and the huge dimensions of
Wagnerian and Straussian music-drama. The action deals with a matri-
monial tragedy in an amusingly flippant manner and reverses the plot
halfway through, so that the opera ends as it began; the music moves
from that point also partly in retrograde motion and makes use of
elements from revue and cabaret. The three-act Neues vom Tage (News
of the day) (1929), to a libretto by Marcellus Schiffer, who also wrote
the book of the previous opera, deals with the sensationalism of modern
newspapers which pry, recklessly and callously, into the private affairs
of citizens. It is in the buffa style of Hin und zurück, but is more ambi-
tiously conceived, with great choral scenes and orchestral interludes,
and contains parodistic skits on the traditional romantic opera—a ‘hate
duet’ instead of the customary ‘love duet’, and a ‘divorce ensemble’
instead of a ‘wedding ensemble’. Altogether, it is a work that witnesses
to Hindemith’s high spirits and his good-natured irony, though it is a
little weighed down by his obsessive urge for elaborate contrapuntal
writing.

At the beginning of the 1930s, which also marks the beginning of his
full maturity, Hindemith’s style underwent a very noticeable change in
the direction of greater relaxation and mellowness. Technically, this is
seen in the abandonment of a massive, close-knit texture in favour of a

Ex. 144
= DEM GG We
Sehr ruhig

Ist Oboe

2nd Oboe

Cor Anglais
іп Е

1 See Н. L. Schilling, Paul Hindemith’s ‘Cardillac’. Beiträge zu einem Vergleich der beiden
Opernfassungen (Würzburg, 1962).

PAUL HINDEMITH 333

с”

lighter, more transparent treatment, in a greater differentiation being
made, so far as polyphony is concerned, between main voices and
subsidiary parts, and in a more clearly defined feeling for key, as in
the Philharmonic Concerto of 1932 (Ex. 144).

Typical of this new phase is not only the Philharmoni€ Concerto, con-
sisting of six variations on a markedly expressive theme, but the oratorio
Das Unauf hórliche (The Incessant) for four soloists, mixed chorus, boys’
chorus, and orchestra (1931), in which the expressive emotional element,
that up to now had been allowed into his music through the back door,
assumes an increasingly important role and lends Hindemith's neo-
classicism a romantic overtone:

Ex. 145
Langsam p

к=з сш зыш

trägt die Nacht__ das

Soprano
Solo

Piano

334 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

C uL s
е

(Night bears the end.)

The oratorio is a setting of a half-mystical, half-philosophical text by
Gottfried Benn, which contrasts eternity with the transience of human
life and the perpetuity of creation with the temporary aspirations and
achievements of mankind. This monumental work is in three parts, of
which the middle is chiefly allotted to the soloists and is flanked by two
predominantly choral parts, where the great choruses in contrapuntal-
imitatory style show Handel’s influence while the melodic writing is
coloured by Gregorian chant.

The work that best illustrates Hindemith's mature mode of expression,
and that in its spirituality and musical vision must be accounted a
masterpiece, is the opera Mathis der Maler (1934), to which he wrote
his own libretto. Like Die Meistersinger and Pfitzner's Palestrina, this
opera is an ‘artist’s drama’ centring on the figure of Dürer's contem-
porary Mathis Grünewald, who is for the composer a symbol of the
German artist of his own time. The story deals with significant events in
the painter's life and is set against the background of the Peasant War
in South Germany in the sixteenth century. The spiritual tensions
and conflicts which torment Mathis's mind arise from his participa-
tion in the politics of his country and from his profound questioning
of his artistic mission; and they take on a topical meaning when
understood as a reflection of Hindemith's own problems as artist
and man in Nazi Germany. The opera is a refutation of the totalitarian
dogma that the artist must be a political animal, subservient to the
State, and proclaims as its chief message that for an artist to serve any
other master but himself is to forfeit his moral and intellectual integrity
and to deny his true mission. More epic than dramatic in character, it
approaches the style of a scenic oratorio, with big choral scenes in
contrapuntal manner and with extensive slow-moving solo numbers,
duets, and ensembles. Wagnerian leitmotive technique alternates with
the formal devices of the older opera. Occasional use is made of

PAUL HINDEMITH 335

German folk-song such as the medieval tune ‘Es sungen drei Engel’
(Ех. 146 (i) ) in the Prelude, Engelkonzert, of Gregorian chant as at the
end of the seventh scene (ii) and of pentatonic melodies modelled on
Gregorian chant (iii):

(Mighty Ruler, true God who controllest the changes of things.)

These lend the music an archaic flavour suited to the ambience of
this idealistic and noble work. The symphony Mathis der Maler (1934)
is based almost entirely on music from the opera.

Of Hindemith's three pre-war ballets, Nobilissima Visione (1938), to
a choreographic story by Leonid Massine, shows in eleven scenes the
life of St. Francis of Assisi. Lofty in conception, it is not primarily
ballet music in the Stravinsky sense, for the range and variety of pure
dance pattern is restricted. Other works of Hindemith's pre-war period
include Der Schwanendreher (1935), a kind of viola concerto whose
material is largely derived and elaborated from a German folk-song.
(Hindemith was for a number of years viola player in the Amar Quartet
and frequently appeared as soloist in his own works for that instrument,
as he did in Der Schwanendreher.) His three Piano Sonatas (all 1936)
and the Sonata for Piano Duet (1938) are splendid examples which
show the synthesis of an essentially neo-classical style with a romantically
expressive mode of utterance.

336 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

With a composer of Hindemith's temperament a profound interest
in the theoretical aspect of his craft is not surprising. His was that rare
combination of a creative and reproductive artist with a searching and
lucid theoretical thinker. Evidence of this is provided by his textbook,
Unterweisung im Tonsatz*, which is an exposition of the theory and
practice of his own methods, in which the organization of the entire
melodic and harmonic material is based on a ‘diatonization’ of the
twelve notes of the chromatic scale—the very opposite of Schoenberg's
dodecaphonic system.

Like Schoenberg, Hindemith takes for his basis the twelve chromatic
notes; but, unlike the Schoenbergian series, the twelve notes are strictly
organized and stand in clearly defined relationships to both a central
note, the tonic, and to one another. It is these relationships which
determine the melodic and harmonic values of the twelve notes.
Hindemith takes as his point of departure the harmonic or overtone
series acclimatizing its ‘impure’ notes to the temperate scale, and
derives from it two rows. In contrast to Schoenberg's complete equaliza-
tion of the twelve chromatic notes, Row I shows a hierarchical order:

(Hindemith includes the octave as the note next in importance to the
first note).

The nearer a note lies to C, the closer its relationship to it; the
further away from it the weaker this relationship until in the twelfth
note, B, it is at its weakest. The tritone Е sharp is considered by Hinde-
mith an outsider standing in a neutral relationship to the tonic C and
playing an ambivalent role (see p.337). In this he differs from the
generally held modern view that the tritone is completely unrelated to
C and therefore represents an extreme, or zero, in the scale of relation-
ship.

The varying degrees of relationships to the central note, or tonic,
constitute for Hindemith ‘rule and measure for the linking of sounds,
for the order of harmonic progressions and thus for the further course
of the musical happenings'.? Row I is what has been called a ‘functional
mode’,? i.e. it indicates the functional role of the twelve chromatic notes

1 Mainz, 1937; translated as The Craft of Musical Composition (New York, 1942).

2 Ibid., р. 74.

*'This term was first used by Richard Hill, Schoenberg's Tone-Rows and the Tonal
System of the Future', Musical Quarterly, xxii (1936), p. 14.

PAUL HINDEMITH 337

о a centre. There is, to repeat, a world of difference between this row
and the Schoenbergian note-row. The latter is a melodic model or store
of motives for practical use in a composition, whereas the Hindemithian
series has no thematic significance whatsoever and is merely a graph
showing functional relationships.

It gives only one set of tonal relationships, i.e. the degree of nearness
to or distance from the tonic. Another row is needed to show the
relationship between the twelve notes, namely their intervallic relation-
ship which determines the harmonic value of an interval, according to
its degree of consonance and dissonance. This purpose is served by
Hindemith's Row II which he derived from the so-called combination
tones:

(The arrows indicate the respective roots of the intervals).

Hindemith takes full account of the modern conception of the relativity
of consonance and dissonance by drawing no strict demarcation line
between the two; there is merely a gradual transition from simple and
perfect intervals (the first seven intervals of Row П) to less simple
intervals of higher harmonic tension (the next four intervals) until ex-
treme tension is reached in the major seventh. The tritone, on the other
hand, which has no root, is a neutral interval whose harmonic value
depends on the context in which it occurs.

On the basis of Row II Hindemith proceeds to build a system of
chords comprising all possible combinations of intervals whose har-
monic value is determined by what kind of simple and less simple
intervals they contain. If chords of a higher harmonic tension move
towards chords of lesser tension the result of such a progression is a
harmonischer Fall or harmonic descent—in the opposite case, a harmon-
ischer Anstieg or harmonic ascent. In other words, the harmonic
tension decreases and increases in direct ratio to the progression from a
wertvoller, or valuable, chord to a less valuable chord and vice versa.
This crescendo and diminuendo in harmonic tension Hindemith calls
harmonisches Gefälle or harmonic incline, and the planning of a gradual
and balanced incline is, according to him, the purpose and test of a
good chord progression, unless a sudden fall in harmonic tension is
sought for some specific aesthetic effect. For instance, in the following
progression of six chords, the harmonic tension is seen to increase
slowly towards the fourth chord and then diminish towards the last:

338 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Ex. 149
Y

Thus, the harmonic Gefälle of this example is well-balanced. Hindemith
argues that by assessing the harmonic values of chords with the help
of Row II, composers are given a means whereby to organize and
control in a deliberate manner the course of harmonic progressions and,
indeed, the harmonic disposition of a whole piece.

A. word must be said about Hindemith's theory of tonality in modern
music. Since his system, based on the natural laws of musical acoustics,
constitutes a 'diatonicized' chromaticism in which every one of the
twelve notes is related to a central note—just as the seven diatonic
notes of the major-minor system are related to a tonic—he maintains
that it is possible to establish a tonality in every kind of music, including
even twelve-note music, as he attempts to show in his analysis of a few
bars from Schoenberg's Piano Piece, Op. 33a.! His procedure in finding
the key of a given passage is, roughly, the following: he first looks for
the roots of a given chord progression, then arranges these roots in a
line, ascertains with the help of Row II the ‘best’ interval, and the root
of this interval is the tonic of the passage in question: Thus, the line
formed by the roots of Ex. 149 is:

Ex. 150
a> ice

Its ‘best’ or simplest interval is the perfect fourth G—C whose root is C
--һепсе C is the tonic of the above passage.

Whatever might be thought of the involved way in which Hindemith
establishes the two fundamental rows on which his whole system rests,
it must be said that Unterweisung іт Tonsatz represents, even after the
lapse of a whole generation, a very valuable contribution to composi-
tional theory and a serious attempt to introduce tonal order and
organization into the complex phenomena of music in the inter-war
years.

KURT WEILL AND ERNST KRENEK
The two most notable German contemporaries of Hindemith during

1 Unterweisung, pp. 244-45.

KURT WEILL AND ERNST KRENEK 339

the inter-war period were Kurt Weill (1900-50) and Ernst Křenek
(b. 1900). Weill, a pupil of Busoni, began his career with works in which
he pursued a boldly experimental, expressionistic and abstract line
(Divertimento, 1923; String Quartet, 1923, and Frauentanz for soprano
and five instruments, 1924). He subsequently turned to the stage as his
main field of activity, adopting a more realistic and topical approach
and creating a new type of German opera in which such heterogeneous
elements as those from the old Singspiel, jazz, cabaret and Uberbrettl (a
German form of intimate revue) are moulded into an individual style.
For this reason and also on account of the raciness of his melodic idiom
and the pungency of his much simplified harmonic language, Weill’s
operas achieved at the time a wide popular success. Like the young
Hindemith, Krenek, and other contemporary composers (Max Brand
in Maschinist Hopkins, 1929), he cultivated Zeitoper, operas with a
topical political and social subject in which bourgeois society was
pilloried and made responsible for the social injustices of the class
system, as in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and fall of
the town of Mahagonny) (1927), Die Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny
Opera) (1928), and Die Biirgschaft (The Security) (1932) in which a
strong satirical vein is tempered by an intermittent serious attitude. He
also followed the short-lived vogue for the Гей ск, or educational
music, in the school opera Der Jasager (The Yea-sayer) (1930). Signifi-
cantly, five of Weill’s stage works have libretti by the left-wing poet and
playwright, Bert Brecht; and their collaboration produced, in Die
Dreigroschenoper, their best-known and most successful work, the
model for which was John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera. This was a thinly
veiled attack on the corruption of contemporary public characters and
institutions, and similarly the German work represents a mordant satire
on modern society and public institutions. It is not an opera in the
traditional sense but a mixture of Singspiel and cabaret, consisting of set
numbers (arias, duets, ensembles, and parodistic chorale) with inter-
spersed spoken dialogue, the whole accompanied by a small orchestra.
Weill replaces the popular melodies of the English original by jazz-like
tunes of a most immediate appeal and of such simplicity that they can be
sung by actors, not only by professional singers; his argument for using
this device was that jazz represented the folk-music of modern times.
Whereas Weill’s output was largely devoted to opera, Krenek dis-
played a Protean versatility; in fact, he may be said to be the German
counterpart of Milhaud. The fact that Kienek’s intellect has always
been more potent than his creative instinct possibly explains the lack of
a firm direction in his stylistic development. His zigzag course also
reflects the spiritual insecurity and absence of a strong inner purpose

340 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

characteristic of the German Zeitgeist in its extreme manifestations.
Like Hindemith, Křenek allowed himself to be influenced by the various
*isms' of the 1920s, but, unlike Hindemith, he did not succeed in achiev-
ing a distinct personal mode of expression. Не, began as a radical and
uncompromising experimentalist in an intransigent atonal style—
three Symphonies (1921-22); four String Quartets (1921-24); the scenic
cantata Die Zwingburg (The Citadel) (1922); the farcical detective thriller
Der Sprung über den Schatten (The Leap over the Shadow) (1923), and
the expressionist Orpheus und Eurydike (1923), the latter to a libretto by
Kokoschka which treats the ancient myth in a modern psychological
manner. Then КїепеК executed a volte face, abandoning the experi-
mental and abstract and turning to a frankly popular idiom. In Jonny
spielt auf (Johnny strikes up) (1927) a Negro dance-band leader is the
hero, and Křenek makes use of jazz and the spectacular devices of
modern stage production, including the radio and a real locomotive.!
After this he changed his course again, paying tribute to topical Zeitoper
in the trilogy Der Diktator (1926), Das geheime Königreich (The Secret
Kingdom) (1927), and Schwergewicht oder die Ehre der Nation (Dead
Weight or the Honour of the Nation) (1927), all one-act operas. Then
came a neo-romantic phase in which he drifted into a diatonic style
best exemplified in the song cycle, Reisebuch aus den österreichischen
Alpen (Travel Book from the Austrian Alps) (1929), which was largely
modelled on Schubert's Winterreise; Fiedellieder (Fiddle Songs) (1930),
and the tragedy Das Leben des Orest (The Life of Orestes) (1930),
treated as an intensely passionate human drama in the manner of grand
opera. Returning from his studies in Berlin with Franz Schreker to
Vienna (1928) he came into close contact with the works of Schoenberg
and his school, and after prolonged hesitation decided to embrace the
twelve-note system with all its theoretical and practical implications.?
From then onwards the majority of Krenek’s compositions were written
in serial style, such as the monumental Karl V (1933), which draws оп
elements from the historical drama, grand opera, dumb-show, and the
film, and is comparable to Milhaud's Christophe Colomb.

THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL—ARNOLD SCHOENBERG

In the flux of currents and cross-currents characterizing European
music during most of the inter-war period, there was one firm rock
formed by three composers who are collectively known as the Second
Viennese School—Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and his two dis-
ciples Alban Berg (1885-1935) and Anton Webern (1883-1945). This

! See pl. V (b).
? See his Über neue Musik (Vienna, 1937) and Studies in Counterpoint (New York, 1940).

THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL--ARNOLD SCHOENBERG 341

was the only group of composers which showed a consistent develop-
ment in a single direction, namely the exploitation of a new method of
composition that represented a revolutionary departure from all other
methods known in musical history. In its aesthetics, however, it adhered,
with the exception of the later Webern, to the chief tenet of romanticism
—music as the vehicle of subjective emotion—but music subjected to
the immense pressure of largely unconscious irrational forces of the ego
and thus becoming expressionist in character; in this sense the Second
Viennese School may be said to represent a reaction against neo-
classicism and the New Objectivity.

In earlier chapters of this volume it has been shown how Schoenberg,
in developing and intensifying Wagner's chromaticism, arrived in the
period 1908-1914 at a free chromatic or atonal style. His works written
in this style—a fluid, amorphous, and invertebrate atonal mass—
represent the liquidation of all previous means of formal and harmonic
organization; and they were all very short works (Three Pieces for piano,
Op. 11, Five Pieces for orchestra, Op. 16, Six Piano Pieces, Op. 19) for
the relinquishing of all harmonic devices, used hitherto to create formal
articulation in tonal music, precluded the employment of larger forms;
while in those compositions which did show a measure of formal exten-
sion, it was the text that conditioned the form (Das Buch der hüngenden
Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens), Ор. 15, Erwartung (Expecta-
tion), Op. 17, Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand), Op. 18, and
Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21). In these ‘free atonal’ works Schoenberg had
arrived at an end, he found himself in an impasse; and it was in con-
sequence of this that he began experimenting with a novel principle of
construction which, analogous to the formal organization of tonal
music, would guarantee order and coherence and at the same time
introduce a unifying principle into the melodic and harmonic material.
These aims he achieved by the method of what he himself called ‘сот-
posing with the twelve chromatic notes related only to one another’ and
which is generally known as the twelve-note or serial method, a method
foreshadowed in some of Schoenberg's atonal works, such as Pierrot
lunaire and the Orchestral Songs, Op. 22, where an attempt is made to
tie together the structure by means of recurrent motives. Similarly, the
last part of an abortive symphony (1915), which later became the ora-
torio Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob's Ladder), contained a scherzo with a
dodecaphonic theme. In the oratorio it appears at the very opening—
the first six notes in the form of a basso ostinato, the last six notes
sustained in a chord above it:

342 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Ex. 151
Sehr rasch

The fundamental idea behind this new mode of composition was to
replace one structural force—tonality—by another force—thematic
unity;or, seen from the point of view of Schoenburg's pre-dodecaphonic
works, to substitute for unqualified free atonality organized atonality.
This was to provide a firm basis for the achievement of a genuine atonal
style, as in his previous compositions it was frequently hard to prevent
tonal elements from intruding into the music and thus disrupting the
carefully arranged atonal structure.

This search for the unification of the entire material of a composition
by means of an inclusive system of note relationships had been in the air
during the years shortly before the First World War. There were, for
instance, Skryabin's attempts to base whole musical structures on what
he termed ‘synthetic chords’. The Austrian Josef Mathias Hauer (1883-
1959) anticipated Schoenberg more directly and his theories had some
influence on the latter's own thinking. As he admitted, *Hauer's theories,
even where I think them exaggerated, are profound and original, and
his compositions, even where I regard them as examples rather than as
compositions, reveal creative gifts'.! In 1908 Hauer began to write music
based on a system which he later elaborated in several publications?
demonstrating that the chromatic scale can be arranged in 479,001,600

! Harmonielehre (third edition, Vienna, 1922), p. 488,
? Vom Wesen des Musikalischen: Ein Lehrbuch der Zwólftonmusik (Berlin, 1920), and
Zwoólftontechuik: Die Lehre von den Tropen (Vienna, 1926).

THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL—ARNOLD SCHOENBERG 343

permutations; these are grouped into forty-four Tropen which are
twelve-note patterns rather similar in character to Schoenberg's note-
rows. Each of these Tropen can again be divided into two sections of
six notes which stand in complementary intervallic relationship to
one another; and, in addition, each Trope can be transposed to any
other degree of the chromatic scale, with further internal regroupings
of intervals which result in an astronomical number of permutations.
As a composer Hauer was negligible, and in the event it was not his
system but Schoenberg's that established itself and proved technically
and aesthetically of far-reaching significance.

The dodecaphonic method was primarily a means of achieving order
and coherence; but it also fulfilled two other purposes with which
Schoenberg had been concerned almost from the beginning of his career.
One was to develop a theme by continuous variation, a principle which
he gradually evolved from hints found in Brahms as, for example, in the
finale of the Quartet in A minor, Op. 52, no. 2:

Ex. 152
Allegro non assai

Such hints find in the twelve-note technique their consummation; for
essentially a dodecaphonic composition represents a perpetual series of
organically linked variations of a basic note-row and its derivations.
The other purpose was to achieve complete thematic unity, that is, to
evolve an entire work from a basic idea which is represented by the
so-called note-row—a series formed by the twelve notes of the chro-
matic scale arranged in an individual order of sequence and invented
by the composer. Yet so far as Schoenberg himself was concerned, the
construction of a note-row was preceded by the invention of an idea
which already possessed a thematic character; and it was from this idea
that he worked back to the basic row—in other words, the creative act
came first and then the play of the intellect on its product. The unity
of the musical space is ensured by the use of the note-row in two

344 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

dimensions, vertical and horizontal, which results in an intrinsic identity
of the harmonic and melodic elements, in which the temporal-spatial
elements are only two different aspects of the same musical idea. Each
composition has to be based on a note-row, and to enlarge its scope
three variants are to be added to the basic series: its inversion or mirror
form, its cancrizans or retrograde form, and the inversion of the retro-
grade as, for instance, shown in Schoenberg's Suite, Op. 25:

Moreover, the note-row and its derivations can be transposed to the
other degrees of the chromatic scale, with the result that forty-eight
possible versions of the basic idea are available to the composer—
always supposing the truly musical ‘identification’ of note-series with
their ‘opposites’, an intellectual rather than an aural process. These
transpositions provide one of the principal means of achieving formal
design, as moving from one transposition to another fulfils a similar
function to that fulfilled by modulating from one key to another in
tonal music.

The twelve-note row combines some of the functions of scale, key,
and fundamental theme. Like a scale, it contains all the available notes
of a given note system—in dodecaphonic music, the twelve notes of the
chromatic scale are arranged not according to a gradually rising and
falling pitch, but in an order of intervals freshly invented for each
composition. Thus the row already possesses a melodic character but is
not yet a melody or a theme because it is not yet rhythmically articulated.

Two rules in the early application of the note-row were that (a) the
original order of its intervals must be maintained throughout a com-
position, and (5) no note must be repeated until the other eleven notes
are sounded. After the row has been used up melodically or har-

THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL—ARNOLD SCHOENBERG 345

monically, or in both ways simultaneously, this procedure is repeated
until the end of a piece. As the two chief purposes of the row are to
ensure thematic unity and to replace the function of key in tonal music,
it follows that it must be present in a composition at all times in either
basic form (Grundgestalt) or its derivatives. As for the rule of the non-
repetition of an individual note before the entire row is employed, this
sprang from Schoenberg's anxiety during his early dodecaphonic period
lest a repeated note might tend, by thus assuming undue importance, to
destroy the equality of the twelve chromatic notes and suggest some-
thing similar to a tonal centre; for the same reason octave doublings of
a note were forbidden. In the later stage of twelve-note theory these and
other strict rules were relaxed—note-repetitions were permitted, dis-
sonances were no longer employed indiscriminately but according to
their varying degrees of harmonic tension,’ and even consonances were
readmitted. The note-row as such does not, of course, exclude tonal
implications—it can be so designed as to include triads and other tonal
formations, a procedure adopted in particular by Berg to mollify the
extremely discordant character of pure twelve-note music, and by
inventing rows with a tonal slant he may be said to have achieved a kind
of symbiosis with tonal music. Methods of employing the note-row also
include its sub-division into two or more segments, with groups of six,
four, or three notes (see Exx. 151, 159, 162, 174, 177, and 179), without
thereby affecting the all-pervasive thematic function of the entire row.
For this reason the term ‘functional mode’ is an apt description of its
true nature which bears a certain affinity to that of the raga in Indian and
the maqam in Arabic music.” Since the note-row is a horizontal struc-
ture, the music based on it is primarily contrapuntal in character and the
ancient devices of inversion, reversion, imitation, and canon play a
prominent part. Indeed it is in the use of polyphony and variation that a
composer may show the extent of his inventive imagination and technical
skill. On the other hand, it has to be admitted that the twelve-note method
of composition represents an artificial, intellectually conceived system of
tone relationships which, unlike the empirically derived theoretical
basis of tonal music, was invented ad hoc. In this it resembles a language
like Esperanto, without a natural history. The note-row and its manipu-
lations, fascinating though they are to the intellect, have no basis in the
observable natural phenomena of music; they are, as it were, test-tube
creations, laboratory experiments, very close in character to the

1 Křenek, in his Studies of Counterpoint, distinguishes between dissonances of a higher
degree of tension or ‘sharp’ dissonances (minor second, major seventh), and dissonances of
a lower degree of tension or ‘mild’ dissonances (major second, minor seventh).

2 See Vol. I, рр. 195 and 421.

346 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

acrostic and other devices which have at different periods engaged
the attention of poets. Yet what matters in the last analysis is not the
nature of a system, but whether, by using that system, the composer is
able to create works of an original and enduring quality, a question
which has been answered in the affirmative by Schoenberg, Berg,
Webern, Dallapiccola, and other musicians. Moreover, twelve-note
music adheres to the same general aesthetic principles as govern the
rest of Western music irrespective of style and technique—contrast and
variety in unity, balance and proportion of the parts in relation to the
whole, effective distribution of climax and anti-climax, and so on. These
qualities make themselves felt without the listener being consciously
aware of the particular technical means by which they are obtained. As
Schoenberg once said, “Ше twelve-note technique is a purely family
affair’; and he insisted that in the term *twelve-note composition’ the
accent was to be laid on the noun.

The great crisis in Schoenberg's creative career occurred during the
years 1914—18 when as a composer he went underground, as it were, and
experimented in a number of abortive works with the possibilities of a
unifying principle based on the employment of the twelve notes of the
chromatic scale. The first works which showed this principle in embryo
were the Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23 and the Serenade, Op. 24, for seven
instruments and solo voice (both 1923).! The fifth of the piano pieces, а
waltz, and the fourth movement of the Serenade, which is an impas-
sioned setting of Petrarch's Sonnet no. 217, are both based on twelve-
note series; but the technique employed was, as Schoenberg himself
admitted, comparatively rudimentary. Thus, in the vocal movement the
baritone sings the identical series of twelve notes throughout, without
any transpositions or derivatives:

“Тһе first movement of the Serenade is recorded in Тле History of Music in Sound, X.

THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL—ARNOLD SCHOENBERG 347

Ex. 154 р 6
Казсһ , $i. "us

О kónntichje der Rach’anihr ge-ne- - sen, diemich durch

Blick und Re - degleich zer-stó-ret, und dann

(O could I ever recover from the revenge on her who destroys me with glance
and speech alike, and then . . .)

The only structurally interesting feature lies in the successive distribu-
tions of the row: as every line of the poem is hendecasyllabic, the
second line begins with the 12th note of the row, the third line with the
11th, the fourth line with the 10th and so on, the row gradually doubling
back on itself until the thirteenth line is reached when the row begins
again with its first note. The Waltz of Op. 23 is also based on a complete
note-row while the other pieces show an approximation to it, in that
each contains a recurring series of several notes—five for instance in the
third movement:

Ex. 155 О
Langsam

and twelve plus two in the variation movement of Op. 24. Both these
works, which are in the composer's relaxed and light-hearted vein, are of
a transitional character in their manipulation of the dodecaphonic
method. By contrast, in the following Piano Suite, Op. 25 (1924)
(though some movements were composed in 1921), and in the Wind
Quintet, Op. 26 (1924), Schoenberg is seen to employ his new method
with an inflexibility difficult to reconcile with a composer who, despite
the marked intellectuality of his technique, always placed construction
at the almost exclusive service of emotional expression. It was as though
he wanted in these two works to prove to himself the practical validity of
the twelve-note technique, its manifold structural and contrapuntal
potentialities. Each of the two compositions is based in its entirety on a
single row of a special form: that of the Piano Suite is arranged into three
groups of four notes each, while in the row of the Wind Quintet the last

348 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

six notes are an almost exact replica, transposed a fourth down, of the
first six notes, a structure which corresponds to the divisions of a theme
in tonal music into first (half) and second (full) close. In op. 26 Schoen-
berg returned to the classical four-movement scheme abandoned during
his free atonal period, a return made possible through the achievement
of large-scale structural organization by means of twelve-note technique.
The Wind Quintet comprises an Allegro in free sonata form, a Scherzo,
an Adagio in ternary form, and a Rondo, and is scored for flute, oboe,
clarinet, bassoon, and horn which frequently produce an organ-like
effect. It is Schoenberg's first large work in the new method and repre-
sents a compendium of all available contrapuntal devices, especially in
the finale.

Schoenberg next applied his new-found technique to the choral
medium, with special emphasis on the canonic aspect. The two works
in question, both for mixed chorus, were Four Pieces, Op. 27, and
Three Satires, Op. 28 (both 1925), in which, with the exception of the
last two numbers of Op. 27, the settings are of his own texts. The
Satires were occasioned by the attacks made on Schoenberg's new
compositional principles in various quarters, and represent his declara-
tion of war on all current ‘isms’ of the time—neo-classicism, folklorism,
‘middle of Ше way’ music and ‘wrong note’ tonal music. And to
demonstrate that it may be as exacting to write good tonal music as
dodecaphonic music he added three most complicated tonal canons
which show the same contrapuntal boldness of writing as the serial
pieces. The next three works were all instrumental. The Suite, op. 29,
for seven instruments (1926), proves by its gay, unbuttoned mood,
which reaches a point of sheer exuberance in the final gigue, that
dodecaphonic music is not concerned exclusively with states of terror
or anxiety, e.g. the second movement, Yanzschritte (dance steps)
which is a witty caricature of jazz. As in the Serenade, the unusual
combination is handled with superb mastery and insight into the
peculiar character of the individual instruments, with the three strings
(violin, viola, and cello), the three woodwind (two clarinets and bass
clarinet) and the piano being treated both in opposition and in concert;
the keyboard instrument is conceived partly as a concertante, partly
as a very plastic accompaniment. Schoenberg's own strict rules are here
relaxed—there are octave doublings, reiteration, and also omission of
single notes of the basic row, and tonal formations such as major
and minor thirds and sixths. The slow movement is a set of four
well-contrasted variations on the song, ‘Annchen von Tharau’, by
Friedrich Silcher (1789-1860), which is perfectly integrated into the
serial texture:

THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL—ARNOLD SCHOENBERG 349

Theme

Ex. 156 is та

Bass Clar.

"EEls E Y

Like the Wind Quintet, the Third String Quartet, Op. 30 (1927), is cast
in a classical mould—a Moderato in free sonata form, an Adagio
consisting of theme and variations, an Intermezzo in scherzo form, and
a Rondo. Yet, compared with that earlier work, Schoenberg's formal
handling here has acquired greater clarity of articulation, the themes
have an increased plasticity, the contrapuntal lines are more fluid and
the texture is more airy. And, as in the Suite, the twelve-note technique
is treated with considerable freedom as, for instance, in the opening

350 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

movement, where the initial five-note ostinato (G-E-D sharp-A-C) is
not only continuous for twelve bars but pervades the entire movement
in various permutations. With the Third String Quartet Schoenberg
entered his ‘classical’ period. A year later came the Variations for
Orchestra, Op. 31 (1928), which represents the crystallization of the
dodecaphonic method in the exploitation of all the horizontal and
vertical potentialities and is in a sense comparable to Bach's Kunst der
Fuge. Although orchestral polyphony is carried to its utmost limits, yet,
owing to the continuous changes in the distribution of the leading parts
and the scoring, which frequently achieves the effect of infinitely varied
chamber music, the general texture shows an extraordinary transparence,
with a gossamer lightness in certain variations (nos. 2, 4, 6, 7, 9). Simi-
larly, the colour scheme is marked by immense diversity—from the
hazy, almost impressionist, introduction and the monochrome of the
theme itself to the subtle woodwind hues of Variation 2, and from
the fleeting colours of Variation 7 to the compact and massive sound of
Variation 8. At no point is the orchestral palette used for the sake of
extraneous effects but always in the service of the musical thought, of
the individual structure and the general design. The introduction
gradually reveals the contours of the basic theme and some of its
transpositions and in its latter part quotes, in the solo trombone, the
motive B flat-A-C-B natural. This in German spells BACH and is
intended as a homage to the master of counterpoint. In fact, this
introduction may be taken as a variation before the actual appearance
of the variation theme. The latter shows quaternary form built up succes-
sively from the original row, its retrograde inversion (transposed), its
retrograde and the inversion (transposed), and is а /ocus classicus to show
how twelve-note music permits of the invention of a melody which is
beautifully sustained, of the utmost purity of line and of a perfect
equipoise in its rise and fall, to say nothing of its tender lyrical expres-
sion:

Ex. 157
Basic Row:

@) — ===
>- ho >

7 в зо оир

THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL—ARNOLD SCHOENBERG 351

Molto moderato

Of the numerous ingenuities which characterize the Variations, one
deserves special mention. While the theme, in its initial statement,
derives from the successive unfolding of the original row and its three
derivatives, in the Adagio section, shortly before the close of the work, it
appears simultaneously in all the four forms of the row:

Ex. 158

Cor
Anglais

Clar. in
E flat

Violin
(Solo)

352 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

be —

в: [|

ae ee лашы сш

ee Иса E

a PRR ea a

е Eee ee)
* (2

The Variations were Schoenberg's first full-scale orchestral work in
serial technique, and the comic Von Heute auf Morgen (From Today
till Tomorrow) (1929) was his first twelve-note opera. It reflects the
vogue for opera with a topical subject, such as Hindemith's Neues vom
Tage and Кїепек°ѕ Jonny spielt auf; and the composer also wanted to
prove that serial technique and a light-hearted vein of expression were
not incompatible. The rather insipid libretto by Schoenberg's second
wife Gertrud who concealed her identity behind the pseudonym “Мах
Blonda', is a social satire illustrating the inconsistencies of modern
matrimonial assumptions. There are five characters, one of whom, a
child, is a speaking part. The opera is based on a single note-row that
yields an infinite number of vocal themes of varying character—lyrical,
arioso, and dramatic—which are handled with a considerable flexibility
and lightness of touch, despite the fact that contrapuntal writing
prevails. Thus, the quarrel duet between husband and wife is a canon,
and to the final quartet the orchestra contributes two more parts so that
the texture contains altogether six independent voices. Yet the instru-
mental style—the opera is scored for an orchestra of normal size but
includes a large number of percussion instruments—is for the most part

THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL--ARNOLD SCHOENBERG 353

restrained and the audibility of the singers' words generally unimpaired.
Apart from the Suite, Op. 29, the opera is the only workof Schoenberg's
to make use of jazz elements.

The two Piano Pieces, Op. 33a and b (1929), show an advanceonthe
style of Schoenberg's previous dodecaphonic piano music, in that they
are more clear-cut in design and that his mastery of the new method
now enabled him to solve similar problems in a more straightforward
and more assured manner. Thus in the first piece the note-row is first
stated in three initial chords, of four notes each, which are immediately
answered by three chords (transposed inverted cancrizans), after which
it unfolds in horizontal direction (transposed inverted cancrizans in
treble and retrograde in bass)—an excellent example, within the shortest
possible space, of the harmonic and melodic use of the twelve-note
series :

Ек. 139

Basic Row:

The last works Schoenberg wrote before his emigration to America in
1933 were Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene (Music to a Film
Scene), Op. 34 (1930), which is an accompaniment to an imaginary film

354 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND, OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

scene describing a mounting tension from imminent danger to fear and
the final catastrophe; Six Unaccompanied Pieces, Op. 35, for men's
chorus (1930), which are in a simpler contrapuntal style than his Opp.
27 and 28, and show a noticeable relaxation of the twelve-note rules, the
last piece, ‘Verbundenheit’, even employing tonal triads; and the opera
Moses und Aron (1932) whose completion occupied the composer during
the last years of his life.

The first American composition was the Suite for Strings in G (1934),
a mainly educational work written for the repertory of American
school orchestras. This accounts for its being wholly tonal, though its
contrapuntal writing would seem rather complex for a school work.
Schoenberg's intermittent return to the tonal idiom in this and a few
later compositions was at the time wrongly interpreted as a concession
to American taste. Yet, apart from the fact that this assumption is
amply disproved by other “Атпегісап” works in strict serial technique,
Schoenberg gave it as his opinion that there was ‘still a lot of good
music to be written іп C major’ and in an article, ‘On revient toujours’,!
he confessed that the wish to return to his earlier style remained con-
stantly with him and that was ‘how and why I sometimes write tonal
music’.

The series of important works written during his last period began
with the Violin Concerto, Op. 36 (1936), which was his first work in
concerto form and obliged him to consider the, for him, novel problem
of opposing a single instrument against a full orchestra. ‘Opposing’
here is perhaps not the right term, since soloist and orchestra are close
collaborators, both being equal partners in the elaboration and develop-
ment of the thematic material. It is, however, a measure of Schoenberg’s
skill that the work is both a symphonic concerto, in which even the most
negligible figure is derived from the original row, and a virtuoso piece
of the most exacting brilliance, the difficulties of the solo part being
indeed so tremendous that the composer declared in jest that it needed
a player ‘with a sixth finger'—enormous intervallic jumps, triple and
quadruple stops, double-stop harmonics, left-hand pizzicato and
exploitation of extreme registers. Yet, even more than in the violin
concertos of Beethoven and Brahms, the virtuoso element serves to
throw the musical ideas into sharpest relief. An important feature of the
general style is the prevalence of chromatic formations in the solo part,
heralded in the first statement of the principal theme where the violin
plays the semitones of the basic row melodically while the orchestra
presents the rest of the series in chords:

1 Reprinted in Style and Idea (New York, 1950), p. 211.

THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL—ARNOLD SCHOENBERG 355

Ex. 160 |
Basic Row:

ши г важат 0771. 8-*9 19 № 12

(ii)

The work, corresponding more or less to the classical concerto form,
consists of a sonata Allegro, a ternary slow movement and march-like
finale in rondo form, with a clear-cut and easily recognizable structure
in every one of the movements. The extraordinary formal mastery of
the work is matched by a rich flow of melodic invention of an intensely
romantic kind, which reaches in the first two movements a rare degree
of passionate intensity.

Compared with the Third String Quartet, the Fourth (written con-
currently with the Violin Concerto) marks a great advance towards truly
classical principles: the shape of themes is more clear-cut and sinewy,
the rhythmic patterns have become more regular, and the texture shows
an increased equilibrium between homophonic and contrapuntal writing:

356 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND, OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Ех. 161
Allegro.molto
^

ist Vin.

=
2nd Vin.
АЗ

Vla.

Е сохан
Cello 5а
КУ == vien:

which stands п marked contrast to some works of Schoenberg's
earlier style, where the impression of a polyphonic surfeit, of contra-
puntal complexity for its own sake, cannot be resisted. In the Fourth
Quartet there does not seem a note too many, everything falls into place;
and, if the Third Quartet frequently revealed a subservience of the
imagination to the twelve-note method, the later work shows absolute
freedom in the way the composer bends his technical means entirely to
expressive purposes. In the period following the Fourth String Quartet
Schoenberg wrote a number of works, some frankly tonal, while in
others the underlying note-row is so invented as to imply quasi-tonal
formations. To the first group belong the Ko/ Nidre, Op. 39, for speaker,
mixed chorus, and orchestra (1938), written for a Jewish organization

THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL—ARNOLD SCHOENBERG 357

and intended for performance on the eve of the Day of Atonement. The
work is in О minor and makes use of part of the traditional Kol Nidre
melody, which seems to be of Spanish-Moorish origin. The Chamber
Symphony, no. 2, Op. 38, which was begun in 1906, at the time of the
composition of the Chamber Symphony, no. 1, Op. 9, preserves its
original tonal language—it is in E flat major—but the use of mirror
forms, especially in the second movement, is to be traced back to the
influence of the later twelve-note method. Similar in style are the
Variations on a Recitative for organ, Op. 40, (1941) and Theme and
Variations for Wind Orchestra, Op. 43 (1943), the first of which is
written in a greatly extended D minor and the second in G minor,
though intense chromaticism tends in each case to weaken the gravita-
tional pull of the tonic.

In the second group, written in the twelve-note method, a vague and
intermittent tonal feeling is perceptible—the Ode for Napoleon, Op. 41,
for speaker, string quartet, and piano, and the Piano Concerto, op. 42
(both 1942). The Ode is a setting of Byron's poem written after
Napoleon's abdication at Fontainebleau on 13 April 1814. It is a poem
against tyranny, a passionate accusation not only of the French
Emperor but of any kind of political dictatorship, containing also a
wealth of historical allusions mingled with passages of mordant irony.
Byron's anticipation of the advent of modern dictators lends his verses
a burning actuality and it was this that prompted Schoenberg to set
them to music. The work is marked by an extraordinarily violent
and explosive quality, largely engendered by the prevalence of broken
rhythmic patterns and by a percussive piano part which is set against
short and sharply defined melodic lines on the four strings. The speaking
part, in contrast to that of Pierrot lunaire of thirty years before, is
notated on a single line giving only the rhythm at which it is to be
declaimed. Despite the fact that the work falls into a number of con-
trasting sections, some of which are in a meditative vein, the dramatic
breadth and atmosphere are well sustained. The note-row on which
the work is based permits tonal chords and cadences, and the close
is in a clear E flat major. Similar in character is the note-row of the
Piano Concerto, containing oblique references to tonal chords and
tonalities as, for instance, in the finale where the F sharp major at the
beginning is opposed by the C major at the end. As in the Violin
Concerto, Schoenberg skilfully solves the problem of integrating soloist
and orchestra and for all the virtuoso treatment—arpeggios, wide
leaps, octaves, and full chords—the piano shares the elaboration of the
thematic material with the orchestra. To the Piano Concerto the com-
poser applied the cyclic one-movement form of the Chamber Symphony,

358 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

no. l, the work consisting of four short and linked sections—an
Andante which oscillates between a dream-like Viennese Ldndler and а
siciliano; a vigorous and, often, stormy Allegro molto; an Adagio
representing the emotional climax of the work, whose ghost-like,
sinister-sounding effects, after an initial section for orchestra alone, grow
increasingly agitated and menacing; and a Giocoso in rondo form which
completely belies the mood of the preceding section by its gay, unbut-
toned character. Schoenberg, in a note found in the sketches to the
Concerto, revealed something of its emotional content writing that ‘life
was so easy (Andante)—suddenly hatred broke out (Allegro molto)—
a grave situation was created (Adagio)—but life goes on (Копдо).

The String Trio, Op 45 (1946), was written after an almost fatal
illness and it reflects the various states of mind the composer ex-
perienced during this illness, seeming to spring from an acute awareness
of the no-man's-land dividing life from death; it belongs to his most
intense and most imaginative compositions opening up a world of vision
entirely sui generis. Anxiety, agony and existential sadness, prompted by
the utter solitude of man in extremis, mingle with a retrospect into a
happy past. The work falls into three main parts and two linking
episodes, of which the first and last parts convey a dark, oppressive and
eschatological mood while the middle part is in a serene vein. The tone
colour of what is essentially a monochrome medium shows a sur-
prisingly wide range achieved by the use of extreme registers and by
an exploitation of special effects, such as harmonics, tremolando,
pizzicato, ви! ponticello, and bowed and struck col legno; in addition,
there are sudden contrasts of extreme dynamics.

A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46, for speaker, men's chorus, and
orchestra (1947), the text of which is Schoenberg's own, is based on an
account of a young Jew who had escaped from the atrocious battle in
the Warsaw Ghetto in 1944. The composer, who had previously given
eloquent expression to his Judaism in Die Jakobsleiter, Moses und Aron
and Ше Kol Мае, here interprets the heroic fight of the Polish Jews
against their exterminators. The music has an extraordinarily disturbing
effect, mounting in tension until the climax is reached, in the last
pages, in the unison chorus singing the ancient Hebrew prayer, Shema
Ysrael, the only section of the work which is sung and which achieves
the effect of an emotional catharsis of remarkable power. The speaker,
whose part is notated, as in the Ode for Napoleon, on a single line
occupies four-fifths of the work. The style of the work is athematic
in the sense that, except for an initial four-note motive recurring
several times and an early anticipation of the theme of the Jewish
prayer (horn, bars 18-21), the music unfolds in a succession of fresh

THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL—ARNOLD SCHOENBERG 359

thematic material of a lapidary character. The fact, however, that these
various ideas derive from the basic row and its variants, is the measure
of the extent to which Schoenberg developed his principle of perpetual
variation.

Schoenberg's long preoccupation and increasing interest in the spirit
and the ideals of Judaism and, beyond that, in religious and philo-
sophical thought in general, began during the First World War, when
he conceived the unfinished oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter (1915-17). This
was followed in 1927 by a prose-play, Der Biblische Weg, the action of
which centres on a young Jew who wants to found a new theocratic
Israel in Africa. This play is to be taken as a preliminary study for the
three-act opera, Moses und Aron, in that two chief characters of the
latter work show traits which the hero of the play combines in his person.
The first ideas for what was to be Schoenberg's last work occurred to
him as early as 1923, but it was not until seven years later that he began
the composition, completing the first two acts (1930-2). Although
throughout the following period it was his firm intention to finish the
last act the opera remained incomplete, with a sketch of only eight bars'
length for the last act.

The libretto, which was Schoenberg's own and is complete, is largely
based on the Book of Exodus—the calling of Moses, the revelation on
Mount Sinai, the erection of the Golden Calf, and Moses's destruction of
the Tablets, while between the first and second acts fall the intervening
events of the massacre of the Egyptian armies, the exodus of the
Israelites, and their wandering in the desert. Schoenberg interpreted
these events in a manner which transcends their biblical significance
and reaches far into the sphere of pure spirituality. His fundamental
theme is the conflict between the characters of Moses and Aaron, a
conflict already hinted at in the Old Testament: pure thought versus
image, idea versus its verbal expression, the Kantian thing-in-itself
versus its appearance, the abstract versus the concrete, silence versus
communication, the spiritual versus the material, the numinous and
unimaginable versus the visible and imaginable, reason versus instinct
and emotion. In the centre of the drama stand Moses (modelled in
appearance on Michelangelo's statue), who is the mouthpiece of the
spirit and the law of the one God, and Aaron, the glib exponent and per-
verter of Moses's God-inspired message, who in his endeavour to bring
this message down to the understanding of the people resorts to miracles,
magic and demagogy. When Aaron asks: “Реор!е, chosen by the one
God, can you have what you cannot imagine?', Moses replies: *No
image can give you an image of the unimaginable'—an interchange
which early in the opera already defines the diametrically opposed views

360 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND QF EUROPE: 1918-1939

of the two characters. The second act ends with the apparent victory of
Aaron who promises the Israelites to lead them into a land of milk and
honey while Moses has lost confidence in his power to carry out God's
will, though he continues in his unshaken belief in God as the eternal,
infinite, and omnipresent noumenon free of all phenomenal attributes.
In the last act Moses challenges Aaron and accuses him of distorting
the true spirit of God. When at Moses's command he is set free, Aaron
falls dead—pure thought has won over the image. The ultimate message
of the opera is that real life can only be the life of the spirit, and that
real freedom can only be achieved in seeking a mystical union with
the Supreme Being.

Text, action and music form an indissoluble unity achieved by the
projection of an all-determining and all-embracing idea, and in this
respect Moses und Aron stands entirely apart from all other modern
operas. Its character oscillates between scenic oratorio, with static solo
and choral ensembles, and grand opera of a tense, dramatic kind,
reaching its apogee in the scene of the dance round the Golden Calf of
Act II—a barbaric orgy by turns ritual, sacrificial, sexual, and suicidal.
The people of Israel are given a most active role to play in the drama,
recalling the turba of the eighteenth-century Passion, and are shown as
torn between piety and hatred, lethargy and fanaticism, devotion and
fickleness. From the mass there emerges a group of a few representative
figures—the Priest (bass), who is shrewdly conservative and clings to the
old deities, and, opposed to him, three fanatic believers in Moses's one
God—a girl (soprano) and two young men (tenor and baritone). The
Supreme Being is symbolized, first, by six solo voices which open the
opera with four hovering tensionless chords on the syllable ‘О’ that
stand for the notion of God's eternity and infinity. When the six voices
begin to intone the text, an orchestral theme occurs representing the
notion of God as an articulate Will and Thought. These are the two
central musical ideas of the opera which undergo the most ingenious
transformation in the course of the work, the melodic and rhythmic
metamorphoses of the second theme in the dance round the Golden
Calf being particularly noteworthy. In addition, there is a third, vocal,
theme of primary importance, which occurs in the early part of Act I
and stands for God's promise to his chosen people:

THE SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL—ARNOLD SCHOENBERG 361

Ex. 162 à Sehr langsam

()
3 female (AG

voices `

3 male
voices

Die - ses Volk ist aus - ег - wählt, —

Nep)
Dll] трасата)

(Әс ж
uum а Ln cui
4-2 8 ра

das Volk. 3 deseinz-gen Gotts zu sein.

(This people is chosen to be the people of the one God.)

(Ex. 162 (1) opens with the first and last three notes of the original note-
row (Ex. 163) telescoped into chords; (ii) uses the notes 4 to 9 of the
row, and (iii) begins with the first six notes of the retrograde, followed
by the first six notes of the original). It is significant that the role of
Moses should be spoken (in strict musical rhythm) which is to be taken
as symbolic, speech serving as the vehicle for pure thought. Aaron,
however, is a lyrical tenor whose part is often marked by quasi-oriental
melismata, and the fact that his is a singing character has an equally
symbolic significance, for song is the expression of the emotional,
the instinctive and the sensuous—cardinal traits in Aaron's personality.
The entire opera is based on a single note-row:

362 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

An interesting feature of the general use of the row is the fact that the
further Aaron and the Israelites move away from Moses's idea of one
God, the more tenuous becomes the row in relation to the themes and
motives. The formal structure of the opera alternates between freely
treated sections of recitative and arioso and more or less ‘closed’ forms:
the opening scene, for instance, is a cantata and the dance round the
Golden Calf a symphony for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, con-
sisting of five movements. The texture is predominantly contrapuntal,
though polyphony is not made an end in itself but serves the dramatic
action. Imitations, stretti and canon abound: the choral Hymn of Act I
utilizes a cantus firmus; and the Interlude before Act II is a complex
double fugue, with the parts sung, whispered, and rhythmically spoken.
The orchestral forces employed are very large, with triple woodwind
(four clarinets), piano, celesta, two mandolines, and a wide selection of
percussion instruments whose most notable use occurs in the orgy of
Act II.

Moses und Aron must be accounted as Schoenberg's greatest achieve-
ment, for the width and breadth of its musical vision are monumental,
the stark grandeur of its conception is comparable with that of the Old
Testament itself, and it possesses a spiritual profundity whose full
import has not yet been compassed.*

ALBAN BERG AND ANTON WEBERN

Except for the general expressionist character of their music and the
adoption of the twelve-note method, Schoenberg's two most eminent
pupils have little in common. Anton Webern was an ‘intensive’, hermetic
composer who aimed at the utmost concentration and compression
of form and at texture of an atomistic nature. Berg, on the other hand,
was an 'extensive', expansive musician applying himself, like Schoenberg,
to larger forms and achieving, alone among the three composers, a
texture їп which the traditional equilibrium between homophony
and polyphonic writing is on the whole preserved. Webern's stylistic
development led to the most attenuated lyricism, with the emotive
impulse subtilized and sublimated almost out of existence, while Berg's
lyrical vein is ardent, nervous, sensuous, and feminine. Berg looks
backwards to the romantic past and, in spite of his whole hearted
adherence to the twelve-note method, he maintained a link with tonal
music by using note-rows with tonal implications and by availing
himself, more or less overtly, of the traditional means of sequence,
repetition and formal correspondence.

1 For a comprehensive discussion see Karl Н. Wörner, Gottesdienst und Magie (Heidel-
berg, 1959; English edition, London, 1963).

ALBAN BERG AND ANTON WEBERN 363

The period of Berg's creative career with which this chapter is con-
cerned opened with his first opera Wozzeck (1922). For a full apprecia-
tion of the reasons that prompted Berg to choose this subject (as also
that of Lulu) it is necessary to recall that he possessed a very marked
social conscience. His compassionate humanity made him most sensible
of the injustices in the political and social systems of Austria under the
Habsburg monarchy, and filled him with profound sympathy for the
underprivileged. It was this trait in his moral character that was in the
first place responsible for selecting the play Woyzeck by George Büchner
(1813-37) as material for his opera. The play, based on a real incident,
is a violent attack on German society and German political authority
before 1848. The fate of the psychopathic soldier Wozzeck, who mur-
ders his mistress and finally commits suicide, illustrates Büchner's theory
that the demoralization and dehumanization of the poor derives from
the cruel injustices of their social environment. The action of the play un-
folds in a series of twenty-seven self-contained, fragmentary, and loosely
connected scenes, not unlike a modern ‘screen story’. Out of these
Berg constructed a three-act libretto consisting of fifteen scenes, five
scenes to each act, and for reasons of dramatic economy and condensa-
tion omitted some of the original scenes and telescoped others into a
single one. The result is a tense, close-knit, and extremely well balanced
drama, with exposition (Act I), development (Act П) and catastrophe
(Act III). Each scene forms not only a dramatic unity but also a musical
unity, Berg employing 'closed' musical forms to achieve inner cohesion.
Thus the music of the first act, designed to establish Wozzeck's relation-
ship to the surrounding characters (the grotesque Captain, the crazy
Doctor who carries out scientific experiments on him, Wozzeck's mis-
tress Marie and so on) consists of five character pieces, Suite, Rhapsody,
Military March and Lullaby, Passacaglia, and Rondo. The musical struc-
ture of the second act is a five-movement symphony, while the third act is
built in the form of six ‘inventions’—inventions оп a theme, ona note, on
a rhythm, on a six-note chord, a key and on a perpetuo mobile movement.
Wozzeck is, for all its novel stylistic and technical features, essentially
in the line of the Wagnerian-Straussian music drama, exploring and
elucidating in masterly fashion the psychology of the various characters,
enhancing the nightmare unreality of the action with consummate in-
genuity and adding occasional naturalistic touches in the description
of external phenomena, such as the croaking of the frogs in the pond and
the ripples of water in the scene of Wozzeck's drowning. The general
technical style of the music is that of ‘free atonality', characteristic of
Schoenberg's works of the period between 1908 and 1912, but it is punc-
tuated by tonal, polytonal and whole-tone scale features, and for the

364 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

volkstümlich portions such as Andres's hunting song and Marie's
lullaby, Berg resorts to a symmetrical arrangement of melodic phrases
and to harmonies of superimposed thirds and fourths which stand in
marked contrast to the irregularly built periods and dissonant (diminished
and augmented) intervals of the major part of the music. In the last
orchestral Interlude (invention on a key), before scene 5, Act III, the
composer steps out of his role as psychological interpreter and reflects
the universal significance of Wozzeck's miserable life and death, in
music which is in an unambiguous D minor. (This piece derives partly
from a discarded symphony of 1912 which accounts for its strong
affinity with Mahler's late style.) On the other hand, serial technique is
foreshadowed in the passacaglia of scene 4, Act I, where a twelve-note
theme constitutes the basis of twenty-one variations, Berg using the
form of a passacaglia to symbolize the Doctor's fixed ideas, as indeed
the choice of all musical forms in this opera was determined by the
specific character of its individual scenes. Wozzeck employs for the first
time Schoenberg's device of the Sprechstimme.

Berg's second and last opera Lulu (1935) owes its origin to the
same compassion and sympathy for the social outcast as inspired
Wozzeck; but the action 1s chiefly concerned with the war between the
sexes and, besides, shows a considerable ambivalence in the psycho-
logical treatment of the chief character. Berg adapted the libretto from
the two plays, Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora, by Frank Wedekind
(1864-1918), which combine erotic satanism with mordant social satire.
Lulu, the heroine of both plays, is the personification of the untram-
melled sexual instinct; every type of man is attracted to her, every man
takes from her what she has to offer but in so doing they meet their own
destruction. While Lulu destroys, she is herself destroyed, gradually
sinking into the gutter, becoming a low prostitute and finally the victim
of a sexual murder. Though Wedekind takes a cynical view of woman's
sexual role, it is bourgeois society that he makes ultimately responsible
for its emergence in demonic form.

There is, however, a strong discrepancy between the Lulu of the text,
a cold, inhuman femme fatale, and the Lulu characterized in Berg's
music through which she is made to appear as a creature of flesh and
blood capable of great suffering. This has been considered a serious
dramatic flaw of the opera! which is certainly true in terms of the
libretto and Wedekind's plays. Yet it is precisely by his musical treat-
ment that Berg turns Lulu into an operatic heroine and engages the
spectator's sympathy for her.

In conflating the two plays into a three-act libretto Berg achieved the

! СГ. Donald Mitchell, “Тһе Character of Lulu,’ Music Review, ху (1954), p. 268.

ALBAN BERG AND ANTON WEBERN 365

same compression and unification of the dramatic action as in Wozzeck.
The attention is most strongly focused on Lulu and on the decisive
stages of her rise on the social ladder and her gradual downfall to a
common prostitute, but she hardly undergoes an inner, psychological
development in the accepted sense. In Wozzeck Berg counteracted the
loose, episodic sequence of its fifteen scenes by the imposition of self-
contained instrumental forms; in Lulu, on the other hand, a closer
dramatic nexus between its seven scenes is reflected іп the more ‘open’
on-running character of the music, in which the vocal element pre-
dominates. The title-role is for coloratura soprano, and the opera
contains a number of vocal forms such as aria and arioso, canzonetta,
cavatina, duet, sextet, and hymn; there are also long stretches of sung
recitative (almost completely absent from Wozzeck) and Sprechstimme.
Dr. Schoen and his son Alwa, however, are associated with a sonata
movement and a rondo respectively, their different psychology being
suggested by the different formal pattern chosen for each. In some
instances Berg also resorts to contrapuntal devices—a canon between
Lulu and the painter and chorale variations in the scene with the prince
(both in Act Т). As in Wozzeck, yet to a larger extent, use is made of
‘reminiscences’ and leitmotives, including particular harmonies, or-
chestral combinations, and sonorities which add to the portrayal of
characters and the changing atmosphere of the drama— chord clusters
on the piano for the athlete, pentatonic progressions for the Countess
Geschwitz, a nonet for woodwind for Schigolch, jazz for the theatre
ambience, and a solo violin playing one of Wedekind's own lute songs
for Casti Piani, which becomes the theme of the variations leading to
the final scene of the opera. Moreover, as in Wozzeck, some of the
music is based on a rhythmic ostinato, as in the monoritmica of the duet
between Dr. Schoen and the painter (scene 2, Act I), which opens with
the pattern:

Ex. 164

T Wa

This rhythm dominates the murder of Lulu at the hands of Jack the
Ripper in the last scene of the opera.

The scoring is for a large orchestra including a jazz band off-stage,
complete with saxophone, sousaphone, and banjo.

By the time he wrote Lulu Berg had completely assimilated the
dodecaphonic method, yet his handling of it was always highly indivi-

dual. The work is based on a principal note-row, but by means of most
25

366 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

ingenious permutations he derives four other series from it. The chief
series is:

By continuous repetition of this series and by selecting from it the
seventh note (not counting the first note) he arrived at the following
note-row which provides the theme of Alwa's rondo:

Ex. 166

Continuous notation of the original series in which the distance between
the selected notes increases and decreases at the ratio of, respectively,
one, two, and three notes, etc. (again not counting the first note),
yields this note-row from which emerges the energetic theme of Dr.
Schoen's sonata movement:

ALBAN BERG AND ANTON WEBERN 367

ПЕ ра
Доза Бес]

[xd
ара

У Ne
Sect, зуль 5 6 7 891011121 2
1

Berg left the orchestration of the final act unfinished but he had all
but completed the music in short score. According to George Perle,
who had access to the manuscript, there are no more than twenty-two
bars unfinished in the second scene of Act III, which is both musically
and dramatically complete, including a full orchestration of the three
fifths of scene 2 and about the same amount in scene 1. Perle found
that the sections not complete in the orchestration contain no new
material but are entirely based on material used in the previous two acts.
Berg's intention was that the clients of Lulu in the final sceneof theopera
should be played by the same performers who enact her victims in Acts I
and II — dramatic symbolism which is reinforced by the fact that the
music of these corresponding roles is identical, except for notational
differences. Moreover, in the Lulu Symphony, written to arouse interest
in the opera and consisting of five numbers—R ondo, Ostinato, Lied of
Lulu, Variations and Adagio—Berg had incorporated in its last two
movements extracts from the Interlude and scene 2 of Act III. Perle
argues with much justification that, despite Schoenberg's refusal in 1936
to complete the last act (for reasons entirely unconnected with the task in
hand), the instrumentation of what was left in short score should not
prove beyond the ability of a musician intimately conversant with Berg's
late style and his technical methods.

Berg's Chamber Concerto for piano, violin, and thirteen wind instru-
ments (1925) was written in celebration of Schoenberg’s fiftieth anniver-
sary and is the last of Berg's pre-dodecaphonic works. But the way in

“А Note оп Act III of Lulu’, Perspectives of New Music ii (1964), no. 2, p. 8. See also
Н. Е. Redlich, Alban Berg (Vienna, 1957), p. 216.

368 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

which part of the melodic material is derived from an initial motto is
very close to true twelve-note technique. The three different motives
of which the motto is formed represent the musical letters in the names
‘Arnold Schónberg', ‘Anton Webern’ and ‘Alban Berg’ and are the first
indication that the number ‘three’ and multiples of it will determine a
variety of formal, rhythmical and instrumental features of the work, in
conformity with Berg’s predilection for numerical correspondences.
Thus the Chamber Concerto consists of three linked movements, each
of which uses a different instrumental design: in the opening Theme and
Five Variations, the piano is the solo instrument, in the Adagio, the
violin, and in the Rondo ritmico, both instruments are combined
with the accompanying wind ensemble. The writing for the two solo
instruments displays a most brilliant exploitation of their expressive
and technical possibilities, the virtuoso element reaching the highest
pitch in the cadenza introduction for piano and violin to the last move-
ment; while the interplay between soloists and orchestra is immensely
varied and is ultimately governed by the concertante principle. Another
noteworthy feature of the work is that the first two movements are
brought together and amalgamated in the finale in a sonata rondo.
Though the Concerto is an abstract composition, Berg’s basic incentive
was a programmatic one of an autobiographical character, namely to
allow himself to be inspired by ‘friendship, love and a world of human
and spiritual references'.!

Berg's first essay in serial technique was his second setting of Theodor
Storm's poem, Schliesse mir die Augen beide (1925), which he published
together with his first setting of 1907, to indicate the distance he had
travelled from a purely tonal style to twelve-note music. In the following
Lyric Suite (1926) he applied the dodecaphonic method to several of its
six movements, using in the first movement the same row as in his second
Storm song, which was a so-called ‘all-interval’ series invented in 1924
by Berg's pupil, F. H. Klein. The second and fourth movements are in the
free atonal manner of Wozzeck and the Chamber Concerto. In contrast
to the Chamber Concerto, the Lyric Suite is loosely constructed and
avoids all symphonic elaboration. Its rise in dramatic intensity, seen
in the tempo indications and dynamic markings of the six successive
movements, was responsible for its being called a "latent opera'. With his
love for subtle thematic relationships and correspondences between
movements Berg employs a melodic fragment or motive from one move-
ment in another. Thus, the second subject of the opening Allegretto
(bars 23-25) returns in rhythmic and tempo variation in the first rondo
episode of the following Andante amoroso (bars 16—23):

! Dedicatory letter to Schoenberg (9 February 1925).

ALBAN BERG AND ANTON WEBERN 369

Fi +.
fa.
NP ANE

Similarly, the exposition of the fourth movement (Adagio appassionato)
is anticipated in the principal theme of the Trio estatico of the preceding
movement:

Ex. 169

Adagio appassionato Wiz ini
y | |

The ground plan of the suite is analogous to an open fan: starting with
the ‘neutral’ first movement (Allegretto gioviale), on one side are the
third and fifth movements which grow increasingly faster (Allegro mis-
terioso, Presto delirando), and on the other side are placed the second,
fourth, and sixth movements which become increasingly slower (Andante
amoroso, Adagio appassionato, Largo desolato), a procedure that serves
to heighten the effect of contrast between the successive movements.
Lyrical and dramatic elements thus alternate, enhancing each other and
reaching their respective climaxes in the Adagio appassionato and the
Presto delirando. A possible clue to the programmatic character of the
work are the quotations, in the fourth movement, of a vocal phrase from
the Lyrical Symphony (1923) of Alexander von Zemlinsky (to whom it is
dedicated), and of the Tristan motive in the finale, to say nothing of the
role played by Berg’s symbolic figure ‘23’ in the bar numbers of the
work.

Berg's last completed composition was the Violin Concerto (1935),
commissioned by the American violinist, Louis Krasner. At the start
he was uncertain as to its general character and form until the death
in April 1935 of the eighteen-year-old Manon Gropius, Alma Maria

370 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Mahler's daughter by her second marriage, when he decided to write it
as a kind of Requiem for the young girl, dedicating it to the ‘Memory of
an Angel’. In the event the concerto became Berg's own Requiem, since
he died in December 1935, aged fifty. On the emotional level it stands
as an eloquent testimony to the same compassion and humanity that
inspired Wozzeck and Lulu. The formal organization displays a wealth
of subtle correspondences between the four movements, and the
virtuosic element is fully developed, reaching its acme in the third
movement's accompanied cadenza for the solo violin. The tremendous
technical difficulties of the cadenza are wholly subservient to the
expressive ideas and are most ingeniously integrated with the demands
of a symphonic concerto. The work may be taken as a symphonic
poem, in the romantic tradition, whose ‘programme’ is the character of
Manon, her tragic death and ultimate transfiguration, her specific
symbol being the solo violin which accounts for the tender lyrical feeling
that informs the major portion of the solo part.

The Concerto is based on a note-row so designed as to permit the
employment of the violin's open strings (notes 1, 3, 5, 7). Furthermore,
this row contains strong tonal implications, gratifying Berg's frequently
declared wish to use serial technique without the listener being aware of
it. The last four notes of the row form a whole-tone progression
identical with the opening of the Bach chorale, Ex. 172(1), introduced in
the finale. Although this identity was not intentional, it yet constitutes a
poetic detail of the utmost emotional significance, implying that the
idea of ultimate deliverance is present in the work from its very
beginning:

Chorale motive

Ex. 170 я j А minor m aa, |
ВЕ а be Не

lo #= =

5 Ре 4 |
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

The work is in two parts each comprising two linked movements of
which the first two conjure up the image of the girl's character—gentle
and dreamy in the Andante, full of youthful vivacity and high spirits in
the Allegretto; the latter movement is a scherzo with two trios in the
second of which Berg introduces a Carinthian Lündler whose melody is
perfectly integrated with the serial music. The second part consists of
an Allegro and Adagio, the former being of a highly dramatic nature

ALBAN BERG AND ANTON WEBERN 371

but interspersed with reminiscences from the genial Allegretto, and, as
in Wozzeck, Lulu, and the Lyric Suite, Berg here resorts to a recurrent
(dotted) rhythmic pattern, suggestive of Manon's inexorable fate:

Ex. 171

PERS E

The mounting tension of the Allegro culminates in the catastrophe
and the way in which afterwards the composer negotiates the link to
the ensuing Adagio is a perfect example of his most subtle art of gradual
transition: the first nine notes of the tone-row are telescoped into an
orchestral chord while its three remaining notes are thrown up as a
melodic figure played by the violin and the orchestra in octaves; this
pattern is repeated five times with ever-lessening force creating the effect
of a gradual collapse: on each repetition the orchestral chord is reduced
by one note while at the same time the violin starts a whole-tone motive
growing from one note to four, which revealsitself asananticipation of the
opening phrase of the chorale, “Ев ist genug’, from Bach’s sixtieth church
cantata, O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort. This chorale, already boldly har-
monized by Bach in А major, Berg transposes a semitone up since his
finale is in the freely handled tonality of B flat:

Ex. 172

Es is ge - nug! Herr, wenn es Dir ge - fällt.
ТУ

372 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

(11) Es ist ge - nug! Herr,

Solo Vin.

Vla.

Bn.

(It is enough! Lord, if it please Thee.)

With the entry of the chorale Berg moves away from the torn, frag-
mentary texture of the preceding movement to tonally more anchored
writing—another symbol—and thus achieves a reconciliation between
the twelve-note method and traditional music. At the opening statement
the chorale melody is accompanied in the middle part by a partial canon
(Ех. 17201)), and, іп the bass, by the note-row (transposed to Е
sharp) whose last note E is sounded by the chorale. The whole passage is
an example of Berg's close textural thinking. In the orchestral segments of
the chorale Berg adheres strictly to Bach's original harmonization. There
follow two variations, both of which use an abbreviated version of the
chorale; the second variation is punctuated by pointed references to the
Carinthian Ldndler. The coda, ending like Mahler’s ‘Abschied’ in Das
Lied von der Erde with the chord of the added sixth, employs the chorale
melody shortened still further, and concludes with three repeats of the
sad final ‘Es ist genug!’.

Anton Webern's art is the complete antithesis of Berg’s, a multum in
parvo achieved by the utmost concentration of the musical thought and,

ALBAN BERG AND ANTON WEBERN 373

springing from it, of projection and technical means. Webern, in fact,
shows a striking affinity with certain contemporary painters, notably
with Paul Klee, in the atomistic nature of his style and the severity of his
vision, and he represents the most radical aspect of Schoenberg's art.
With him the disintegration of melody, harmony, rhythm, and tone
colour and the abolition of the difference between the horizontal and
the vertical are carried as far as was then thought possible. If Webern's
name is nowadays frequently juxtaposed with that of Debussy, it is
because Debussy may be said to have started this process of the dis-
sociation of the constituent elements of music.

Already Webern's early, pre-dodecaphonic works show features
characteristic of his mature style—an extremely sparse texture, a
pointillistic technique, the employment of silence as a principle of
musical construction, a marked predilection for canonic writing (the
most rigorous of the contrapuntal disciplines), and a prevalence of low
dynamics which at one time earned Webern the description ‘the com-
poser of the pianissimo espressivo'. If, in addition, these early composi-
tions were characterized by the utmost brevity of form and laconic
utterance, this was largely due to the fact that they were in the “тее
atonal’ style, with its lack of any means of large-scale structure. With
the adoption of Schoenberg's twelve-note method, which provided
this means, Webern was enabled to tackle more extensive forms, such
as sonata and variation; but the tendency to extreme compression
persisted, the thematic material remained aphoristic and the fabric of
his music tenuous in the extreme. In fact, Webern's essential manner
scarcely changed after adopting dodecaphonic technique, which was
to him a new tool for achieving structural organization and coherence
but affected the character of his music very little.

Webern first used serial technique in three vocal compositions—
Drei Geistliche Volkslieder, Op. 17, for voice, clarinet, bass clarinet, and
violin (1924), Drei Lieder, Op. 18, for voice, E flat clarinet, and guitar
(1925), and Zwei Lieder, Op. 19, for mixed chorus and five solo instru-
ments (1926). If the employment of the serial method is here rather
simple and even tentative, the texture on the other hand displays great
contrapuntal complexity, voice and instruments forming an extremely
close-knit ensemble. What is entirely novel, however, is the vocal treat-
ment, Webern translating the phonetic tension of the words into musical,
intervallic, tension; in other words, the mere verbal sound is trans-
formed into an element of musical structure, a device which was to be
raised to a principle in certain works of Boulez, Stockhausen, and
Nono. See for instance these two examples, the first from Drei Lieder,
Op. 18, no. 1, the second from Zwei Lieder, Op. 19, no. 1:

374 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Ex. 173
(i)

Sehr ruhig
Dn

есш ада сисе e Caere

Ncc I Рт ди се ipm m E
91;

Grüntder Ros - ma-rin, . grübt der Myr ten ыс und der

Na - gerl-stock blüht im Haus

(The rosemary flourishes, the myrtle flourishes, and the carnations flower in the
house.)

GÙ) Lebhaft, leicht und frei oo

sree eae ae `”

So früh - zei-ti-ge Nar-zis - sen ит hen

при | = Bs
t E 7
= W -
р па Без T 1
So früh - zei- ti-ge Nar -
LA гул 8.
Г | Ж ] L4 , |
WEE pie perm Е-Е 46-12
früh - - zei-ti - ge Nar - zis - sen Ый - hen
г 3 1
I Pa = 5 К Е2
ЕЕЕ аа - е НЕ,
E h [ ; -2
rei - hen-weis im Gar - ten

Wa lm A ae a Б.
- ü-ge Nar - zis - sen blü-hen rei - hen -
Г owed | 3
Са ВЛ а жетелі qe aa
Se с=ш= шз = =.

- zis-sen blü-hen rei -hen- weis im Саг - ten.

ALBAN BERG AND ANTON WEBERN 375

(So the early narcissi bloom in rows in the garden.)

The String Trio, op. 20 (1927), was Webern's first instrumental work in
serial technique and marks a departure from his previous free formal
writing in that it applies strict classical forms—rondo in the first move-
ment and sonata in the second of its two movements; the latter even
contains a double-bar and a repeat of the exposition, though the
recapitulation 1s extremely well camouflaged. In the Trio it is no longer
possible to discern with any clarity the individual movement of the
three parts; the ear perceives, instead, a fluidum in which the musical
ideas run freely from one voice to the other, grouping and regrouping,
merging and disintegrating, an effect which is enhanced by the wide
crossings of the parts, by the alternation of arco and pizzicato and by
the introduction of numerous rests apparently interrupting the flow of
the melodic line but actually used as part of its rhythmic structure
and as important as the tangible, audible sound itself. The Trio marks a
point of departure in Webern's style. In the Symphony, Op. 21, for nine
solo instruments (clarinet, bass clarinet, two horns, harp, two violins,
viola, and cello) (1928) the composer is seen to advance further in the
direction of what may be defined as the use of structure per se, as a
Kantian thing-in-itself, no longer serving conscious emotional expression
but generating 'feeling' as an incidental by-product; expression thus be-
comes a function of construction. Moreover, minute atom-like motives
in a seemingly kaleidoscopic arrangement take the place of extended
thematic configurations. This method, novel in both technical and
aesthetic respects, demonstrated the distance which increasingly separated
Webern from Schoenberg and Berg for both of whom the espressivo
remained a cardinal principle. Thus Webern unwittingly paved the way

376 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

for the 'geometrical' construction and electronic music of the next
generation of composers.

The note-row on which the Symphony is based shows a special feature:
like the series used by Berg for the opening movement of his Lyric Suite,
its second half represents the transposed cancrizans of the first half so
that the original row is identical with its retrograde:

Such structuring of the row by means of contrapuntal devices (see also
Exs. 177 and 179) was highly characteristic of Webern's serial thinking
which was in marked contrast to Berg's whose rows are more ‘normal’,
less close-knit and who was also intent on evoking quasi-tonal associa-
tions through their intervallic disposition. There is, moreover, a pro-
nounced difference between the two composers in the way they exploit
their series. While the ‘expansive’ Berg sought to enlarge the thematic
possibilities of a row by deriving from it new rows, as in several
movements of the Lyric Suite and in Lulu, the ‘thrifty’ Webern kept
strictly to the same row and even reduced its yield as a thematic reservoir
by constructing some of his series in segments which represent inversions
and/or retrogrades and/or transpositions of an initial motive of six, four,
or three notes. On the other hand, this contrapuntal compression results
in storing up kinetic energy in the row, an energy which is then dis-
charged in the composition. In Webern’s hand the series takes on a
dynamic quality. It is, incidentally, probable that his marked preoccupa-
tion with the ‘automatic’ devices of counterpoint, notably canon, was
nurtured by his intimate knowledge of Renaissance music and his
editorial work on Heinrich Isaac. Indeed, from Op. 21 onwards (if not
already from Op. 15) the technical models of vocal polyphony of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries begin to emerge in Webern's output
with increasing clarity leading to the masterly four-part chorale of his
Second Cantata, Op. 31.!

In constructing for the Symphony a series (Ex. 174) which has no
independent retrograde, Webern deprived himself of half of its thematic

1 See Walter Kolneder, Anton Webern. Einführung in Werk und Stil (Rodenkirchen, 1961;
English edition, 1968), p. 160; Eng. ed., p. 177.

ALBAN BERG AND ANTON WEBERN 37

possibilities; it was precisely for this reason—'the somewhat mathemati-
cal form of this series'—that Berg, in the Lyric Suite, altered the original
row for the third, fifth, and sixth movements. But Webern's deliberate
reduction of the thematic potential of his series is compensated for

of the first movement:

Ex. 175

т.
Bass Clar. LI. Е

== e
и а Ср te Е Red 9
к ЕЕ
-
z^. 7-

Нар CA

Ist and 2nd Yon

ie eee eed
=~

Violins Неа =. =.
Д Ел арланы нала | БЕН а ы иШ Е ил фиг РТА _ Е кар с шына um E]
Та далалы ыы = лы отша петлета

ЕШТЕНЕ АЕ x есы ee
ет EE |--- == —————
| pom um eee eee, — | = m = 1]

Vlc. = je д [5 mz (берей! ШЕ "БЕ [pa 1

[mpm A Ael eR poe D UC Uem eae Sa RE el r hee aia РНН

378 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

mag gi
ри ,
Ey. = ЕЕ

Г]
|

tional build—clear-cut and self-contained, and consisting of a proper
melody and an accompaniment. The seven variations and coda are all
of the same length (11 bars) but different in texture, rhythmic pattern
and orchestration. The fourth variation (mirror canon) represents the
centre piece of the movement after which the remaining variations run
backwards ‘зо that the whole movement is itself a double canon by retro-
grade тойоп” (Webern).

Like the Symphony, the Quartet, Op. 22, for violin, clarinet, tenor
saxophone, and piano (1930) is in two movements whose contrast
lies partly in their respective speeds and metres— Sehr mássig' in 3/8 and
‘Sehr schwungvoll’ in (mainly) 1/2 time—and partly in their texture. It
is the only work of Webern’s to show, in its particular combination and
the syncopated rhythm of the first movement, an influence of jazz. This

ALBAN BERG AND ANTON WEBERN 379

contrasts with Berg who employed jazz elements more extensively in the
concert aria Der Wein (1929) and in parts of Lulu. There is scarcely any
suggestion in it of a preferential treatment of one or the other instrument
— оп the contrary, they are all handled alike and their individual timbre
is merely exploited to throw a given part into relief. Thesecond movement,
more loosely woven than the first, provides a particularly good example
of Webern's predilection for microscopic motives of one, two and three
notes.

The Drei Gesänge, Ор. 23 (1934), and Drei Lieder, Op. 25 (1935), for
voice and piano are settings of Webern's favourite contemporary Austrian
poet, Hildegard Jone, and show that the vocal medium made the com-
poser to some extent relax the extreme application of his pointillist
method in favour of a more sustained, more markedly lyrical writing,
though the wide leaps and occasional rests in the voice part point to the
characteristic fingerprints of his instrumental style:

es fühlt ihn an dem dunk-len Wur -zel- reich, das an die To-ten rührt.

([The heart] feels [the spring] in the realm of dark roots which touches the dead.)

The two song cycles may be said to represent preliminary studies for the
Cantatas Opp. 29 and 31.

The Concerto, Op. 24 (1934), for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet,
trombone, violin, viola, and piano, written in celebration of Schoen-
berg's sixtieth birthday, was originally to have been a solo concerto
for piano and eight instruments. A trace of this initial scheme is to be
seen in the continuity of the piano part which is the cement holding
the other parts together. The series on which the work is based, shows a
still closer inner relationship than that of Op. 21. It is built of athree-note
motive, its retrograde inversion, its retrograde and its inversion which is
like a blueprint for the structure of the Concerto as a whole:

EST
о RI R I
pv pem e р И о [room тті

380 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

A comparison with the theme of Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra,
Op. 31 (Ex. 157(ii) ), in which each of the four serial forms is stated in
full (4 x 12 notes) shows the extent to which Webern carried the con-
centration of his serial thought. Writing about this row to Hildegarde
Јопе,! he compared it with the Latin tag:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

in which the third word is a palindrome and all the five words, read back-
wards and up and down, form the sentence 'Sower Arepo controls the
work’ and its inversion “Тһе work controls sower Arepo’. Just as Ex. 177
constitutes a micro-variation on the initial three-note motive, so does the
whole Concerto represent a macro-variation in three movements of that
motive. It is the most complete realization of Schoenberg's concept of
total unity. All musical happenings spring from a single germ-cell
producing an organism which Webern was fond of likening to Goethe's
Urpflanze or primeval plant—‘the root is . . . no different from the stalk,
the stalk no different from the leaf, the leaf no different from the flower:
variations of the same 14еа’.? The work is written in concertante style
which is the corollary of the use of nine solo instruments. The music is
thin and clear, extremely supple and sensitive. It was, significantly,
from the Concerto that the concept of total serialization, i.e. the serial
predetermination of all musical parameters, arose in the Germany of the
early 1950s.

The Piano Variations, Op. 27 (1936), is Webern’s only work for piano
solo. A paramount feature of it lies in the fact that the composer, in
contrast to the variation movement of his Symphony, here—not unlike
Stravinsky in the variations of his Concerto for Two Pianos—dispenses
with a theme so called and that the variations are not demarcated, but
merge into one another. Thus the first movement opens with what is
already a variation, namely a statement in canon of the basic row (right
hand) and its retrograde (left hand):

111 March 1931. See Webern, Briefe an Hildegard Jone und Josef Humplik, ed. Josef
Polnauer (Vienna, 1959; Eng. ed., Bryn Mawr, 1967), p. 17.

2 idem, Wege zur neuen Musik, ed. Willi Reich (Vienna, 1960; Eng. ed., Bryn Mawr,
1963), p. 56.

ALBAN BERG AND ANTON WEBERN 381

The second movement is similarly built and both movements recall, in
their pianistic lay-out, a Brahmsian intermezzo. In the third movement
of this ‘Sonatina’ (as Leibowitz calls it) Webern abandons contrapuntal
texture in favour of a markedly homophonic writing and comes nearest
to composing a ‘theme and variations’ in that he opens with the retro-
grade—the ‘theme’—after which are deployed as ‘variations’ the four
serial forms in various alternations and transpositions. Like the second
movement of the Symphony, Op. 27 does not constitute thematic
variations (in the sense practised by Beethoven and Brahms) but contra-
puntal variations in which the series and its derivatives are unrolled in
their totality either in combination (first two movements) or in succes-
sion (third movement). This treatment of the row as the sole generator of
musical sense has been criticized as ‘fetishism of the series'.! But this
leaves out of account such aspects as figuration, dynamics, register, and
accentuation which contribute to the musical sense—though in an
admittedly lesser degree than structure—and which are subjected to
‘real’ variation in Op. 27.

The String Quartet, Op. 29 (1938), shows Webern’s serial invention at
its most concentrated. The basic row here consists of three four-note
motives the first of which is formed of the musical letters in the name
‘Bach’, the second is its inversion or transposed retrograde and the third
its transposition. In addition, the second half of the series represents the
retrograde inversion of the first half:

1 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen, 1949), р. 74.
26

382 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND- OF EUROPE: 1918-1939
Ex. 179

о I-RT oT
p——————4À [rl
НЕ та

Mo —pe— uv eue aec pium p
Куз Se Gl See OF © Ис түт y 4€
far oO раз среде mm ИЖ
| ETE)

Ex. 179 is the ne plus ultra in close motivic relationships, relationships
which in idea are an identity, and it provides another illustration of the
resemblance of a typical Webern row to the palindrome and inversion in
the word play of the composer’s Latin tag. As in virtually every work of
his last period, strict canonic treatment prevails though there is some
relaxation of it in the third movement. Webern’s last instrumental com-
position was the Variations for orchestra, Op. 30 (1935), though its
particular combination—flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, horn, trum-
pet, trombone, bass tuba, drum, celesta, harp, and strings—it, with the
exception of the strings, used in a soloistic way and aspires to she nature
of chamber music; it excels in the most delicate hues and ranges over
a remarkably wide variety of tone colours. In Op. 30 the composer
returns to the more traditional form of theme and variations such as he
had used in the second movement of the Symphony. The theme is first
alluded to in the introduction or ‘Overture’ and is stated in full in the
first of the six variations which are clearly set off from one another by
double-bars. The work shows an ingenious fusion of variation with
sonata form.

Between the Drei Lieder, Op. 25, and the Piano Variations, Op. 27,
Webern wrote Das Augenlicht, Op. 26, for mixed chorus and orchestra
(1935), and he continued with his interest in the choral medium in the
Cantata no. 1, Op. 29, for soprano, mixed chorus, and orchestra (1940),
and the Cantata no. 2, Op. 31, for soprano and bass solo, mixed chorus,
and orchestra (1943), the latter being his last and largest work which he
compared to a Missa brevis. The texts of all three compositions are by
Hildegard Jone and are mystical in character. As in the song cycles,
Opp. 23 and 25, the vocal medium prompted him to apply his frag-
mentary style of writing with markedly less consistency and rigidity,
treating the voices in a more sustained manner and aiming at a warmer,
more lyrical mode of expression. Similarly, he returned again to a more
or less clear distinction between horizontal and vertical thinking, as is
shown in these examples from Das Augenlicht:

Ex. 180

әні

ALBAN BERG AND ANTON WEBERN 383
(i) Langsam
=
[em en 2 ЕН | ee ысыла се ете ИШИНИ LU [ux m]
= | 4 Im met Ez La |
po UM EE 1 ч
mit so - = ме Ster- nen als die
4
y O Dun ИЕ ma]
B. d. Мне тына) [LC ta
Е МЕн == рар
D 0
mit 50 - viel Ster - nen Яв.
() 5 ің
Rhee | [mens AGREE | — wie c Too mau mnt
фр LL
ЕЕ a a
> mit 30 = viel Ster- nen
ша е

H E саса
p——qeem— ____ р
оа sr] [DH es ee ae” |. |

die Nacht er – hel- len.

Ster-nen als die Nacht ег -

(With as many stars as lighten the night.)

ae са Е И
Ма ofS санниши

pum
=
[amc x]
=a
2a
[er

O Meer des Blik - kes mit der

384 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

Trà - nen - bran-dung!

(O sea of vision, with the surf of tears!)

While Op. 26 is in one continuous movement, the Cantata no. 1 consists
of three the second of which is for soprano solo. Its basic series is con-
structed like that of the String Quartet, with the same closeness of inner
motivic relationships. The first entry of the chorus in the opening move-
ment unfolds the four serial forms in a chordal texture, as indeed the
whole of this setting is of a homophonic character. To counterbalance
this, Webern conceived the final movement as a polyphonic piece,
a four-part double fugue in which subject and countersubject are related
to each other ‘like antecedent and consequent in a period’. There is a
wonderful flow and fluidity in the vocal counterpoint which avoids the
creation of any recognizable centre of gravity:

p e smart ERE ==
(ЕЕ GER ee [EBEN L {| Гў
LETTER cmd y ма (——Hn
р (ae ЧЕТ a
blas - se - ren Bil -der zum

die blas-se-ren Bil-der
— ——ÓÀÀ син
ӨТ ЖЕЛІГІ. —H p

Eu -—— ДИН. D^ cM A Rej

[1| eg ит Цифрово ре салата фа и е
PIDEN mo EE ее
„Ана са а] 08 шкын пе Б ae) eee ae

auch die blas-se-ren Bil -

ALBAN BERG AND ANTON WEBERN 385

— p cresc. 7

> =: SaaS SRM rv Cha ks 4 1a Sa (7 A ЕЕ
ЕТ БЕЙШЕ Лос ceci] Ee WIS 387] EE lcm
Hf? тыңнан ісі c IIS PLE III Iph
E VL аа с=с гради

m —————Ó poo nnd

Sie- gel des Spek-trums ge - schmol - zen.
f) >” Шел nud
IE FYE O —— — 1 E Ae ЗЕЕ ИЕ ПЕ E qoae]
ОЕ ЕТ = ра
zum Sie-gel des Spek-trums бе - schmol - еп.
| D cresc. F
ШЕР JEn i ep ess
HO-H—8-H—— зезе cree quoe — vu 0 —1—
zum Sie - gel des Spek-trums ge - schmol - zen.
р cres. етті DM. 1
63: ВЕ 9----39-- Ир м c — Tey Da pee Метал ==
- der zum Sie-gel des ЕЕ ge-schmol - теп.

(and also the fainter image is melted as seal of the spectrum.)

In this fugue, as also in the finale of Op. 31, the voice parts are—an
almost unique occurrence in Webern—doubled on the wind instruments.
Op. 31 is in six markedly contrasted movements, part of this contrast
lying in the choice of different vocal combinations for the individual
movements. The music suggests that Webern was entering upon a phase
of new simplicity. This is seen in the first place in the basic series which
15 a straightforward one, without any contrapuntal devices in its struc-
ture. Furthermore, the second, fourth, and sixth movements show a
markedly lesser degree of textural density and the interplay between
voices and instruments is almost completely free of complexities. Indeed,
in the last movement there is no interplay at all, Webern doubling the
four choral parts on the wind. The vocal score gives the impression
that the chorus is unaccompanied, with the instruments cued in for
use in rehearsal only. With its long note-values, though the tempo is
very fluid, and the ‘mensural’ changes of the metre (2/2, 3/2 and 4/2),
this movement recalls music by Heinrich Isaac whose Choralis Con-
stantinus had been the subject of Webern's doctoral thesis in 1906. To
all intents and purposes the finale of this Cantata is a chorale in the
form of a four-part canon whose three verses are to be sung to the same
‘tune’. Who could have foreseen that Webern would ultimately arrive
at a strophic setting of a text?

What is the historical significance of the serial Webern? It is in the first
place to be found in the almost total replacement of the romantic idea of
music as a vehicle for emotional expression (Schoenberg and Berg) by

386 MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

the idea of music as pure sound construction, seen in his preoccupation
with the contrapuntal structuring of a row and with the constructive
quality of a single note and single interval! which are subjected to per-
реша! variations in intensity, dynamics, accentuation and tone colour.
With Webern the dissociation of melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre
is carried to its utmost limits, the corollary of which was the extreme
fragmentation of texture. Moreover, Schoenberg's concept of the
unity of the musical space finds in its most complete realization in
Webern's abolition of the distinction between horizontal and vertical
thinking, for his contrapuntal writing can also be interpreted as the linear
projection of harmonies built from the series. Lastly, Webern reduced
the means by which he exteriorized his inner vision to their essential
minimum and thus achieved the highest possible degree of technical
economy. In short, he drew the most radical, most uncompromising
conclusions from Schoenberg's twelve-note method of composition and
in so doing opened up a new vista for the succeeding generation of musi-
cians who saw it in the serial predetermination of the totality of musical
components, including pitch sequence, rhythm, duration, intensity, and
method of playing. The real father-figure of the New Music of the post-
Second-War period is not Schoenberg but Webern.

КИ по кол, EUROPEAN
MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

By PETER EVANS

IN 1933 Anton Webern described the preceding quarter of a century's
musical developments as “ап advance greater than has ever taken place
before in the history of music'.! He was reviewing the achievement of
twelve-note serial practice as the opening up of territory sought ever
since music had been written, and he looked forward with confidence
to the further exploration of this new world of musical order. So
intrepid a reading of history demanded a visionary reading of the future,
since historical significances are commonly assessed by what in fact
achieves generally recognized validity; and the signs of Webern's
times provided few obvious clues to a less prejudiced observer. Over
three decades later we need less courage to point to significances in that
period (and nowhere more certainly than in Webern's work) for these
emerge in investigating our own, but of this itself little more than a
record can yet be attempted. A chapter which deals with what is still
present cannot indulge so freely the historian's privilege of viewing in
perspective the store of knowledge: its concern must simply be with what
has occupied more than parochial attention.

A simple chronological subdivision of the period 1940-60 would
underline all the radical innovations in musical technique which
distinguish its second decade; but this would tend unduly to obscure the
continued activity of a generation already formed in earlier methods.
A broad division may therefore be made between composers who,
already mature before the war, lived and worked throughout this
period or who achieved belated prominence during it (thus the last
works of pioneers like Schoenberg, Webern, and Bartók have been
discussed in a previous chapter, while Skalkottas and Valen appear
here), and those of the generation which completed its apprenticeship
after the war.

Of the century's earlier pioneers, Stravinsky and Hindemith demand
further consideration, the former summing up in his own development

! Der Weg zur neuen Musik, ed. Willi Reich (Vienna, 1960), p. 17.

388 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

the momentous swing in the orientation of European music which may
yet justify Webern's confidence. While note must also be taken of later
works (for example, of Hindemith) which do not reflect a comparable
change in a composer's practice, one phenomenon may be found to
outweigh all others in a general survey of the middle generation—the
emergence of serial method as no mere shibboleth, but as an attitude to
musical material that might stimulate atrophied thought processes
without taking toll of individuality. Political boycotting in Germany,
and blankly uncomprehending or even virulently hostile notice else-
where, had succeeded in bringing both the music and the ideas of
Schoenberg and his pupils into almost general disrepute. Even when
their music began to find more admirers, especially among composers,
able to form judgements from the scores when performances were still
rare, a variety of new critical positions was taken up: the works must
succeed in spite of the underlying theories, or the theories could have
no relevance to composers not reared in Schoenberg's Viennese en-
vironment. Yet the end of the war brought a new wave of interest in
serialism that affected in varying degree composers of many countries
and already versed in other styles. In Germany and Austria hostility to
twelve-note music was identified with Nazi sympathies and this political
circumstance gave the movement a powerful new impulse, seen most
clearly in the policy of German radio stations.

These other styles, many of them related by some common factor of
neo-classicism, were briefly sampled by a generation that had never
known the allure they had once presented. Impatient of traditions that
themselves involved historical counterfeiting in varying degrees, this
new generation sought no more guidance from the past than would lead
it towards an independent future The new serialism was founded on
the one hand in Schoenberg's principle of regulation, as applied by
Webern in his break with conventional conceptions of musical space
and motion; and on the other in Messiaen's introduction to the
European art of an exotic conception of musical time.

In 1940 the possibility of such a revival of serialism seemed remote;
indeed it was hard to conceive of any artistic movement that could unite
the talent of a continent in a common purpose. Few of the pre-eminent
creative figures were able to remain in Europe, and with their emigration
the focus of attention moved to America. It must be left to another
chapter to chart the influences brought to bear on American music by
the influx of so many of Europe's dominating composers; of reciprocal
influences there are few signs. (Bartók's simplification of idiom had
begun before he left Europe, though the diatonic limpidity of the
Third Piano Concerto's slow movement may owe something to what

IGOR STRAVINSKY AND THE RAPPROCHEMENT 389

Stravinsky has called the ‘Appalachian’ style, and another Eastern
European, Martinu, reflects this more directly in some of his sym-
phonies.) Whether composers died in America, like Schoenberg and
Bartók; chose to settle there, like Stravinsky and, much earlier, Varèse;
or subsequently returned to Europe like Hindemith, their work con-
tributes essentially to a unique European heritage.

IGOR STRAVINSKY AND THE RAPPROCHEMENT

It is clear enough that Stravinsky's changed environment hardly
affected his idiosyncratic stylistic progress; indeed we may be tempted to
think that his penetrating assessment of the European avant-garde
and his characteristic opportunism with regard to its findings were
helped by the perspective of distance. America did however affect his
choice of media, as in his settings of English and his use of the jazz band
(Ebony Concerto, 1945). And it is to the American reverence for the full
orchestral symphony as the centre-piece of musical activity that we owe
Stravinsky's two essays in this form.! Together with the Two-Piano
Sonata (1943-4) and the Concerto in D for string orchestra (1946) they
are stages in a last review of traditional form and texture that culminated
in The Rake’s Progress.

The tag *neo-classical is unavoidably prominent in any documenta-
tion of Stravinsky's career, yet beyond suggesting his dependence on
initial stimulus from other music, it brings us little nearer an under-
standing of a crucial aspect of his activity. His symphonies demand not
only the background of specific tradition, but a general historical
awareness as extensive as his own. In both first movements the combina-
tion of simple repeated-quaver accompaniments and a persuasive
motivic technique strikes a new balance between static and dynamic
elements, and the use of classical progression divorced from classical
timing produces an entirely personal articulation. Nominally recogniz-
ing the progressive schemes of sonata practice, the Symphony in C
(1940), with brilliant irony, recaptures the rooted quality that charac-
terizes so much Stravinsky. Its second group turns to the dominant, but
adds a further section in the subdominant; the moral of this contradic-
tion is rightly drawn by a move back to the tonic that renders the
development merely ornamental. Stravinsky observes the traditional
transposition of second group material on its (reversed) restatement,
yet this in fact reinforces even more strongly the tonic.

Exposition —B1 on dominant of V; B2 in IV (to I)
Restatement—B2 in I (to V); ВІ on dominant of I

1 See Stravinsky's comments on the American commissioned symphony in Stravinsky
and Craft, Memories and Commentaries (London, 1960), pp. 92-93.

390 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

This simultaneous acknowledgement and denial of classical precedent is
stressed by hints of tonal instability in the first subject. By constant use
of the non-committal third E-G in ambiguous harmony (avoidance of
the root and use of the seventh B), Stravinsky is able to suggest E
minor as an alternative meaning to the professed C major, even in the
final bars of the movement, and it is on this delicate point that the
apparently garrulous subject is able to hover for so long without
tedium.

Ex. 182
(Moderato alla breve)

S
прш m "idm —

(Fls. tacent)

IGOR STRAVINSKY AND THE RAPPROCHEMENT 391

The Symphony in Three Movements (1945) abandons this feline subtlety
for harmony locked so tightly in contradiction as to provoke violent
rhythmic convulsion; here the tonal plan of classical form no longer has
even ironic relevance, yet the functions of development and truncated
restatement are made far more vital. The material is powerful and
varied, but only in the opening of the Andante is there that vein of
affectionate reminiscence which сап be traced throughout The Rake's
Progress (1948-51). Whereas the symphony seeks to pursue the conse-
quences of its pandiatonic language against a background of classical
procedure, the opera places a series of classical statements in the fore-
ground and deftly transfers them into the newer idiom. Thus, it might
seem a more frivolous undertaking or, in the light of Stravinsky’s
subsequent work, a mere valedictory divertissement. Even though such
a work would perhaps be a fitting monument to a public which has
avidly cultivated a narrow tract of music’s past to the detriment of the
present, the number of specific models it brings to mind (with Don
Giovanni prominent in Auden and Kallmann’s moral tailpiece, and
Cosi in the musical textures) would appear calculated impudence if
Stravinsky carried us no further than the point of recognition. But his
‘rare form of kleptomania'! is not a sentimental evocation doing duty
for a personal expressive code. As a composer he does not discover the
crux of what is to be expressed through any predetermined ideas, but
rather discovers parallels of feeling in the course of working what may
be an outmoded musical convention. The stylistic deviations prompted
by these parallels are, in fact, the quintessential Stravinsky, so that it is
irrelevant that the background of expressive convention may change
from Bellini’s to Mozart’s; and the artificiality of the process is particu-
larly appropriate to the ‘framing’ which has always characterized opera
buffa.

Stravinsky’s word-setting provides a simpler duality. Its apparently
false accents are merely visual, for the vocal lines themselves move
naturally and often show a fidelity to the inflexions of speech remarkable
in one who came so late to the English language. Set against a fixed
metrical accompaniment, they constantly diverge and converge in an
accent-scheme whose freedom effaces what might have been stilted in
the stylistic pastiche. The re-timing of conventional progressions further
loosens the movement, but rarely leads to any disturbance of tonal
unity within each set piece.*

1 Stravinsky and Craft, op. cit., p. 110.
2 See Robert Craft, ‘Reflections on The Rake's Progress’, The Score, ix (September, 1954),
p. 24, for a study of the set-piece forms.

392 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Ex. 183
(d= 60)

IGOR STRAVINSKY AND THE RAPPROCHEMENT 393

In Ex. 183 the vocal line finds its own accent-scheme from the words.
The initial ambiguity of B flat and G minor persists in similar minor
keys that rest on first inversions so as often to suggest majors. Having
exploited the strangely exalted pathos of this device, Stravinsky finally
reverts to the B flat pedal for a genuine major that has gained a trans-
figured clarity.

In his work on this opera, Stravinsky was assisted by a young
American, Robert Craft,! widely versed in contemporary music, whose
enthusiasms may have shortened the composer's route to serial proce-
dure, charted with characteristic precision in the works that followed.
Only a wisdom after the event notes signs of such a departure, incon-
ceivable at the time, in some music of the forties: in the spare canon-by-
inversion of the Two-Piano Sonata, or in the octave transpositions of
the ten-note row (including repetitions) in the first Interlude of Orpheus
(1947). The significance of the Mass (1948), one of Stravinsky's most
accomplished works, is easier to sense than to define. In setting for
liturgical use the text which, above all others, should resist the limiting
effect of idiomatic cliché, he dispenses with his customary stimulus of
familiar idiom. Despite broad parallels with plainsong and medieval
polyphony, and incongruous echoes of his earlier work (Benedictus, cf.
Oedipus), this score creates the impression of a fresh approach to simple
elements of sound, a contemplation of chords and conjunct lines
purged of both the furious rhythmic unrest of the Rite period and the
automatic propulsion of pseudo-classical metre. From this attitude to
Webern's contemplation of the interval and of silence may still be a
long step, but it is not into an utterly foreign land.

Yet of the fundamental propositions of serialism there is no sign in

1 See Robert Craft, “А Personal Preface', Тһе Score, xx (June, 1957), p. 7.

394 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

the Mass, and little of contrapuntal manipulation. The Cantata (1952)
activates equally simple sounds by a ritual dance metre in the *Lyke-
Wake Dirge' verses; but the first Ricercar introduces strictly inverted
canon, and the second interlocks in one line the four serial forms of a
sinuous eleven-note phrase (tonal, and with many repetitions), then
works out numerous possibilities of their canonic relationship.! Though
he still uses free parts, Stravinsky is clearly able to order the total sound
of an intricate polyphony by his choice of transposition and rhythmic
shape. But instead of the serialist’s dissolution of the row into the
stream of the music, he deliberately stresses its melodic constriction
and draws from this an ecstasy that reflects the text. In returning to
instrumental textures with the Septet (1953), Stravinsky does not resist
the lure of some well tried formulas in the sonata first movement;
only the persistence of the opening motive and the complexity of the
fugal development reveal his new concern for a basic unity of material.
Тһе other two movements share one sixteen-note series, still tonal
though now exploiting a wide range of octave transpositions. As
ground in the passacaglia it often supports an upper texture woven
entirely of the same thread. The binary fugal gigue, inverted in the
second half, repeats both expositions in double fugue: the simultaneous
subjects deliver the identical series in different note-values. That such
mastery of serial resource could be won two years after The Rake’s
Progress is remarkable enough; but that the Septet should also retain
Stravinsky’s unique sonority gave evidence that his rapprochement with
serialism was no irresponsible gamble with fashion, but had a validity
rich in consequences for music other than his own.

A variety of techniques, notably those of Bartók and Hindemith, have
employed the twelve-note repertory as an enriched means of demons-
trating relationships to centres of attraction. But the traditional rela-
tionships depended on scales of uneven steps, and their retention, in
however elaborate a form, was inconsistent with a fundamental material
of undifferentiated semitonal steps (and in neither Bartók nor Hinde-
mith is this really implicit). While Schoenberg’s recognition of the
anomaly encouraged his adoption of the serial relations, Stravinsky
chose to retain the old diatonic relations, but frequently to explore them
in more than one orbit at a time. The critical hypothesis which treats
the two men as poles in the music of their time? is supported by the
results of these procedures. Whereas Schoenberg’s endless revolution of
the chromatic total produced a multiplicity of pseudo-leading-notes and

1See Colin Mason, ‘Serial Procedures in the Ricercar П of Stravinsky’s Cantata’,

Tempo, 61-2 (1962), p. 6.
2 See Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen, 1948), and Francis Burt, ‘An

Antithesis’, The Score, xviii and xix (1956-7).

IGOR STRAVINSKY AND THE RAPPROCHEMENT 395

therefore a sense of constant forward movement, Stravinsky's super-
imposed tonal pulls were often so mutually contradictory as to lead to
the suppression of classical flow and to construction from disjunct
and rhythmically autonomous segments. Despite relaxations from the
most extreme positions—Schoenberg's occasional use of petrified
rhythm! as well as his tonal tendencies; Stravinsky's use of “пео-
classical’ metrical accompaniment patterns—the search for common
ground was not actively encouraged while both men were alive.

In the pre-war years, the political climate of Germany and the
cultural climate of Europe in general rejected Schoenberg’s school, while
an elegant imitation of the more superficial features of Stravinsky’s
style was fashionable. When the stresses of war-time life led to a
widespread demand for release in artistic experience, audiences of
limited musical background found satisfaction in the classical orchestral
repertoire or such modern music as could be most easily related to it.
In these years, serial music was unknown to the public and confidently
written off by the critics. But, as Dallapiccola has pointed out, *other
systems, having once fallen into disuse, have never reappeared, whereas
this one did reappear, and during the war years at that, in isolation and
in all countries independently'.? And a post-war generation of composers
concluded almost unanimously that the renewal they sought would set
out from serial principle, without necessarily retaining Schoenberg's
own fundamentally traditional rhetoric. Stravinsky's observation of this
phenomenon must have led то a profound analysis of the further
potentialities of his creative methods, and only the most cynical can fail
to see a decision of great moment and still greater courage in his
adoption of serial method after Schoenberg's death. In fact Stravinsky
brought at least as much to serialism as he borrowed. His curiously
oblique, though by no means careless recognition of tonal meanings, in
dodecaphony as in his earlier music, sounds an entirely different note
from Berg's yearning for tonal fulfilment. But even if the anti-tonal
implications of some of his works had been fully realized,? his typical
disjunct articulation and hypersensitive disposition of translucent
sonorities would have preserved the vividly personal character of his
music. The union of one of the most original creative minds and of the
most constructive thought in the music of this century led to some of
Stravinsky's most remarkable achievements; it also demonstrated a
catholic basis for the technique of composition, and this was to

1 As Hans Keller has pointed out in the String Trio: see Тйе Score, xx (June, 1957), p. 20.

2 Luigi Dallapiccola, “Оп Ше Twelve-note Road', Music Survey, iv (1951), p. 331.

3 Stravinsky and Craft, Memories and Commentaries, р. 107, and see Ех. 187 from
Movements.

396 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

be welcomed in circumstances where bigoted partisanship had seemed
the only alternative to despair.

Stravinsky's own progress to serialism was refreshingly free of such
bigotry.! Far from accepting without examination the ultimate implica-
tions of constructive principles essayed in the Septet, he next explored
the valuable tension set up between these principles and the promptings
of a text. A simple example is provided in the first of the Shakespeare
Songs (1953) where *Musick to heare' is symbolized by revolutions of a
C major scale fragment, absorbed through octave transpositions,
instrumentation, and rhythmic irregularity into a texture elsewhere of
the strictest serial observance. The row may be regarded as of twelve
notes but is a network of inner relationships (see Ex. 184(i) ), and the
use of the four-note nucleus y as the basic compositional element is an
obvious pointer to Stravinsky's study of Webern during these transi-
tional years.

Ex. 184
е X retro
(i) та gel; mX retro- b —
| = Е = пи x ITO

уе уіпу.——4 Та vg

ев ЖЕ
К iuge Е

Flute ток — = ЕРИ ае сұт АЕС y fel 5
2-03 DEN

Clarinet 2-4 Е

(sounding FX

р та marc.

! Milton Babbitt, ‘Remarks on the recent Stravinsky’, Perspectives of New Music ii (2)
(1964), p. 35, covers the period from the Cantata to Movements.

IGOR STRAVINSKY AND THE RAPPROCHEMENT 397

subito P

In his next work, Jn Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954), the technical
restriction against which a powerful expressive urge is pitted is a single
series of five notes, retained throughout every strand of the song and of
its surrounding dirge-canons (for quartets of trombones and strings).
Though the concentration of such a tour de force is partially eased by
Stravinsky's ritornello practice, the emotional concentration (the
‘fierce tears’ of Thomas's poem) is intensified; just as in earlier works,
the crux of the feeling is discovered in the working-out of the musical
material.

Webern wrote ambitiously of a large-scale work, to last half an hour
even in its reduced form,! yet his loving research into such small musical
cells never produced, even with the consummate mastery of his last
period, a work exceeding half that time. So it is not surprising that
Stravinsky abandoned the introspective methods of these miniatures in
undertaking two larger compositions, the Canticum Sacrum (1955) and
Agon (Contest) (1954—7). Not only did he enlarge the scale of his serial
working by adopting at last the full twelve-note repertory, but in the very
moment of recognizing resources associated with atonality, he chose
also to reinvigorate his old pandiatonic style. The chronology of Ароп?
partly accounts for the juxtaposition, but in the Canticum the stylistic
compatibility is deliberately and forcefully demonstrated:? the row
manipulation of the middle movements yields clear tonal meanings,
while the outer movements, at times even mono-modal, are united by
one of the devices of serialism, strict retrogression. This crucial docu-
ment in Stravinsky's development characteristically asserts present
significance against a penetrating sense of the past. Conceived in honour

1 Ір letters to Willi Reich concerning the Second Cantata, Ор. 31; quoted in Der Weg
zur neuen Musik (Vienna, 1960), pp. 69 and 72.

2 Roman Vlad, Strawinsky (Turin, 1958; Eng. ed., London, 1960), p. 199; Eric Walter
White, Stravinsky, the Composer and his Works (London, 1966), p. 450.

3 Robert Craft, “А Concert for Saint Mark’, The Score, xviii (1956), p. 35; and Roberto
Gerhard, *Twelve-note technique in Stravinsky’, The Score, xx (1957), p. 38.

398 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

of Venice's patron, Saint Mark, it draws on instrumental timbres that
recall the Gabrielis, on ricercare and cantus firmus technique and on
plainsong affinities hidden in its two rows. Conversely, the serial
technique marks a notable step forward by harmonic compressions and
linear exchanges, while a new polyrhythmic independence and a control
of wide vocal intervals underline the debt to Webern.

Perhaps only in setting a sacred text can a spiritual unity be achieved
that suspends disbelief in an ageless music. Certainly the piquant
archaisms of Agon are intended to be savoured as such. Even more
pointedly than the French overture which opened Apollon, these
abstract dance movements re-create the stylizations of seventeenth-
century ballet de cour without recourse to direct stylistic appropriation.
Here the transition from the diatonic to the serial, achieved in slower
stages yet in fact progressing further than in the Canticum, makes a
fascinating summary of Stravinsky’s serial artifice and its consequences
for his concept of texture. The listener’s impression is unified by the
extreme originality of instrumental colour; sounds as arresting as the
Prelude’s flutes with double-bass harmonics over harp and timpani
arpeggios, or the canonic opposition of acid mandoline and cloying
harp in the Gaillarde, testify to an undimmed aural imagination, as
empirical an arbiter in Stravinsky’s serial as in his earlier music.

It is no involuntary surrender to the mechanics of a system, therefore,
that gives to Stravinsky’s first work on a single twelve-note row, Threni
(Lamentations) (1957-58), its dark labyrinthine sound. A composer may
choose to stress the obsessive character of strict row derivation,! and
the smouldering gloom of Jeremiah’s Lamentations is uncannily lit up
in this way. Even the difficulty of the vocal writing, weaving tortuous
lines without instrumental support, contributes a sense of strain which
is an important part of Stravinsky’s conception. (If an ability to pitch
such lines precisely becomes general—and there are clear signs that this
will happen—something will disappear from this work comparable
perhaps to the tension lost in the change from the old natural horn to
the modern instrument.) The Hebrew initial letters, retained from the
original verse scheme in the Vulgate text, provide an obvious means of
musical articulation but also an opportunity for a more detached, orna-
mental exercise of serial art. In the first movement, and ‘Querimonia’
section of the second, Stravinsky is content to let these beautiful sounds
stand as entities (see Ex. 185(i)) or serially linked repetitions (Ex. 185 (1):
but in ‘Sensus spei", the central and most expansive section of the whole
work, the eight Hebrew letters, containing twelve syllables, are equated

! Analytical studies by Hansjórg Pauli, Tempo, xlix (1958), p. 16, and by John S. Weiss-
mann, The Musical Quarterly, xlv (1959), p. 104.

IGOR STRAVINSKY AND THE RAPPROCHEMENT 399

with the twelve notes, and these are sustained in turn as instrumental
single or double pedals throughout the succeeding verses. The series
is thus made a super-ordering such as we shall note in the music of
the post-war generation, though one which is no secret formula but

Ex. 185

Basic Set

Strings
(pizz.)

400 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

sun са)
Ip 4A
. WS

E - go vir vi-dens

Retro „© ңә:
transposed: 3—12; 1 4-2

au -
Trombones P

BASS MONODY
continues, then—

Trombones

the dominating sounding element. Tonal meanings are created in
innumerable ways in Threni:+ as well as the network of relations within
the row (see Ex. 185), its spanning of a minor third sets up a special
relation between transposed forms at the minor third above and below

1 Vlad, ор. cit., Eng. ed., p. 215; also Stravinsky and Craft, Memories and Commentaries,
p. 107.

IGOR STRAVINSKY AND THE RAPPROCHEMENT 401

and at the tritone. ‘Querimonia’ explores the rearrangement of row
segments (e.g. 5-124-4—1; 3-1--12-4) and ‘Solacium’ reveals the simple
intervals and scalic effect of two-note groupings preparing the way for
genuine permutation technique (e.g. 12-10-8-6-4-2-1-3-5-7-9-11).
The orchestral texture is sparse but incisive, and its conversion to
Stravinskyan sonority of the pointilliste manner (Ex. 186) clearly fore-
shadows the next major work.

Even the cryptic and ambiguous title, Movements for piano and
orchestra (1958-9), suggests some affinity with works like Stockhausen’s
Gruppen and Zeitmasse—though the title had already been used for the
orthodox twelve-note textures of Fortner (cf. p. 413), Gilbert Amy’s
work is a more likely precedent for it—and Stravinsky’s interest in the
avant-garde is documented in the conversation volumes.! Its serial

Ex. 186
Fl.
Ob.
Cor. А
Cit.
Alto Clt.
Bass Cit,
^ pocosf p sub.
Horn ку == ај ЕЕЕ
orns ЦД —2 m ME
sord. 7 соға, ее В
тат тъ Р осо D p a

y 3
г E
Е ==

Piano poco

and Piano й тр
Нагр =
а, X 2 +
[nce Зевин ees |

ле | fg =
үз =;

Chorus parlando sotto voce zi i | | | | | 7 | | |

(tutti) Re-cor-da-re Do-mi-ne quid ac -ci-

1 Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations, pp. 125-33, and Memories, pp. 118-26.

402 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

f) (Alo) in - tu - e - (re)
==
ms Si в +.

ГТ i
-de-rit no-bis

(Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us.)

usages are intricate, often permuting the row, two hexachords of
mirrored constitution. But its most significant advances towards terri-
tory pioneered by a far younger generation are in complexity and
diversity of rhythmic shape (counterpointing freely the ‘irrational’
quintuple and septuple groupings; see Ex. 187) and in the avoidance of
crystallized thematic material, though not of clear quasi-restatement
correspondences. Chord formation, at the opposite extreme to wide-
ranging monody in a constantly shifting textural balance remains
peculiarly Stravinskyan, as does the orchestral sonority, despite a still
more fragmented technique than in the previous works; and the scheme
of dynamics has nothing to do with statistical distribution.

PAUL HINDEMITH AND THE GERMAN MIDDLE GENERATION
Stravinsky's cosmopolitan nature found America, like his other earlier
refuges, a background to creative activity that could be accepted, even if it
was with a kindly scepticism. It is typical of Hindemith that, while in
America (1940—53) he associated himself enthusiastically with its musical

PAUL HINDEMITH—GERMAN MIDDLE GENERATION 403
Ex. 187

Piano

EE
Cit.
Bass СИ
Tone.
Celesta
Harp
Piano
л == = == a le ЄЗ
ЕН
А ре 5----
5 $3 КЫ ск rer) eel
Bas Ct. y H— — Я 18-3 59-6318
SZO Lt) f mS
c marc.

Ты. ЕУ

= mas шегере ласа
ee [8 =:

404 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

activities and pedagogy, notably as a professor at Yale, he was eventually
drawn back to a European environment. Some direct offshoots of his
American years were the theoretical works! (developing skills on a
lower level than in the Unterweisung), his high-minded сгедо,? and the
English settings, especially of the Whitman Requiem,? a moving tribute
to the dead of whatever nationality. The generally mild harmony of this
work betokens no change of style, since Hindemith, after enlisting the
support of natural law* for the simplification of idiom achieved in
Mathis, seems to have had little difficulty in accepting his own arguments
as eternal principles. If finer distinctions can be drawn, it might be held
that works written for America, and especially for its symphony-
concert audiences, make a more deliberate bid for popularity. How
valuably this offset the ponderous textures of much late Hindemith

1 Elementary Training (New York, 1946); Traditional Harmony Тапа II (New York, 1943
and 1948). For Hindemith's earlier music see Chapter IV, pp. 327-38.

2 А Composer's World (1949-50 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures; New York, 1952). Ап
important paragraph added to the German edition (Zürich, 1959) is translated in Journal
of Music Theory (April, 1961), pp. 110-12. For some discussion of Hindemith's philosophical
arguments, see Stuart Hampshire, The Score, vii (1952), pp. 58-62.

3 When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed, a Requiem ‘for those we love’ (1946).

4 Unterweisung im Tonsatz (Mainz, 1937); translated as The Craft of Musical Composition
(1942); its claims to natural law are investigated by Norman Cazden in ‘Hindemith and
Nature’, Music Review, xv (1954), p. 288, Victor Landau, ‘Hindemith the System Builder’,
Music Review, xxii (1961), p. 136, Richard Bobbitt, ‘Hindemith’s Twelve-Tone Scale’,
Music Review, xxvi (1965), p. 104 and A. Daniels, ‘Hindemith’s Contribution to Music
Theory’, Journal of Music Theory, ix (1965), p. 52.

PAUL HINDEMITH—GERMAN MIDDLE GENERATION 405

is seen in the sparkle of the Metamorphoses on themes of Weber (1943)
and the lucidity of the Sinfonia Serena (1946).

These symphonic works do not invite direct comparison with his
orchestral music of the twenties, written in a concertante manner for
adventurous groupings. Where comparison is inevitable, as between the
early quartets and Nos. 5 and 6 (1943 and 1945), the later works dis-
appoint by an unduly explicit tonal harmony, which constricts the old
contrapuntal textures and encourages square-phrased forms. Favoured
movement types—bulky march, lyrical pastorale, and so on—are as
readily to hand as were the affective symbols of the Baroque composer.

The interludes of Ludus Tonalis (1942) provide a convenient summary
of these, executed at a particularly high level of invention. Designed
as a didactic parallel to Das wohltemperierte Clavier, this is governed
by an all-embracing tonal organization which rules the succession of the
twelve keys? in a set of fugues according to their tonal distances from an
initial point, charted by Hindemith's 'Series Г. But it is too uneasy a
compromise between an archaic constructive principle and a personal
hypothesis ever to approach either the topicality or the universality of
its model, whatever the quality of its craftsmanship. Hindemith's
mastery of contrapuntal device, rooted in the past, was perhaps intended
as an object-lesson to the present: his mirror technique (the palindromic
fugue in F, the totally inverted fugue in D flat, and the reversed and
inverted relation of prelude and postlude) even embraces in the B flat
fugue the four serial orders of the subject:

Ex. 188

(Moderato scherzando)

! Heinrich Strobel, Paul Hindemith (Mainz, third edition, 1948), p. 127.
? See supra, p. 336. The fugue in D is recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x.

406 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

— subject augmented

Far from losing definitive form in the fluid, inextricable mesh charac-
teristic of serial styles, they affirm tonality in a metrically patterned,
stratified texture. Movements of less subtlety, like the deft 5/8 fugue in
G or the beautifully spaced canon in B, are more persuasive testimony
to Hindemith's retention of his old imaginative powers.

A curious innovation of this period, and an antidote to the monotony
which may ensue when instrumental patterns are given their head, is the
freely rhapsodic setting of words in non-vocal contexts. Thus, in the
Two-Piano Sonata (1942) a recitative-like line declaims in piano tone
the medieval poem ‘Wynter wakeneth al my care’. Other examples occur
in the 1949 Horn Concerto (to words by the composer) and in the ballet
score Hérodiade, a ‘récitation orchestrale’ after Mallarmé, 1944. In
another work used as a ballet, The Four Temperaments (1940), Hinde-
mith’s inventiveness takes a different form: the work consists of four
vast variations for piano and strings on a tripartite theme, preserved

PAUL HINDEMITH—GERMAN MIDDLE GENERATION 407

with the fidelity of a cantus firmus throughout radical changes of tempo
and rhythmic shape.!

The opera Die Harmonie der Welt (The Harmony of the World) (1956)
dominates by sheer size Hindemith's output after his return to Europe.
Though the orchestral movements (also playable as a symphony, as with
Mathis) introduce some original and complex sonorities in representing
the whirling of the spheres, the whole work, on the life of the astronomer
Kepler, rarely recaptures the urgency with which Hindemith had once
depicted Grünewald's artistic and moral crisis. Lyrical passages of great
beauty and some powerful choral scenes are momentarily arresting, but
nobility of purpose is not in itself sufficient to maintain an audience's
expectancy through the longueurs of philosophical argument. This opera
provides no evidence of radically new departures after some twenty
years’ reliance on the style expounded in Mathis; and Hindemith more
strikingly affirmed his faith in that style by refashioning two operas
that had symbolized earlier stages in his development, Cardillac (1926-
1952) and Neues vom Tage (1929-53).

Modern opinion unanimously condemns the presumption of editors
who rewrite the works in their charge, but the action of the composer
who applies the lessons of maturity to the impetuosity of his own youth
is almost equally debatable. Because it concerns what is perhaps
Hindemith's most inspired work, the revision of the song cycle Das
Marienleben (1923-48) has become a test case, too involved to be argued
here.? Two short quotations (Ex. 189) from 'Rast auf der Flucht nach

Ex. 189

(i) (-с.104-108) 1923 Version

Voice

Piano

1 William Hymanson, ‘Hindemith’s Variations’, Music Review, xiii (1952), p. 20. The
finale of the Octet (1957-8) provides a later example of this idiosyncratic variation tech-
nique.

2 See Hindemith’s introductory remarks to the new version (in English, 1953), and
Rudolf Stephan, ‘Hindemith’s Marienleben (1922-48), Music Review, xv (1954), p. 275.

408 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

- tier gan-ze Städ

Voice

р ____ _.
EL
pirum

Piano

- бег gan-ze Städ

(and now, on their grey mule, they endangered whole cities.)

Agypten’ show one context in which the composer's distrust of instinct
has led to regulation according to principles developed later. Many
changes have far-reaching effect on the structure, and several undeniably
enhance the vocal flow, but only believers in absolute criteria of artistic
effectiveness will applaud the transformation without hesitation; and
performers have not relegated the old versions of the cycle, or of
Cardillac, to the limbo which should logically be their fate.

PAUL HINDEMITH—GERMAN MIDDLE GENERATION 409

Critical practice now reserves the term Kapellmeistermusik as a
reproach, yet it represents a concept that has often justified itself. Only
the regional structure of Germany's music has made possible her vast
creative activity, an assured background of general competence from
which the figure of pronounced originality or genius can emerge.
Inevitably, few composers achieve this prominence, but new music needs
the background also, of essentially derivative, second rank figures who,
given sufficient stimulus, dilute or synthesize unfamiliar idioms. It was
the misfortune of the German generation that came to maturity in the
National Socialist period! that this stimulus was denied by the banning
of twelve-note music and of Hindemith's works. No doubt the latter
were more immediately attractive, with their mechanized counterpoint
and ultimate subservience of dissonance to tonal gravitation, and
Zilig has pointed out that it was an unacknowledged caricature of
Hindemith's manner, pruned of its dissonance and therefore utterly
vacuous in its contrapuntal bustle, which became the official Nazi style
in those barren wastes of Spielmusik by composers better forgotten.”

For more adventurous minds the frustrations of aesthetic theories
based on a dictator's whims? led to a crisis which could only be resolved
in exile or in self-imposed silence. Krenek chose the first course, Hart-
mann the second, a courageous gesture of protest from a composer just
reaching the height of his powers. His teacher, Anton Webern, had
already withdrawn into an obscurity that was to outlast his life. The one
progressive influence not officially proscribed, that of Stravinsky, was
not encouraged by performances. And so with the end of the war and
the disappearance of aesthetic dictatorship, the composers of a stunted
generation reached out eagerly for all the sustenance that had been
denied them. The later music of Hindemith, Stravinsky, and the
Viennese School suddenly became a part of their artistic environment.
By now there was a younger generation seeking a model, and its dis-
covery of Webern is a phenomenon to be discussed later. For many of
the pre-war generation however, total assimilation was harder, and the
revelation served to reinvigorate a gift for cautious emulation or
synthesis.

Carl Orff (b. 1895)* stands apart from these generalizations, for his

1 A necessarily artificial but workable division is made between those composers born
before 1910, who appear here, and the younger generation, discussed later.

? Winfried Zillig, Variationen über neue Musik (Munich, 1959), pp. 136 and 255.

3 Zillig, op. cit., p. 134, on Hitler's judgement of Hindemith's Op. 38 Concerto. For an
obituary devaluation of Hindemith's work, including an entirely conjectural argument that
his stylistic modifications were intended to secure Nazi approval, see Н. Е. Redlich, “Раш
Hindemith—a re-assessment', Music Review, xxv (1964), p. 241.

“К.Н. Wörner, ‘Egk and Orff’, Music Review, xiv (1953), р. 186, and Andreas Liess,
Carl Orff (Zürich, 1955; Eng. ed., London, 1966).

410 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

individual style had finished with outside influences (mainly of the
Stravinsky of Les Noces) by the mid-thirties. After the war his most
notable advance was in the scope of his dramatic undertakings: the
two operas on Hólderlin's translation of Sophocles, Antigone (1949)
and Oedipus (1955), apply to larger spans the numbing reiterative tech-
nique of his immensely popular scenic cantatas. These hypnotic
incantations of ancient languages or relentless probings of the primal
dramatic situations codified in classical mythology have a fascination
for the German that the outsider may find disturbing. Karl-Heinz Füssl
claims that fas personified wish-fulfilment of the Germans, Orff stands
in Germany above all criticism'.! Certainly, his prodigious sense of
musical theatre, which can dispense with all intricacy of purely musical
development, convinces audiences not particularly inclined towards
contemporary idioms that they have satisfied their responsibilities in
this matter. Orff's place in the larger musical world is won by his contro-
versial but stimulating Schulwerk (an educational method, revised
1950-4) and his early use of the large array of percussion instruments
favoured by the new serialist composers.

Werner Egk (b. 1901), like Orff a Bavarian and by temperament a
composer for the stage, has a more orthodox technique with a veneer
of self-consciously French sophistication. This is most evident in scoring
of an elegance unusual in Germany, but he does not consistently reveal
the harmonic sensibility which should accompany it. A typical orches-
tral work, the Variations on a Caribbean Theme (1960), ranges from
Gallic flute arabesques to the local colour of bongos, congas, and tom-
toms, but both remain excrescences in a vulgarized Hindemithian
texture whose moments of aspiration are nearer Hollywood. Such un-
certainty of level is far less apparent in his operas, and his ability to find
a simple but engaging formula for each dramatic situation brought
widespread success to Der Revisor (after Gogol's Government Inspector).
Though he has never achieved quite the degree of Orff's popular success,
the genial and picturesque qualities of his early Zaubergeige commended
him to a similar public on its 1954 revival.

As well as writing many of his own libretti, Egk supplied one for
Blacher's Abstrakte Oper (1953). Whereas Messiaen's nonsense text for
his Cinq Rechants seems contrived for purely musical suggestibility, and
the phonetic investigations of the avant-garde (Stockhausen, Berio,
Kagel) are directed towards a bridge between speech and music, Egk
uses a free juxtaposition of syllables to give an edge to basic emotional
situations, dramatically resented. pNot only the chic quality of this

1 Karl-Heinz Füssl, *Music in Austria and Germany today' in Twentieth-Century Music
ed. Howard Hartog (London, 1960), p. 130.

PAUL HINDEMITH—GERMAN MIDDLE GENERATION 411

experiment but its roots in an unacknowledged sentimentality seem
typical of the work of Boris Blacher (b. 1903).1 Even his use of swing
formulas has a wan charm that seems an affectation beside the virile
licence of jazz. In fact, Blacher has no need for these formulas, or for his
echoes of Stravinsky, as spurs to a keen rhythmic imagination. Nor does
he constantly rely on the mechanized arrangement of bar lengths
which is his most celebrated invention. His claim that ‘this variable
metre is less a rhythmical problem than a formal one"? is justified only
when the longer bars can be apprehended as entities. Too often,
however, subsidiary accents and even simple syncopations destroy the
effect of progression through a higher unit of time. Comparisons of this
metrical ordering with that of pitch serialism bear little inspection:
Blacher's method cannot set up the dense network of palpable conse-
quence and coincidence implied by serial principle. Yet it can be an
effective liberating agent in conventional textures (see Ex. 190 from
Orchester-Ornament, 1953) and has been profitably borrowed by com-
posers too prone to Germanic stolidity, like Hartmann and the early
Henze. Blacher's preferred textures are lean, ranging between Orff's
prodigal economy and Webern's excessive refinement, but often occupy-
ing a middle territory that allows scope to his fluent command of
academic device (see e.g. the canonic movements in the Paganini

Andante У 69

Ex. 190

Flute

Bassoon

Metre (х №

Strings

1 Cf. articles by С. Е. Kosuszek, The Score, i (1949), J. Rufer, Schweizerische Musik-
zeitung, lxxxviii (1948), and С. von Einem, Schweizerische Musikzeitung, xc (1950).

2 Boris Blacher іп a contribution to Josef Rufer, Die Komposition mit zwölf Tönen
(Berlin, 1952; Eng. ed., 1954), p. 178 of English edition.

MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

412

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PAUL HINDEMITH—GERMAN MIDDLE GENERATION 413

Variations, 1947, or the choral writing of the 1959 Requiem). A simple
serialism is often found next to free dissonances, usually mild; these
occasionally approach the internal contradiction of Stravinskyan
harmony without casting off the obligations of progression. A typically
deft synthesis is that of the final section in the Orchesterfantasie (1956),
a movement which on the immediate level is characterized by Stravin-
sky's nervous rhythm and third reiterations, by a climax of melodic
sevenths and ninths and by a canon four-in-one. On a higher time scale
it Is organized by the tutti interjection of twelve-note serial forms from
the opening section, delivered in single notes at intervals reduced
progressively from twenty-three bars to continuous crotchets and still
further diminution. These orchestral works found a readier hearing
thanks to their scoring, which is brilliantly apt though essentially
traditional; in the theatre, over-anxiety to simulate a wealth of abstruse
meaning (see e.g. Rosamunde Floris, 1960) jars with a music that is best
when least pretentious.

Though the vast palindromic Amen of Blacher's Requiem is executed
in transparent textures, it suggests a peculiarly German pride of
craftsmanship (contrast e.g. the retrograde techniques of Stravinsky's
Canticum or Nono's Incontri). Not surprisingly, the more usual outlet
for this is a weightier contrapuntal idiom springing from a love of the
Baroque and from Hindemith, whether or not it recognizes the har-
monic mandate of the Unterweisung. Few of the innumerable composers
who command such a style have more than local interest; but that it
can become compelling by consummate mastery of device is shown by
the best works of the Austrian, Johann Nepomuk David (b. 1895).
Ernst Pepping (b. 1901) has produced admirable church music but failed
to make a distinctive mark with his more ambitious work.

Wolfgang Fortner (b. 1907), who began from just such a position,
has achieved international recognition. His earlier music added to the
routine Hindemithian industry a strong feeling for clean sonorities
deriving from Stravinsky. After the 1947 Symphony, a testimony to that
period's hope and fears which played an important role in Germany's
musical recovery, his assimilation of twelve-note methods (a process
perhaps aided by his pupil, Henze) led to still wider prominence.
Although his approach to texture and structure remains rooted in the
past, he provides another instance (with Stravinsky and Dallapiccola
as the most striking) of the new imaginative vistas opened to an already
fluent composer who discovers in serial thought a natural medium. In
the Mouvements for piano and orchestra (1953)! exemplary workman-
ship, with much neat dovetailing of rows, is lavished on an entirely

аа comment by Francis Burt, “Ап Antithesis', The Score, xviii (1956), р. 16.
2

1940-1960

MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM:

414

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PAUL HINDEMITH—GERMAN MIDDLE GENERATION 415

traditional sequential extension of material. The norm of dissonance is
low (as the series suggests—cf. Ex. 191(1)) and textures fluctuate
between neo-classical and neo-romantic, but with a preponderance of
the patterned figuration that is Hindemith's legacy to a whole German
generation (see Ex. 191 (п)); the serial boogie on the other hand is a
conceit that would appeal to Blacher.

Seven years later, in the Ашофе for oboe and orchestra (1960),
Fortner's habit of transposing a segment of the row as a pseudo-classical
developing motive! has led to the use of a single motive of three notes;
the juxtaposition of its four serial orders can produce a twelve-note
row. It is not only this refinement that suggests acquaintance with post-
Schoenbergian developments. The rhythmic interest has increased,
chord building and scoring are more varied; and the rhetorical scheme,
in which pastoral solo strains and belligerent assaults are convincingly
related, is new, although inordinately prolonged. The expressive release
which Fortner's stylistic exploration afforded is strikingly confirmed іп
his vocal music; the almost embarrassing fervour of The Creation (1954)
is stimulated as well as controlled by its technical constraints, and the
Lorca opera, Die Bluthochzeit (The Blood Wedding) (1953) exhibits a
range that no merely parochial talent could command.

As well as his important work as a teacher in Heidelberg and Freiburg,

! Cf. Fortner on his serial technique in Josef Rufer, op. cit., p. 182.

416 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Fortner organized series of concerts in those cities under the title
Musica Viva. In this he followed the lead given in Munich by Karl
Amadeus Hartmann (1905-63). Within six months of the end of the
war, Hartmann, whose withdrawal from the German musical scene has
been noted, launched a campaign to re-educate composers, performers,
and audiences by programmes ranging from the precursors of the new
music, through the virtually unknown masterpieces of the pre-war
generation to the experimental work of the emerging generation.
Catholic but intelligent programme arrangement and adequately re-
hearsed performances were accorded the highest importance. The
results of Hartmann's labours can scarcely be overestimated: not only
did the Munich audiences grow from a mere thirty to some fifteen
hundred, but Munich Radio adopted the series and transmitted it to a
far wider public. Its imitation in other German centres (and further
afield, including Liverpool and Glasgow) brought modern music to
people mistrustful of the esoteric atmosphere of Darmstadt and
Donaueschingen, where the newest music has been methodically per-
formed and discussed by adepts.

Hartmann's own works reflect these broad sympathies, and an alert
ear immediately traces debts to Stravinsky, Bartók, Berg, and indeed,
almost every important figure of the century. Yet these never deface the
impression of a strongly personal musical ideal, pursued so constantly
as to suggest monotony to the not wholly sympathetic listener. This ideal
seems to spring from a new interpretation of Bruckner's symphonic
concept that has focused on the profound adagios and bucolic scherzos
of that master. Whereas the intense, rarefied mood of the former is
subjected to Hartmann's impulsive but disruptive fantasy, the animal
vigour of the latter is dissipated in mechanized concertante figurations.
This paradox is seen most clearly in the two symphonies which under-
line by their scoring a preoccupation with one of these types—the
ardent, almost hysterically impassioned Symphony No. 4 (1947) for
strings, framed by adagios, and the prosaically chattering Symphonie
Concertante (No. 5, 1950) for wind, cellos, and basses, dominated by
neo-Baroque allegros. The symphony completed between these two
(though labelled No. 3, 1949) is more satisfactory than either, not only
because of its full orchestral resources, with much bright-toned percus-
sion, but also because Hartmann's use of a single continuous span
compels him to cultivate some middle ground between his extreme
moods and encourages him to abandon these when their initial urge is
exhausted. Framed by the funereal opening and its final recall, an
emotional pattern which the nineteenth century's abuse has made
unfashionable is given new life by a centre-piece that demonstrates

PAUL HINDEMITH—GERMAN MIDDLE GENERATION 417

aggressive optimism in terms of cumulative fugue and ground bass.
Fugal technique seems a natural solution here, but it has become a
mere decorative procedure in the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies of
1952 and 1959. Hartmann's inclination to cling to mechanisms that
have no essential relation to the music’s growth is even more clearly seen
in his fondness for mirrored writing, not pulled forward by canon but
ranged immobile around a central point. In the Viola Concerto (1955),
the brass chorale (a common borrowing from Bruckner) is punctuated
by solo interludes (cf. Berg's Violin Concerto); despite a chromatic
introversion that recalls Bartók, the strict mirror technique:

Ex. 192 Andante con moto

Muted
Brass

has a stiffness quite foreign to that composer's symmetrical feats.
The spirited revival of German music by the generation of Blacher,
Fortner, and Hartmann was one token of a determined bid for national
self-respect. Blacher's music in particular, with its urbanity, efficiency,
and hints of defensive irony, is a perfect counterpart to the faintly
anxious good taste of the modern German hotel or office block. In
sharp contrast, Austria's recovery of national autonomy was musically
celebrated by an affectionate embracing of her past, or of those more
recent composers (like Franz Schmidt) whose memories of it were
least clouded by this century's preoccupations. Neither the Nazi ban
nor their subsequent transformation of the European musical scene
secured for Schoenberg's methods the championship of an Austrian
public which had surrendered to its characteristic (and commercially

418 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

profitable) nostalgia. The generation that should have carried on from
the three great pioneers is represented only by two of their pupils,
Apostel and Jelinek, and by Ше emigrant Křenek.

Though Hanns Jelinek (1901-69) worked indefatigably for a
Gebrauchsmusik based on twelve-note principles, notably in the nine
volumes of Zwélftonwerk, Ор. 15,1 he failed to find a convincing
solution to the problems of his age in merely making dodecaphonic
textures sound as nearly as possible traditional. Audiences that are
soothed by what is familiar in such music are no nearer acceptance of
any further consequences of twelve-note methods. Of course an under-
standing public is still less likely to be recruited if such consequences are
pursued so far, and so rapidly, as to reach a private world. The remark-
ably varied career of Ernst Křenek (b. 1900) may be seen as a virtuosic
feat of liaison. Gifted with an imagination that set him naturally among
the explorers, he has sometimes been compelled by a sense of respon-
sibility to interpret his findings in terms which the less ambitious listener
can hope to understand. He remained faithful to dodecaphony after
settling in America in 1938, but drew from its few basic principles
a wide selection of compositional procedures? with as wide a range of
stylistic consequences. His choral Lamentations (1942) reinstate a scalic
norm by deriving all their material from two basic hexachordal ‘modes’
and the attendant modes obtained by setting out from degrees other
than the first; developments of this principle in instrumental works in-
clude systematized rotations of note-order within smaller segments. In
the years of these experiments, Křenek sometimes sought wider com-
munication through a simpler technique. But the post-war emergence of
young composers determined to conduct such experiments on a far
broader basis found Křenek ready to learn as well as teach. As his own
work had always remained traditional in its progressive development
of the recognizable motive, he was reluctant to see this abandoned in
favour of apparent chaos, suspicious of serial mechanisms bordering on
total pre-determination, and frankly critical of electronic phenomena
*of a considerably lower intellectual level of musical consciousness than
the aspirations which were associated with the music of the past.’
Characteristically, he tested these first reactions by the most practical
method, venturing not only into schemes of multiple serialization in
such works as Kette, Kreis und Spiegel (Chain, Circle, and Mirror)

1 See also his textbook, Anleitung zur Zwélftonkomposition (Vienna, 1952), and its review
by Křenek, Musical Quarterly, хі (1954), р. 250.

2 See КТепеК’5 writings on these in Music Review, iv (1943), p. 81; Musical Quarterly,
xxxix (1953), p. 513; Musical Quarterly, xlvi (1960), p. 210, and in Josef Rufer, op. cit.,
p. 188.

з Ernst Krenek, ‘A glance over the shoulders of the young’, Die Reihe, i (Vienna, 1955;
Eng. ed., 1958), p. 14.

THE MIDDLE GENERATION ELSEWHERE 419

(1958) but joining company with men of the next generation in
exploring the mingling of electronic sound with voices in the oratorio
Spiritus Intelligentiae Sanctus (1956).

After Kfenek's intellectual curiosity has been acknowledged, it must
be said that his creative achievement is disappointingly uneven, and bears
no constant relation to the degree of technical innovation. If early
works like Jonny or Leben des Orest showed that he dispenses with all
technical stimulus at his peril, the opera Pallas Athene weint (1955) has
shown that he also needs stimulus of another kind to reach his most
impressive level. Here a burning concern for liberty is given didactic yet
forceful expression through musical symbols that lose no immediacy for
being derived from a personal interpretation of twelve-note practice.

THE MIDDLE GENERATION ELSEWHERE

During the years of Nazi artistic proscription, Switzerland was able
to assume responsibility for the first performance of works as important
as Mathis, Lulu, and Webern's Orchestral Variations. Her own com-
posers remained free to profit by any example they chose, and were by
national temperament inclined to choose widely. Honegger's stylistic
amalgam was fused long before this period, but his development as a
symphonist was touched off by an urge to comment on its dark events
(in the powerful Second Symphony, for strings and trumpet, 1941);
three more essays followed. A development still more remarkable was
that of Frank Martin, born in 1890, but little known before the war.
Stravinsky's journey from pandiatonicism to dodecaphony began as
research into serial method, not necessarily demanding twelve-note
material. Martin, on the other hand, was satisfied by old textural ideals,
realized with considerable ingenuity and refinement, but he increasingly
liberated his melodic line by use of twelve-note successions.! Below this
surface his music often remains entirely diatonic, and the bass line
regains the guiding role lost in both Schoenberg and Stravinsky. As a
result, his harmonic textures, however fluid in their accommodation of
chromatic line, never seethe with the inner tensions that are the source of
Schoenbergian Angst.” АП is so patently under control that excitement is
noteasily generated, though ungrudging admiration is often aroused. The
popularity of the Petite Symphonie Concertante (1945)? is earned by the
felicitous deployment of its varied string colours, and its counterpart

1 Roman Vlad, “Егапк Martin' in his Modernità e tradizione nella musica contemporanea
(Turin, 1955), p. 236.

? Martin's opposition both to Schoenberg's aesthetic and to subjugation to rule is ex
pounded in articles in Polyphonie, iv (1948) and Schweizerische Musikzeitung, 1хххїї (1942).

3 Cf. Jacques de Menasce, “Егапк Martin and his Perite Symphonie Concertante',
Musical Quarterly, xxxiv (1948), p. 271.

420 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

in wind tone, the 1949 Concerto, is perhaps even more adroit. But
in works which demand our deeper engagement, the opera on The
Tempest (1955) and the series of oratorios! dominated by Golgotha
(1948) and Le Mystére de la Nativité (1959), not all Martin's concern for
sonority can hide the limitation of his idiom. The first impact of serialism
has proved a rich source of creative tension in many men's work, but
the composer who seeks to maintain so delicate a poise is in danger of
unwittingly reducing it to a pose.

On the other hand, a composer whose receptivity to new ideas is at
once eager and cautious may profit for years from a gradually increasing
commitment to serial procedure on his own terms, and the career of
Luigi Dallapiccola (b. 1904) affords an interesting study in such
assimilation.? Stravinsky's magisterial appropriation was achieved after
serial music had become widely available, but Fascist Italy in 1940 was
a less propitious environment. ‘Just at the time when everyone had
ceased to mention atonality or twelve-note music, I began to be pas-
sionately interested in such problems, Dallapiccola has written.? In
fact, Schoenberg's influence dated from a performance of Pierrot lunaire
in 1924, which made him resolve to study composition.* During the
following years he mastered a wholly Italian style, re-interpreting the
neo-classical concepts of Busoni and Casella through a feeling for
polyphonic texture that reached back to pre-classical times, yet excluding
neither the Verdian cantabile nor the expressive use of instrumental
colouring. Having forged a link with Italy's past, he sought one with
the European present that should preserve the native qualities of his
music. As he writes, “һе field which most attracted me to the twelve-
note system was that of melody.'*

Already his melodic lines had tended to juxtapose diatonic, even
modal, shapes in the wider context of the chromatic repertory; unlike
Martin, Dallapiccola explored the implications of such lines in contra-
puntal engagement, especially through canonic procedure. By the time
of the opera Volo di notte (Night Flight) (1939) he had arrived at work-
ing principles that foreshadow serialism without aping the Viennese
pioneers. Deprived by political prejudices from direct study of their
scores, he sought inspiration in the literary procedures of Joyce and
Proust. But the lack of technical guidance was no obstacle to the over-

1 For Martin's views on sacred music, see Schweizerische Musikzeitung, Ixxxvi (1946).

2 Cf. Roman Vlad, Dallapiccola (Milan, 1957); also articles by Vlad in Horizon, xx (1949.
(reprinted in Modernità . . .) and The Score, xv (1956), p. 39.

? Luigi Dallapiccola, “Оп the Twelve-Note Road', Music Survey, iv (i) (1951), p. 321.

а Cf. Vlad, Modernità . . ., р. 197.

5 Dallapiccola, in Josef Rufer, op. cit., p. 180.

в Dallapiccola, “Оп the Twelve-Note Road’, loc. cit., p. 323.

THE MIDDLE GENERATION ELSEWHERE 421

whelming expressive urge of the Canti di prigionia (Prison Songs) (1938-
1941), for the composer's own experience of political tyranny had
already nourished that fanatical devotion to the cause of human liberty
which is at the root of his major works.! A natural affinity with modal
chant enabled him to make of Dies irae an awesome motto, but serial
thought and an imaginative ear for icy sonorities (two pianos, two harps,
and many percussion instruments) combined to produce the strange
menace of the second movement.

Dallapiccola has stressed that mere quantitative equality of notes
cannot prevent the predominance of some, due either to their placing
in time, or to 'extremely subtle relationships which exist between
certain notes', polarities which are fundamental characteristics of each
row.? In the works which followed the Canti di prigionia he explored the
properties of many rows,? never making a technical advance without
assuring himself that he was still in control of the total sonority and of
its immediate expressive potentiality. The seductive textures of the
Liriche greche (Greek Lyrics) (1942-5) conceal experiments in the
integration of material which made possible the fluency of И Prigioniero
(The Prisoner) (1944—8).* Іп an age when any compositional method but
the most recent is fervently denounced, few works have been more
salutary reminders than this opera that the one essential vehicle for a
vital creative impulse remains a technique which, though already
mastered, is still for the composer an imaginative adventure. Dalla-
piccola's variety of rows and motives, his evocative use of traditional
chord structure, his mingled echoes of Verdi, Debussy, and Berg, all
offend against a priori conceptions of serialism; but his right to profit
as he chooses from serial discipline is vindicated by the powerful impact
the work has continued to make.

The technical premises of this impassioned protest against physical
and mental torture? could not, however, be systematized into a guaran-
tee of further success. In Dallapiccola's “засга rappresentazione', Job
(1950), the constant burden of tribulation presenting itself in many
guises may have prompted his first large-scale structure from a single
row.$ Far from inducing monotony, this inspired almost too richly
varied an imagery, and the spoken narrative tends to disperse the
musical cumulation. After brilliantly demonstrating contrapuntal device

1 Cf. В. Smith Brindle, ‘Italian Contemporary Music’ in Howard Hartog (ed.), European
Music of the Twentieth Century (London, 1957), p. 176. “ Dallapiccola, loc. cit., pp. 325-6.

з Details of Dallapiccola's twelve-note work from 1942 to 1957 are given in Hans Nathan,
“Тһе Twelve-Tone Compositions of Luigi Dallapiccola', Musical Quarterly, xliv (1958),
p. 289. * Cf. Dallapiccola, *Notes sur mon opéra', Polyphonie no. 1 (1948).

5 Cf. Vlad on the significance of 1/ Prigioniero in The Score, xv, (1956), p. 43.

6 Including а form achieved by permutation; see Nathan, loc. cit., p. 291, n.3.

MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Ex. 193

422

(4 Sops.)
О

Molto lento (2

nos - tra

fi - des

(4 Sops.)

Horn

fra - ter.

(О brother, were our faith firm, miracles would be wrought in us.)

THE MIDDLE GENERATION ELSEWHERE 423

in the diatonic contexts of the violin Divertimento on Themes from
Tartini (1951), Dallapiccola applied the same skill to a row in the
‘Contrapuncti’ of the Quaderno musicale di Annalibera (Musical album
for Annalibera) (1952); like the studies in mood and texture which com-
plete this set of piano pieces,! they show a new preoccupation with
rhythmic variety that was to distinguish his masterpiece, the Canti di
liberazione (Songs of Liberation) for chorus and orchestra (1955).
Indeed the same series underlies both works and its choral presentation
in the first canto is taken directly from ‘Fregi’ in the Quaderno (see Ex.
193 to bar 6—an ‘all-interval series") a reminder of the vocal nature of
all Dallapiccola's line. From the bass entry in bar 5 the imitations of a
serial fragment with progressive diminution (but constant proportion)
of note values, introduce a device used in every movement. The scale
of rhythm values in use, any one of which may be treated as a basic
unit, reveals a growing interest in Messiaen and the avant-garde. Though
the frequent width of melodic interval points to Webern, Ex. 193 shows

5322422444

how diatonic are the implications of the segments (although the direct
octaves of J/ Prigioniero have disappeared), and Dallapiccola's thematic
use of the row elsewhere recognizes the contrasted expression of near-
conjunct line.

If the scoring of this work (for full orchestra) comes near to the
Bergian espressivo, much of his music shows Dallapiccola to be master
of a slighter medium more typical of the period—solo voice and chamber
ensemble. Works like the Goethe-Lieder (1953)? and the Cinque canti on
Greek poems (1956), have refined instrumental textures that contribute
subtle points of symbolism without ever challenging the expressive
supremacy of the voice. The visual symbolism (cf. the madrigalists'
*eye-music") of note patterns that form in the score a cross in Cinque
canti or a Christmas tree in the Concerto per la notte di natale (Concerto
for Christmas Eve) (1957) conveys nothing to the listener, but is an
illuminating commentary on the almost spiritual involvement of this
composer in all he writes. These works reveal the completed assimilation
of Webern's influence in their freedom of wide interval and in textures
assembled from reflecting segments. But Berg remains the inspiration
for the contrasting harmonic blocks of the Concerto, and the use of the

1 Orchestrated as the Variazioni (1954).

2 The German inflexions (Wagner and Schoenberg) which affect the lines of the Goethe-

Lieder are shown in Nathan, loc. cit., pp. 294-5 and 299. Nos. 2, 3, 5, and 6 are recorded
in The History of Music in Sound, x.

424 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1660

voice in two movements of this instrumental form confirms that even
in his most advanced style Dallapiccola works with vocal shapes.!
Other composers of Dallapiccola's generation observed his serial
progress with interest: Seiber noted a development that 'far from
restricting his ideas or cramping his style ...seems to have liberated
his colourful imagination.”? In Italy, the revelation of native lyricism
enhanced by the twelve-note method proved an incentive to experiments
that even touched figures as revered as Malipiero and Ghedini. The most
thoughtful and individual compromise characterized the later work of
Goffredo Petrassi (b. 1904).3 Less dependent than Dallapiccola on
the stimulus of a text, he had achieved a neo-Baroque manner which
softened the rigidity of Hindemith's instrumental counterpoint but was
founded in a similar extension of diatonic (and in his case modal)
principle. Gatti's discovery of “Ше demon of modernistic intellectual-
ization'* in works like the orchestral concertos is unduly severe on
Petrassi's cool but not aggressive rejection of a romantic pose he would
have found uncomfortable. Just as Stravinsky proved repeatedly
that this attitude need not lead to a desiccated objectivity, so Petrassi
with his male voice Coro di morti (Chorus of the Dead) (1940-1) drew a
dramatic power from his treatment of Leopardi’s dark verses that is the
more compelling for its universal intimations. The hard sonorities
(brass, three pianos, percussion, and double-basses) appear less Stravin-
skyan in a context that includes choral writing of an archaic (and Italian)
flow and instrumental contours betraying an interest in twelve-note
models. Despite a number of stage works, two ballets and the operas
Il Cordovano (1948) and Morte dell'aria (1950), the Coro was not sur-
passed until he worked on a subject of comparable grandeur in the
cantata Noche oscura (Dark night of the soul) (1951). Vlad aptly cites
some words of its poet, St. John of the Cross, ‘mysteries are revealed
through strange shapes and images'," to explain Petrassi’s need to break
loose from all diatonic ties in setting the erotic symbolism of the poem.
He achieved this by allowing the serial orders of a chromatic motive to
roam through musical space so as to cover, though not to regularize,
the resources of dodecaphony. Serial practices reappear in the Third
Orchestral Concerto (Récréation Concertante, 1952), and in the Fifth

1Cf. John C. С. Waterhouse, “Тһе Italian Avant-Garde and National Tradition’,
Tempo, 68 (1964), p. 14.

2 Matyas Seiber, ‘Composing with Twelve Notes’, Music Survey, iv (iii) (1952), p. 486.

3 Cf. John S. Weissmann, ‘Goffredo Petrassi', The Score, iii (1950), р. 49, and his book
of the same title (Milan, 1957); also Roman Vlad in Modernita e tradizione nella musica
contemporanea (Turin, 1955), p. 217.

4 Guido M. Gatti, article on Petrassi in Grove, 5th ed., vi, p. 689.

Сү ач Корс рт 2202» 6 СГ. Weissmann, The Score, iii (1950), p. 59.

? Cf. Vlad, “Га Noche Oscura’ in Modernità . . ., p. 234.

THE MIDDLE GENERATION ELSEWHERE 425

Concerto (1955)! the free permutation of a six-note row in one move-
ment and its complement in the other produces homogeneous but
contrasted material. By the time of the 1957 String Quartet and the
Serenata (1958) Petrassi had extended his interests to the work of the
younger generation; the latter work, for flute, viola, double-bass,
harpsichord, and percussion, still betrays his old neo-classical sympa-
thies yet manages to absorb them into a style ranging easily from simple
cantabile line to the mannered percussion writing of the avant-garde.

In countries more remote from the decisive happenings of modern
music, the composers best equipped to rise above a crippling pro-
vincialism were those with first-hand experience of the central lines of
development. Two pupils of Schoenberg who are comparable in this
respect are the Spaniard Roberto Gerhard (1896-1969) and the Greek
Nikos Skalkottas (1904—49), both of whom revert occasionally to a
simpler, nationalist manner. Skalkottas suffered from a self-imposed
isolation, in which he pursued his own ideas without reference to con-
tinuing developments of the Central European technique he had
acquired.? Yet he also lacked the stimulus or corrective of hearing his
own works in performance. Opportunities to hear the symphonic and
other extended works are still rare, which is particularly unfortunate
since the short pieces available in print, talented applications of an
individual serialism? to square-cut forms, relapse at times into harmonic
and textural formulas (often more reminiscent of Hindemith of the
twenties than of Schoenberg) too jaded to convey a vital expressive
urge, as in this example from the Fourth Suite for Piano:

Ex. 194 Tempo di Polka moderato Ж

1 СЕ Kenneth Gaburo in ‘Current Chronicle’, Musical Quarterly, xlii (1956), p. 530.
? Cf. John G. Papaioannou, *Nikos Skalkottas' in Hartog, op. cit., p. 320.
Sibide ра 125%

426 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

It is difficult not to believe that more rapport with European music in
Skalkottas' later years would have preserved his most personal charac-
teristics—lithe energy, clear yet not attenuated sonorities, and a quizzical
or even sardonic tone—and checked his tendency to let textural pro-
liferation take control at moments of flagging impulse.

After the Spanish Civil War, Gerhard! left his own country for
another territory of the musical periphery, England. His wide musical
sympathies and penetrating intelligence found him a place there
both as a masterly composer of incidental music and as a commentator
on contemporary developments;? these he studied deeply and con-
verted to his own ends. Аз a result, whatever Spanish inflexions ог
subtlety of English word-setting may contribute to its individual tone,
his work reveals a European legacy that demands some mention in the
present survey. This has so far been a record of composers who struck
a basically diatonic stylistic balance before the war, but were in many
cases impelled to modify this by some aspect of Schoenberg's
thought. Dallapiccola has quoted from Giséle Brelet’s comments on
atonality: 'trop tót venu, П lui fallait attendre que surgisse chez les
musiciens la conscience des problémes auxquels il prétendait apporter
une réponse.'? It is interesting to note that this time-lag was felt neces-
sary even by Gerhard, a composer steeped in the Schoenbergian
aesthetic and fluent in its practical consequences. In contrast to many
composers, his late adoption of fully serial technique followed music
written against a background of intimate knowledge of its workings;
thus not only is his serial music entirely without the gaucheries of first
experiments but it can coalesce easily with a freer style.* The Violin
Concerto (1942-5) is a beautiful example of this, his comic opera The
Duenna (1945-7) turns again to a pointed diatonicism,® and in later

1 Cf. The Score, xvii (1956), a sixtieth birthday tribute to Gerhard, with articles on his
work and a catalogue.

2 Cf. Gerhard's articles in The Score, vi, ix, xvi, xvii, xx, and xxiii.

3 Giséle Brelet, Chances de la musique atonale (Alexandria, 1947) quoted by Dallapiccola
in ‘On the Twelve-Note Road’, loc. cit., p. 320.

* Cf. David Drew, ‘The Musical Character’, The Score, xvii (1956), p. 39.

5 On its scoring cf. Norman del Mar, ‘Gerhard as an orchestral composer’, ibid., p. 17.

$ Cf. John Gardner, ‘The Duenna’, ibid., pp. 20-6.

THE MIDDLE GENERATION ELSEWHERE 427

instrumental works he has used an increasingly ordered serialism. To
the permutational ‘inversions’ of complementary hexachords which
regulate tonality (in Gerhard's broad sense)! in the 1953 Symphony is
added in the Quartet (1955) a series of time-proportions derived from
the pitch set by a simple process of measuring semitonal distances.?
With the 1959 Symphony he cast off the dependence on motivic contour
which he considered tautological in serial working, and in Collages
(1960) he tackled the problem of fusing electronic and instrumental
sound. Gerhard’s belief in an intelligently considered ‘system of
arbitrarily set-up co-ordinates’? as а vital spur to the creative imagina-
tion was amply justified by his own works.

Other peripheral figures have been content with narrower horizons.
In Scandinavia the most notable emergence during these two decades
was of the Norwegian Fartein Valen (1887-1952), though most of his
music had been written earlier. Valen's link with a central tradition was
through his teacher Reger, but the contrapuntal style he developed
stepped out of the shadow of Bach. Despite coming under Schoenberg's
influence to the extent of using twelve-note melodic rows, he did not
allow them consistently to permeate the texture; and the motivic dis-
cussion which unites the parts sounds aimless once a dominating
melodic strand is abandoned. Valen's enterprise deserves notice as an
early venture towards territory that has still attracted few Scandinavians.
More typical was the fluent but eclectic conservatism of the Dane, Vagn
Holmboe (b. 1909), as indefatigable a composer of chamber concertos
as was the Hindemith of the twenties, but of far less brilliance. In
Sweden, Hilding Rosenberg (b. 1892)* wrote a series of oratorios and
transmitted a catholic taste to some gifted pupils; Gósta Nystroem
(1890-1966)5, without modifying his style, produced his most distin-
guished work in the Sinfonia del mare (Sea Symphony) (1948).

The younger Scandinavian generation includes several composers
who will call for discussion later. In Central and Eastern Europe too,
and here even more surprisingly, the influence of the most radical
advances in serial style helped to nurture some impressive talent.
Of the older men, little can be reported which reflects a significant

1 Cf. Gerhard, ‘Tonality in Twelve-note Music’, The Score, vi (1952), p. 23. For relevant
discussion of hexachord combinational properties cf. George Rochberg, ‘Harmonic Теп-
dencies of the Hexachord', Journal of Music Theory, iii (1959), p. 208; for a comparable
technique cf. Ernst Kfenek’s contribution to Rufer, op. cit., pp. 188-91.

2 Vlad writes on both works in The Score, xvii (1956), p. 27; cf. also Gerhard, ‘Develop-
ments in Twelve-Tone Technique', ibid., p. 61. Contrast the more elaborate derivations of
time proportions from pitch series by Stockhausen.

3 Gerhard, “Тһе Contemporary Musical Situation’, The Score, xvi (1956).

4 СЕ, Moses Pergament, ‘Hilding Rosenberg" Music & Letters, xxviii (1947), p. 249.

5 Cf, Pergament, ‘Gösta Nystroem" Music & Letters, xxvii (1946), p. 66.

428 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

change of reputation, and the impact of twelve-note music found no
repercussions comparable to the transformation of a Dallapiccola or a
Fortner. Bohuslav Магии (1890-1959), a Czech living in America, made
a determined and largely successful bid for command of distinctive
extended structure in his six symphonies; but his language remained
nationalist, tinged by а belated impressionism or neo-classical
patterning.

OLIVIER MESSIAEN

So far, this account of the middle generation’s development during
and after the war has been unified by one central though far from
universal phenomenon—the revitalizing of style by serial thought. This
may seem to invalidate the contention? that the philosophical speculation
which brought serialism into being, and the cerebration required in its
operation, were inseparable from a peculiarly Germanic musical ethos.
Yet one country seems to lend some credibility to the contention:
France produced no composer of distinction in direct succession to
Schoenberg’s ideas and technique, and vociferously rejected the
importation of these into her music. In the new serialism as expounded
by Boulez, not only did the letter of the old technique become a minor
and inconstant observance, but values deriving from a specifically
French tradition were consciously asserted.

The assimilation of principles originating outside France into a style
of exclusively native tone is a familiar feature in her musical history.
But the ability to maintain a character has no virtue in itself, and of the
oldest French generation at work in this period, it may be said that its
musical character, if unmistakable, was also weak. The only French
member of Cocteau’s ill-assorted ‘Six’ to reveal any capacity for
renewal was Poulenc,? whose two operas, Les Mamelles de Tirésias
(Tiresias’s Breasts) (1944) and Dialogues des Carmélites (1956), remark-
ably sustain satirical and lyrical moods familiar from his songs. If the
piety which rather heavily oppresses Carmélites stems from nineteenth-
century operatic models, Poulenc’s natural affinity with Gounod?
ensures that it never becomes a pose. Such music about saintliness is
acceptable in the theatre but it has little to do with religious music. In
Olivier Messiaen (b. 1908) France has the only important contemporary
composer whose religious belief is central to his art.

1Cf, Milo’ Šafránek, Bohuslav Martini (Prague, 1961; Eng. ed., London, 1964), Peter
Evans, ‘Martina the Symphonist’, Tempo, lv (1960), p. 19. John Clapham, *Martinü's Instru-
mental Style’, Music Review, xxiv (1963), р. 158, and Harry Halbreich, Bohuslav Martini:
Werkvergeichnis, Dokumentation, Biographie (Zürich, 1968).

СЁ р: 380% ? Cf. Henri Hell, Francis Рошенс (Paris, 1958; London, 1959).
4 Cf. David Drew, ‘Modern French Music’ in Hartog, op. cit., p. 264.

OLIVIER MESSIAEN 429

His association with Jolivet, Baudrier, and Lesur in 1936 under the
title ‘La Jeune France’ was merely a further declaration against the
smart, heartless music of the day such as he had already made in his
early works. Certainly he sought no stimulus in the alliance; for this he
found spiritually in a symbolical interpretation of Catholic dogma and
technically in his studies of rhythm (especially Hindu), of plainsong, and
of bird-song. In 1940 his freedom from the preoccupations of his
contemporaries was clear, but his significance for a younger generation
was still unsuspected. Now that this is generally acknowledged, it too
often provides an excuse for ignoring his own erratic but considerable
creative achievement.!

Mode, the prescription of limits within which the music may move
freely, is fundamental to Messiaen's thought and a concept distinct
from that of series, which determines the order of movement. By span-
ning the octave with regular patterns of pitch intervals (see Ex. 195)
modes are obtained ‘of limited transposition’ (since the patterns repeat)
which offer a variety of gravitational possibilities in place of the single
point to which asymmetrical structure inevitably relates the old scales:

Ex. 195
Examples of ‘Modes of limited transposition’

ero = possible
= possible

€3—-5 transpositions
possible
Рад
5 transpositions
possible
Sere eee eee eal

Within one of these modes tonality may remain elusive; and when two
modes are at work, the texture may become fully chromatic and tonal
feeling be dependent on melodic emphases. But since the selection with-
in a given mode is left to the composer, he is equally at liberty to dwell
on those notes which form conventional successions and simultaneities.
Messiaen’s style in fact embraces both extremes, but he has sometimes

1 The outstanding description and critical estimate of Messiaen’s work is by David Drew:
*Messiaen—a provisional study’, The Score, x, xiii, xiv (1954-5).

430 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

irritated his disciples by his fondness for the second,! much as Hinde-
mith favoured a comparatively small proportion of the possibilities
latent in his own theory of progression. No such theory is implied by
modality; Messiaen is dependent on his ear for the regulation of
harmony. But like Stravinsky and Debussy, who also jettisoned the
progressive mechanism, he is intent on the aural phenomenon per se
and, like them, both scrupulous and imaginative in its construction.

If pitch-modality seems at once too defined and too imprecise to be
regularly adopted by other composers (though it can be relevant to the
structure of twelve-note rows), Messiaen's rhythmic principles demand
consideration as leading to the most radical innovations in this branch
of Western musical thought since the seventeenth-century triumph of
the dance as background measurement. Treating rhythm as an absolute
phenomenon separable from other considerations, he demands acute
perception of the length of each note as an entity, reckoned as a multiple
of a very small basic unit (present or imagined) rather than as a fraction
of a palpable higher unit of time.? Thus, the Hindu rhythm at Ex.
196(1), one of many such patterns in the percussion writing of Oiseaux

Ex. 196
ә тера ыы
ттш II MM E E

17 elements, totalling 13 x J

А
x Me > > а >
ү) 2

“2/2. 1. 2;

х3.

exotiques (1956), is not felt as a complex syncopation in the 2/4 measure
(used for notational convenience) but as the proportions 3.2.3.5.5.2.2.
In his own rhythms Messiaen avoids the emergence of a background
metre, often by adroit use of small added values: see e.g. the first dotted
note in Ex. 196(ii). To amplify such rhythms into structure—repetition

! Boulez's objection both to Messiaen's F sharp major penchant and to the self-deception
of disguising it as modality is voiced in Antoine Goléa, Rencontres avec Pierre Boulez
(Paris, 1958), p. 160.

2 Cf. Preface to Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (1941) and, for the most detailed exposition
of Messiaen's theories, Technique de mon langage musical (Paris, 1944).

OLIVIER MESSIAEN 431

in toto is the simplest method: Ex. 196(ii) is the rhythmic ostinato of the
Quartet's first movement. As in Machaut's isorhythmic technique,
repetitions may preserve the proportions in different units; Messiaen's
augmentations and diminutions are not restricted to classical two-
multiples—see Ex. 196(iii) from the Quartet’s sixth movement.! Rhyth-
mic canon is а subtler repetition that produces cross-rhythm, and
Messiaen attaches particular significance to 'rhythmes non rétro-
gradables' which reverse from a central value.

Rhythmic ostinato exemplifies Messiaen's view of his material as
something formed in essence before the process of composition begins;
ideas may be repeated literally, decorated profusely, or placed together
in varying relations of time and space. Borrowing again from medieval
technique, he may choose a melodic-harmonic color and a rhythmic
talea of a different number of constituents (e.g. Ex. 196(ii) of seventeen
rhythmic elements is set against a harmonic ostinato of twenty-nine
chords)? and let their interaction produce constant change from what is
immutable. Drew points out a still more rigid automatism in the piano
piece L'Échange (from Vingt Regards): by quoting two bars and a brief
key to procedure he is able to account for the following twenty-two
bars.? Twelve-note serialism is no longer commonly held to be a
Procrustean constraint on the composer's freedom of choice, but in the
mechanisms of Messiaen's most painfully contrived movements may be
seen the first surrender to the hazards of inadequately considered pre-
determination: Webern discovers musical potentialities while Messiaen
rotates statistical possibilities. The efforts of his pupils to synthesize the
practices of these two explorers attracted even Messiaen himself into
a position more radical than he felt willing to maintain; and it would be
unjust to represent him solely by the works of those years, or to suggest
that crude formulas dictate the course of his entire output. During the
troubled times of the forties, his certainty of direction had no parallel
among his own generation.

Though the instrumental colouring (determined by resources avail-
able in a prison-camp, 1941) makes the eight-movement Quatuor pour
la Fin du Temps wearisome as a whole, it shows Messiaen's style
fluctuating between essentially conventional harmonic forms (see the
two gentle ‘Louanges’ in E major); and the wholly original super-
imposition of blackbird and nightingale flourishes on a framework of
interacting ostinati (Liturgie de cristal’). But he may combine such

1 Cf. Dallapiccola's practice in the Canti di liberazione, Ex. 193 on p. 422.

2 Messiaen's addiction to prime numbers is more systematically revealed in e.g. Меитез
rhythmiques (1950), the third element of which is a symmetrical rhythmic pattern expanding

on repetition from a total of 41 semiquavers to 43, 47, and 53.
? David Drew, The Score, xiv (1955), рр. 46-47.

432 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Modéré, joyeux (d= 120)

Ex. 197 бол 2------------------------------------------
= Ч :
te be же жей е е ка
пън Pul (> ее xw Shee x peh
A a Ay 4 10 H ы ІП Е AEE UA
63 2 ен L oL d mcs е =
ыо „Р carillonnant

più

с»
БЫ s.d secs 2 ТЫЗ NC PPM
Modéré, joyeux (2 12) 2d Pa. SP. Bd, Pw
= m = > d >
b = с se 4
f) che ple ba НА == DH e 4 s 1
Enim EE лае EE ии te
Гол arri seem ДА ЕЕ Lem
iy Sf сиізге, sonore Жыр NND та
Yt) ЖЕСІ БЕЙНЕ
Fa с | F Би: = = ЕЕ Дена
: oO
=>
DJ

г СИ Uy сее еее

к" „ш
ӨПТ кеселі = as |
D cud с=з C as ПЫШ есет
= мы

о
Sh Фаза аа а о.
я F e “т => =
227 Shay. | #2:
Eig са НЕ

extremes: in Ше finale of Visions de ГАтеп (1943),1 a rhythmic complex
(cf. Ex. 196(ii) used again in this later work) in canon at narrowing time
intervals rotates three-note groups with chromatic organum thickenings,
creating a maze of sound (Ex. 197, piano I) which enhances a chorale? as
1 Cf, also Drew's discussion of Атеп des Étoiles, ibid., pp. 41-44.
2 The fundamentally unchanged character of Messiaen's procedures in his later style may

be seen by comparing with this the addition in Пе de Feu 2 of the free initial theme to the
last pair of the serial permutations discussed on p. 440.

OLIVIER MESSIAEN 433

square and monotonous in itself as the feeblest effusions of the French
organ school (Ex. 197, piano II). The circular key scheme (A-C sharp-
F natural-A: a break with classical precedent rather than principle) of
the chorale verses is literally repeated in the third of the Petites Liturgies
de la Présence Divine (1944). This exceptionally direct work did much
to establish the composer's reputation. А setting for unison female
choir of his own text, it achieves dramatic compulsion from effects as
simple as the clangorous reiteration without harmony of a springing
pentatonic line. The scoring is for celesta, vibraphone, ondes martenot,
piano, percussion, and strings, and demands a prescribed spatial
arrangement of the forces. These anticipations of Boulez extend even
to the use of the vibraphone to sustain vocal notes.

In the first Liturgie the piano's bird-song introduces atonal chromatic
bravura into a work which is unequivocally in A. Chromaticism of this
kind, latent in Messiaen's modal theory, penetrates still further the
texture of Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jésus (1944) and of the Turangalila-
Symphonie (1946-8).2 This work looks ahead in such details as the
association of a twelve-note succession with a scale of diminishing
rhythmic values;? but its true importance is that of a vast compendium
of Messiaen's musical language at an unusually well sustained level of
invention. Though rhythmic counterpoints are superimposed in un-
precedented profusion, and orchestral colourings are kaleidoscopically
varied, neither thematicism nor tonality is abandoned.* Five years later,
Messiaen returned to orchestral composition with a piano concerto,
Le Réveil des Oiseaux, that emphasized his need to escape from the
ascetic restrictive schemes of some intervening works. In Oiseaux
exotiques (1956), a fantasy for piano, wind, and percussion, the com-
poser continued to indulge, to the virtual exclusion of other material,
his interest in Hindu and Greek rhythms (twenty patterns) and his gift
for imaginative evocations of bird-song (forty-seven species). This
enthusiasm has persisted in his later work, and has once again isolated
the composer from the main forward movement of European music.
As a result he is no longer burdened by a crippling sense of responsibility
and can revert to a characteristic textural luxuriance. Oiseaux exotiques
15 in fact no pot-pourri but, for Messiaen, a remarkably strong arch-
shaped movement in which the most flamboyant bird calls act as ritor-
nelli. The texture is accumulated from the counterpoint of numerous

1 Cf. Boulez, Improvisation sur Mallarmé no. 1.

2 Cf. Drew, The Score, xiv, pp. 50-56 and Leonard Burkat, Musical Quarterly, xxxvi,
(1950), p. 259.

3 Cf. Drew, The Score, x, p. 48.

* See p. 45, n. 1. The F sharp movement to which Boulez objected was incorporated in
Turangalila.

434 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

calls, each having a fixed repertory of pitches, not necessarily adjacent,
subject to rhythmic manipulation:

Ex. 198
Un peu vif = 132) 2
- P РЕЧ

(бга) 12, ; be
Piccolo - т == EE г

(Lesser Green
Leafbird)

Flute; Oboe
2 Clarinets
(Baltimore

Oriole)

Glockenspicl
(Redbilled
Mesia)

Xylophone
(California
"Thrasher)

This type of modal limitation had been systematized, together with
other rationalizations of Messiaen's practice, in the piano study Mode
de valeurs et d'intensités (1949), a work which must be discussed within
the context of another generation.

THE NEW SERIALISM

In the generation that was learning its craft as the war ended there is
disagreement as to the historical relationship of their musical achieve-
ments. Luigi Nono has affirmed his willingness to be judged against the
background of a continuing historical process, but Stockhausen's

THE NEW SERIALISM 435

apologist Dieter Schnebel! has argued that the new music implies the
disappearance of such a tradition. Certainly the historical inevitability
of these specific developments, though persuasively expounded by their
apologists, is very debatable. It is clear that their intellectual premises
came naturally to a sceptical generation which demanded explanations
for creative procedure that should satisfy the mind as well as the
sensibilities. To suggest that the particular equipment which has been
assembled was partly due to a fortuitous interaction of circumstances is
merely to recognize one of many such recoveries after crucial moments
in music's history. Musical meanings are conveyed in a man-made
language, and there are no a priori grounds for assuming that the
language now evolving, bv a perplexingly devious but ultimately
empirical process, cannot communicate the aesthetic experience, even
if its apparent remoteness from natural analogies may delay or prevent
any popular acceptance.

Most composers of this generation served at least a brief apprentice-
ship in orthodox twelve-note techniques. The published expositions of
the works of the Viennese School by the Polish-French theorist and
composer René Leibowitz? were among their first guides in a field
which many of their elders were just beginning to explore, though
Martin and Dallapiccola would have been able to initiate their sometime
pupils Stockhausen and Berio into personal interpretations of dodeca-
phony. At a time when French musicians were still overcome by
Leibowitz's revelations (in performances as well as commentaries), and
when there seemed high hopes of a French school of twelve-note
composers,? Boulez enlisted as his pupil, already equipped with skills
derived from Messiaen's teaching. But the most momentous revelation
of serial composition came with Leibowitz's work at the Darmstadt
Summer School in 1948 and 1949.

The Kranichstein Institute, founded at Darmstadt in 1946 due to the
visionary zeal of one man, Wolfgang Steinecke, was intended first as a
centre where young German composers could study together and hear
the whole tract of contemporary music which had been denied them by
Nazi proscription.* Their first mentor, Fortner, was still unversed in
serial practice, but could demonstrate lessons he had learnt from
Stravinsky and Hindemith; and in the following year Hindemith him-
self directed the course. So far this was only to reveal the true origin,

1 See Luigi Nono, “Тһе Historical Reality of Music Today' (a Darmstadt lecture of 1959)
in The Score, xxvii (1960); Dieter Schnebel, ‘Karlheinz Stockhausen’, Die Reihe, iv, p. 121.

2 René Leibowitz, Schönberg et son école (Paris, 1946); Introduction à la musique de douze
sons (Paris, 1949).

3 Cf. Leibowitz on the work of his pupil, André Casanova, in Music Survey, П (iii) (1950).

4 Cf. Antoine Goléa, Rencontres avec Pierre Boulez (Paris, 1958), рр. 67-80.

436 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

immeasurably more powerful than its miserable progeny, of the
diluted pseudo-Hindemith of the familiar Spielmusik style. But
Leibowitz's courses, together with the admission of foreign students
from 1949, began the transformation of Darmstadt's scope: the aural
experience of an almost unsuspected body of rich creative achievement
and the discovery of reassuring technical bases on which they could
build united the most talented (and many others) of a whole European
generation. Their pursuit of that style which should satisfy a need for
the intellectual underpinning of the creative impulse led them, as
successive courses and private study made their models more familiar,
to find this most unambiguously in Webern's music. Thus Darmstadt
became the driving force behind the first consciously international
movement in the music of our century.

At so close a range in time it is not possible to determine this century's
most decisive moment of change.! The new serialism was near enough to
Schoenberg to stress all that it had rejected of his methods and rhetoric,?
but it is from Schoenberg that we must trace perpetual variation, the
systematic unfolding of musical properties (with him limited to the
pitch content) and as a corollary the association of sound and number.
Beyond this he chose to rely on inherited formal constituents (expres-
sive motive, phrase, and paragraph) for proportions in time, and on the
ability of the row to construct proportions which should recall the
traditional spanning of musical space; many composers of the middle
generation devised individual means by which to sustain the same
compromise. The attraction which the young generation found in
Webern's music was its new expressive forms, rooted in the clarity and
correspondence of intervallic and durational proportions themselves,?
a demonstrably orderly arrangement of sonorous phenomena yielding
an undemonstrable but compelling beauty. It has often been pointed
out* that Webern's adoption of twelve-note rows created far less of a
gulf in his work than had always existed between this and Schoenberg's;
but it did enable him to achieve the perfect equilibrium of his later
works by imposing on one idea, the construction of correspondences
measured by interval, the constraint of another, serial propriety. By
reducing the dominating status of the Schoenbergian thematic concept
of the row, Webern was able to break free from the vast chain of conse-
quences, essentially unrelated to the row as an autonomous proposition,

1 See e.g. Th. W. Adorno, ‘Modern Music is growing old’, The Score, xviii (1956), p. 18,
and the reply by H.-K. Metzger in Die Reihe, iv, Eng. ed. p. 63; also the essay by W.-E.
von Lewinski in the same vol. p. 1, and Zillig, op. cit., p. 199.

2 Cf. Pierre Boulez, ‘Schoenberg is dead’, The Score, vi (1952), р. 18.

3 СГ. the analytical essays in ‘Anton Webern’, Die Reihe, ii.

* E.g. by Pousseur in Die Reihe, ii, p. 51.

THE NEW SERIALISM 437

and to order connexions—and ultimately structures—according to its
inner potentialities. Since these prove to be virtually limitless, his
characteristic row already demonstrates symmetry within its segments,
so that the work makes audible ‘horizontal, vertical and “Фагопа!”
relationships'! stemming from a three- or four-note cell. These are the
objects of the listener's attention. Although coincidence produces
‘harmony’ and succession ‘melody’, these qualities are not allowed to
take on determining functions which, by re-introducing a degree of
predictable movement, would divert his attention from the innate
quality (which includes the duration) of the sounding moment.

Though serialism of all twelve pitches is one of the restrictions which
brace Webern's style, it does not serve to guarantee the maximum
separation of identical (or octave-related) notes. Indeed the close
proximity of a note common to superimposed or adjacent serial forms
may be pointed,? yet our hearing is so directed to the quality of the
intervals, their forming and dissolving connexions, often across a wide
total span, that such a relation is in no danger of establishing a con-
ventional polarity. And as Webern's basic pitch-material could be
reduced to the small cell, later composers have not felt bound to work
with the complete pitch series.? Serial principle orders succession but
does not of itself specify the number or nature of elements—a function,
as was noted earlier, of mode. The new serialism sprang from a detailed
consideration of both concepts, first brought face to face by com-
posers who had learnt from dodecaphony and from Messiaen's methods
(Boulez and Stockhausen, and—through Messiaen’s teaching at
Darmstadt—a far wider circle, including Nono). Messiaen's treatment
of rhythmic proportions had demanded a large number of durations
relatable by number, so that a rhythmic mode (a repository of different
values) was already part of his equipment. Indeed he had already applied
to this the principle of series in the use of rhythmic ostinato (cf. row
repetition) and repetitions in various diminution and augmentation
ratios (cf. row transposition), and in the importance he attached to
retrograde rhythm. By contrast, in the late works of Webern could be
found extremely subtle rhythmic relations,* including precisely timed
silence as a vital contrapuntal element;? but despite ап aural detachment
from classical metre? and internal symmetries that prevented classical

1 H.-K. Metzger, Die Reihe, i (Eng. ed.), p. 43.

? Cf. Christian Wolff, Die Reihe, ii, p. 62.

* The developments which led to the abandonment of Schoenberg's principle are dis-
cussed by Gyórgy Ligeti, ‘Wandlungen der musikalischen Form’, Die Reihe, vii, p. 5.

* E.g. the rhythm of connexions discussed by Pousseur, loc. cit., p. 59.

5 Cf. Pierre Boulez, Die Reihe, ii, p. 40.

6 Webern himself, however, appears to have heard his music tensed against such a
background. Cf. Peter Stadlen, *Serialism Reconsidered', Тйе Score, xxii (1958), p. 15.

438 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

flow, few signs of a treatment of duration so objectified as to be
accommodated into serial logic.

The objective scrutiny of both pitch and time as musical properties
that could be systematically ordered was turned, by a natural extension
of the new attitude, on to other properties. Tone colour, once bound to
the sense of the melodic phrase, had been fragmented in the changing
chord of Schoenberg's Op. 16 pieces, and Webern's orchestration
naturally pointed his construction from intervallic cells. Serialization
instead of free variation of colour was a simple enough step, and as a
substitute in media of limited colour (e.g. the piano) a serialization of
methods of attack was thought plausible, thus rationalizing the tendency
of modern music to make increasingly fine distinctions in this field.
Webern's wide range of dynamic values, regarded as properties of the
individual notes, suggested yet another serial ordering.

In visualizing the perpetual variation, according to a predetermined
code, of each factor contributing to the distinctive quality of the musical
note, the new school sought to atone for the extreme predominance
accorded to pitch in Western tradition; their music should reflect the
proportions of the series in a constant interplay of all the elements. For
а just appreciation of the fluctuating activity within such ‘global forms’,
the listener, brought up on precise recognition of pitch and compre-
hension of rhythm by the mnemonic of metre, must acquire entirely
new powers of discrimination. Apart from the acquisition of similar
powers, the composer's first concern must be with a means of determin-
ing the mutual relationship of his serial codes. Messiaen, already
practised in simultaneously unfolding schemes of pitch and time,
postulated a rudimentary solution in his piano study, Mode de valeurs
et d'intensités, significantly inscribed ‘Darmstadt, 1949’—5ее Ex.
199(1). True to his early principles, this uses mode, not series, but now

Ex. 199
y Mode, Division I (top register)
DU тт ы е о пні ie а ! loco
Tis
$5 phe be е В oe MeL
POP PEP ff f mf ff mf

= дет
4 = Durational values 1 to 12 (x Ж);
E : = - = їп Eu II and III the units
e D and. 2 respectively.

THE NEW SERIALISM 439

its

(Div. I)
8

Gi)

Piano

Sf mf P

(Div. Ш)

prescribes limits in all four fields of pitch, duration, attack, and
dynamics. His pitch mode fixes the register of all twelve notes across a
wide range (see Ex. 199(1); two similar divisions correspond to the
other staves and virtually cover the piano's compass) and to each of
these is attached,! once for all, a specific attack drawn from a set of
twelve, a dynamic level drawn from seven, and a duration drawn from a
‘chromatic’ range of one to twelve values—4^, J and J^ being the units
of the three planes.

The rigid constraints of this piece (which incidentally give an almost
motivic character, or at least a polarizing effect, to certain exposed pitch
recurrences) do not contribute to its progress, whereas Messiaen's old
interacting ostinati solved this problem at least. In another study of
this set, Ле de Feu 2, he again sets up a fixed association of pitch and
duration (though now entirely 'scalic': B J^ B flat J A J. «с. to C d.
see Ех. 200(i)) but reduces the earlier, utterly impracticable differences

1 A similar conjunction, but with a smaller range of constituents, had been attempted in
Cantéyodjayá (1948), p. 8.

440 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Ex. 200
(i):
Pitch-duration mode
a2 15 10 etc.)

т 6 s-5 9 4 төр зе 2 САБИ

(7 6 6-5 9 4:0 и 7 E.
10 4 3 9-11 75 2, Эри see (iii)
255 :8 1? do 9. , 8" 4л ди

6 9 3.12 1 MN а 8 Фреш

ап в ие 3 10 40 6] и
512 3^1 104 9) 6 2 at Ы

Piano

PIERRE BOULEZ 441

in attack to four types and the dynamics to five. Messiaen reconciles
here the difference between the constantly changing contour of modality
and the established successions of linear serialism by the principle of
permutation of all twelve notes, thus establishing at the same time a
progressive mechanism. His row is the familiar pattern of semitones
radiating alternately from a central note, see Ex. 200(1), and the
permutation used applies the identical process (1.e. 7.6.8.5.9.4.10.3.11.2.
12.1); а few lines of the table are shown at Ex. 200(1), from which the
reader can reconstruct the course of those sections of the work based
on this scheme by analogy with the first, Ex. 200(iii), noting that succes-
sive permutations are coupled in treble and bass.

Messiaen's work has been used to demonstrate simply an approach
to organization of material which was also being developed by his
pupils at this time. Their aim of subjecting all the elements which
contribute to a musical texture (the term parameters was adopted)
to serial procedure was extended into a structural determinant by per-
mutation of the series according to the dictates of a super-series. These
general principles were given a new interpretation in almost every work;
for when so much follows from pre-compositional decisions (even if
relaxations be permitted in their acceptance) they become an important
field for the exercise of the composer's creative individuality. That this
field may prove irksomely narrow is to be deduced not so much from
the superficial impression of similarity listeners have found in multiple-
serial structures—since the listening technique which these demand is
both formidable and unfamiliar—as from many composers' subsequent
abandonment of this extreme position. It will be profitable at this point
to consider more specifically the work of some prominent representa-
tives of the new music.

PIERRE BOULEZ

Musical history would not have immediately led us to suppose that
France would provide the two most celebrated documents in the early
search for strict control of every musical element —Messiaen's Mode de
valeurs et d'intensités and Boulez's Structures. The pseudo-polyphony
of the French Baroque, Berlioz's freedom from the tyranny of conven-
tional progression and phrasing, and Debussy's reliance on a superb
harmonic and formal instinct іп abandoning orthodox tonality,
suggest a native antipathy towards rigidity of procedure. Yet if the
demonstrable organization of German music is often absent, the

1 This pattern recurs in the Livre d'Orgue (1953). It is also a schematic serial basis much
favoured by Luigi Nono; cf. p. 476.

442 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

characteristically French fantasy is governed by a meticulous feeling for
order. Messiaen's fitful genius is somewhat exceptional in often needing
the help of the controlling mechanisms noted earlier; but it is significant
that, even in the Quatre études de rhythme (which include Mode and
Ile de Feu 2), these appear in conjunction with freely rhapsodic ideas.
If Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) was driven by intellectual curiosity to discover,
in incomparably more precise detail, the consequences of a will to
establish order in each dimension of his music, the powerful quality of
his imagination has offset these statistical preoccupations.!

The more rigidly inhibited a piece is, the more satisfyingly account-
able it becomes to the analyst, until he may even arrive at the position
of being able to point out ‘errors’ (as distinct from infelicities or mis-
judgements) in the composing process. When analysis has once achieved
such a status, it becomes difficult to recall its essentially subsidiary
relevance to the listening experience, and a work's notoriety may come
to depend more on the analyst's labours than on the listener's. This is
not to decry Boulez's renowned essays in total serialization, but to stress
that their place in his creative achievement has proved to be less than
their importance for his development. Some of the works which pre-
ceded them, though disowned at times by Boulez, give a clearer picture
of the composer's individuality, and it is a picture which more recent
works have brought into still sharper focus.

After the Psalmodies for piano (1945), written before he knew any-
thing of serialism, Boulez mastered orthodox row-manipulation under
Leibowitz swiftly enough to explore beyond it in his next works. The
1946 Flute Sonatina uses more elaborate permutations of fully dodeca-
phonic thematic material than were recognized in Schoenberg's
practice; but the passages of development adapt Webern's structure
from much smaller cells, of a few intervals, producing an athematic
texture in which attention can be concentrated on the minutiae of the
sounding fabric—notably the subtle balance between rational and
irrational elements in its rhythmic cells.? Two years later, the Second
Piano Sonata established a composing process in which the plotting
of rhythmic relations seems to be given precedence, and the attendant
pitches develop intervallic cells without reference to any ideal twelve-
note basic shape:

1 Among Boulez’s many writings, Penser la musique aujourd'hui (Paris, 1964; English
translation, Boulez on Music Today, London, 1971), gives the most impressive account
of the interplay between intellect and imagination that characterizes his work.

2 Boulez's analysis in Polyphonie (1948), cited in Goléa, op cit., p. 51.

PIERRE BOULEZ 443
Plus vif
^

Tempo Г. extrément rapide IN
— i р-е
paid 7 f = |

444 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Extreme dynamic changes help to convey the explosive fury charac-
teristic of early Boulez (and a hidden menace powerfully sensed in some
later, more suave, contexts), but they still progress here according to
‘expressive’ rather than objectified or purely statistical dictates. Indeed
the demonstrative rhetoric (and, one might add, the length) of this work
is so far removed from Webern's highly-charged reticence that the
resulting sound gives no idea of the debt in interval treatment.! Aggres-
sive timbre and splintered textures dominate the instrumental sonority,
but the contrasting quiet passages are of an exacting complexity. In the
Livre pour Quatuor, which includes ideas reworked from the Sonata,”
Boulez found a more congenial medium for a true counterpoint of
dynamic values and for the exercise of an easier lyricism.

These works provided impressive evidence of a compelling new
voice capable of more than one inflexion, but they gave no clear clues
to any symbolic life to be re-lived by the listener. The composer who is
intent on inculcating a new technique of acute listening may be ill-
advised to provide too soon any form of parallel to the aural pheno-
menon. But we may suspect one who constantly refuses to recognize
the part played by analogy in drawing musical experience from
patterned sound. (Those who find the material of Die Kunst der Fuge
truly ‘neutral’ must also find it a very dull work.) Just as Webern's
songs provide a key to his rarefaction of old expressive symbols, so
Boulez's vocal music interprets the associations he feels in newer musical
structures, and, as we saw in Stravinsky's work, this desire to wed
expressive power to an intricately regulated technique can lead to a
powerful fusion. Le Marteau sans maítre (The Hammer without a
Master) has proved a most influential work in spreading the new music,
but Boulez had already revealed a vivid response to René Char's verse
in the early cantatas, Le Visage nuptial (1946—51) and Le Soleil des eaux
(1948/50/58). He regards the singing of a poem as a convention seriously
weakened by stylized imitation of speech rhythms and intervals; and he

! Drew, *Modern French Music' in Hartog, op. cit., pp. 292-3.
2 The Livre has subsequently been re-worked in a version for string orchestra.

PIERRE BOULEZ 445

aims instead at communicating the expressive message through the
musical revaluation, rather than through the making intelligible, of
texts better ‘understood’ simply by reading.! His wide range of vocal
effect, even regarded purely musically, is notably free from affectation.
In the first movement of Le Soleil des eaux the soprano monody has a
suppleness which, with orchestral scoring of a beguiling clarity (even
when densely contrapuntal), shows Boulez master of a peculiarly French
lyricism; and the impetuous choral writing of the second movement
reaches a natural climax by bursting orthodox musical bounds with
elemental shouts. As the final bars recede into a limpid chamber-music
texture, the whole work describes a curve of intensity that is familiar yet
original.

In the instrumental works which followed, Boulez was to control such
curves, here emerging from the interpretation of a poetic experience, by
a Statistical plan designed to embrace every other feature susceptible to
analysis. The cantatas already show considerable systematization of
rhythm, interval succession (including quarter-tone relations in Le
Visage nuptial), and contrapuntal density, but in elaborating the system
to the exclusion of emotional parallelism Boulez seemed to embark on
an entirely new sea. The evocative titles, which related Boulez to the
line of Messiaen and Debussy, were replaced by the cryptic data of
Polyphonie X for eighteen instruments (1951) and Structures for two
pianos (from 1952). The crossing movements which explain the former
title are not merely of ascending and descending pitch patterns, but of
rhythmic patterns (Messiaen’s use of a rhythmic ‘chromatic’ scale to-
gether with its cancrizans in Cantéyodjayá affords a very simple prece-
dent) and of the governing serial processes; Ligeti’s analysis of Structure
Ia demonstrates a continuing preoccupation in Boulez’s diagonal
selections from his permutation tables.? Messiaen's Mode study had
allowed some freedom of movement, once its fourfold but parallel
restrictions were set out; but Boulez unflinchingly follows truly serial
paths in each parameter. The fortuitous coincidences in Polyphonie X of
pitch, duration, instrumental timbre, and dynamic level? inevitably
result at times in demands which cannot be accurately realized or which
repel the ear; and it seems clear that the craftsman of the sensitive
translucent scoring in Le Soleil des eaux has abdicated momentarily in
favour of the impassioned yet dispassionate researcher.

1 Boulez оп words and music in Cahier de la Compagnie Madeleine Renaud-Jean-Louis
Barrault (May, 1958); cited by Goléa, op. cit., p. 111-13.

2 Gyorgy Ligeti, ‘Pierre Boulez—Decision and Automatism in Structure la’, Die Reihe,
iv (Eng. ed., 1960), p. 36.

3 Boulez on the inevitably approximate nature of dynamic markings: Die Reihe, i, p. 26;
see also his Penser la musique aujourd'hui, pp. 68-69.

446 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Boulez has described as ‘totalitarian’ this first essay in total serializa-
tion.’ His Structures rest on as imposing a network of primary decisions,
but better considered; and the most vexed problem, that of timbre, is
replaced by varieties of attack in the single tone colour of two pianos.
He still writes polyphony but, as Ligeti points out, ‘for all its polyphonic
stratification of series [the music] is formed from discrete elements of
pitch and duration: because of the piano’s characteristic attack, the
acoustic events are concentrated into points that are well defined as to
frequency and time.’? If we were to rate it no higher, the work would
remain an invaluable contribution to the new aural training required
by structures in which each note represents, not a fixed association as
in Messiaen’s piece, but a unique interaction of independently progress-
ing serial mechanisms. Both his initial pitch series (but not register—a
vital field for the composer’s free adjustment) and duration series are
borrowed from the Messiaen model (cf. Ex. 199), and in the first move-
ment, the exposition of their simple permutations naturally produces
sections of identical length (1 ШЕ +2 4- 3... 12 = 78 §s). Each begins
with the simultaneous impact of the first note in every strand in use, the
texture varying between one and six strands; and the sectional character
is further stressed in that one value in the series of dynamics and attacks
holds good for each strand throughout a pitch/duration combination.
(Boulez writes of dynamics as “а kind of superstructure with a demon-
strable function rather than a real factor of structural organization.)

Ex. 202

PIANO g mp legato - ж
5 а 5
Modéré, presque x 24%,
А ха ло
Е

mano те рио | mop
РЕ Банк тата x == Й ^ EE
# ; E >

1 Goléa, op. cit., p. 139. ? Ligeti, loc. cit., p. 42.

PIERRE BOULEZ 447

5 = +
Baas = Хоя элна Бош] «ГУ ae) eae SSeS
нин оу — ———— —M— — ы —

4 b

Trés Modéré 8р art
te С

Ex. 202 shows a complete section of three strands and the first bar of a
four-strand section. The correspondences across the division show how
carefully planned is the super-ordering. The three pitch series here are
clearly a transposition of the retrograde inversion (piano I), and two
transpositions of the retrograde (piano II); the duration series are an
‘inversion’ and two ‘basic sets’. But this terminology has no meaning
apart from the permutation tables, and Boulez set these up by

448 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

numbering transpositions of the pitch series, but uses them as a
numerical basis for the other elements too.

The other two movements of the first book (a second book has
appeared, and the composer's didactic plan comprises twelve move-
ments) break away from the jolts—predictable and eventually monoton-
ous, however varied the intervening patterns—caused by synchronized
permutations of one simple duration series. Far more forceful
oppositions can be engendered when duration series move out of
alignment by using different units, when their larger values are sub-
divided,! and when the degree of activity is further raised both by a less
leisurely operation of the dynamic series and, paradoxically, by the
organization of durations of silence. In the formidably difficult second
piece, Boulez's command of contrasted piano textures, and of their
balance across a wide span, betrays a shaping impulse that can now
impose itself on rigorously ordered material. This is no limp “ореп
form’ thrown up fortuitously by the machinations of a system: its
composer could turn with assurance in the following work to a dialectic
founded in less demonstrable premises.

Characteristically he reverted to the problem set aside in Structures—
the ordering of timbre, now according to an ideal of delicacy that was
not among the preassumptions of Polyphonie X. But he also reverted, in
Le Marteau sans maítre (1953—7), to his earlier search for a new corre-
spondence between words and music. The varied methods of vocal
delivery in Wozzeck (for example), from speech to cantabile line, all
served to underline an expressive meaning literally or implicitly pre-
served in the text. Boulez's scale? moves between a rare extreme of
verbal supremacy (parlando and nominal intelligibility) and musical
supremacy (vocalized sound merging with the instruments) transferring
‘meaning’ to a plane on which words are an intrusion. In fact the
Surrealist texts of Char's poems are strangely illuminated in this process.
The alto voice is identified so closely with the alto flute and viola that
there is no radical differentiation when it withdraws entirely (see Ex.
203), and the instrumental ‘commentaries’ on the poems stand in
essentially the same relation to them as do the word settings. Yet
however fundamental these transitions, he has not subjected them to the
strict rota ordering used by some of his contemporaries nor favoured,
as they do, a deliberate sterilization of words by phonetic dissection.?

The popular allure of Le Marteau owes much to an unusual

1 Subdivision is an antidote to the tendency of large values to attract more attention

than is serially their due. See Ligeti, ‘Wandlungen der musikalischen Form’, Die Reihe, vii,

р. 12.
2 Stockhausen, *Musik und Sprache', Die Reihe, vi, р. 36.
3 Cf. pp. 480 and 491.

PIERRE BOULEZ

Ex. 203
Assez lent (d = 63)
Ato Жеген cédez - - -
Flute E
(sounding ГР
notes)

р
Xylorimba |Ң — — |

Vibraphone

ІІ
ІШІ
ІҢ

Percussion

June niae suis

4 eu а са ас елена,
Guitar [pg Nm camera] m 0: oo 00000 nl
i= Ninus Ж]

|
|

Was ГРЕЯ
(ato) Б ae

ЕЗ
V LI

|
|
|
|
у
||

a b 0]
уша, Hie ---- E
[ Bi |
і Ае) a 1 Е ви]

(muted)

450 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Tempo; УЛ Ба poco rall.
- о ы я
^ % та ет A

a mf
Г т-не Е Е ЕТ е.
Guitar To — ae EEA sr Е-е eS

с MAYER Y. p ——— pe c nin A]
) ASA c3

м ye — —
БЕКЕТИ а сазара

4? А d EN.
| E) А ми | В +] + S
мы Чек == pp
Ге) ы [we dS sNAME ст >]

PIERRE BOULEZ

451

Tempo poco рій lento plus
poco rall. court long
() т mf fen
Fl == —& 7а , 5 E — “Ен
5-2
3 Bp 3 3
Xyl M I ко a

е == у= Ea
) ;
РЕ = |

Guitar ӨШ 7 5 —]

B 7n
Voice Е SEE Ars

E = ма с
Те EIU - cheur 2 3
И Е 1521 6 салса
е. :
— ari Jy. pizz. Ж рі22 та

452 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Ancora più lento 1902 mf —
= 7 : UE (e " ана
«Гр K ae j ва (ET)
н. — 9 7- Еж л
1 8 Miri
a" m аа
Xyl. 6 =
|
vib. H =
р 5 A
pote yuia
М D
Guitar И t 7 an re^ пи лена
py 7 *
872 —
А 2. pp
Voice ==. Е
Е — d i ЕБС
; 3 s'est. tu 6 Э К bm али
> >
m = = Ha NG
Viola Hie te = e=; =
өн 1—4 | p— te =

PIERRE BOULEZ 453

instrumentation that excludes all acerbity in a flickering interplay of
high sounds. Music which never assaults the ears may be an effective
narcotic; and the oriental quality of sound together with the undue
length of some movements can easily deaden the listener's awareness of
anything more specific than a peculiar fragrance. Boulez has pro-
nounced his music immune against analysis,! but he cannot mean it to
be heard in so flaccid a manner: if audiences that find this work appeal-
ing are to learn to listen discriminatingly to new music in general, they
will have at least to sense the subtlety of the craftsmanship in Le Marteau
sans maítre. The variation of timbre, far from a crude pointillisme,
includes newly imagined effects of merging and emerging colour and of
‘hocketing’.2 Rhythmic activity, which seems desperate at a first
hearing,? is varied flexibly between an exact timing of proportioned
cells (see the three commentaries on Bourreaux de solitude with their
background of precise percussive reiteration) and a superimposition of
irrational values which produces a controlled rubato. The systematic
variation of octave register within the line* conceals yet does not entirely
dissipate their tight nuclear groupings, but the prevailing impression is
of an improvisatory fantasy that no longer needs Webern's crystalline
correspondences.

As the works of innumerable lesser serialists show, the accumulation
of restrictions must inevitably produce an increasingly arbitrary effect. 5
To have created the feeling of freedom within the ordered world of Le
Marteau was a worthier achievement, and Boulez's characteristic
reaction was to seek in his next works a controlled relation between such
freedom and a fundamental strictness of technique. The second
Improvisation sur Mallarmé is the purest example of this kind, but the
Third Piano Sonata offers another freedom, an opportunity for the
player to select his own permutation from serial possibilities of move-
ment, constitution and succession planned by the composer. This
element of choice, and therefore of controlled chance, had an honour-
able French precedent (which Boulez was quick to exploit) in Mallarmé's
Livre,9 but its application to music was demonstrated most radically

1 Goléa, op. cit., p. 39, but see his own Penser la musique aujourd'hui (Paris, 1964)»
for a detailed account of some technical methods.

2 Robert Craft, ‘Boulez and Stockhausen’, The Score, xxiv (1958), p. 55.

3 Colin Mason discusses some rhythmic problems of Le Marteau in Music & Letters,
xxxix (1958), pp. 198-9.

4 That it is still possible to view the texture as linear polyphony has been made the
starting point of a criticism of this work as stylized and (by implication) reactionary. See
André Hodeir, Since Debussy (London, 1961), p. 153.

5 Ligeti, ‘Wandlungen .. .', Die Reihe, vii, p. 6.

в Hans Rudolf Zeller, *Mallarmé und das serielle Denken', Die Reihe, vi, p. 5; André
Boucourechliev, ‘Pli selon pli’, La nouvelle revue française, cx (1961), p. 916; Boulez,
* “Sonate, que me veux-tu?” ’, Perspectives іп New Music, i, 2 (1963), р. 32.

454 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN'MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

by the German, Karlheinz Stockhausen (b. 1928); at this point, where
Boulez's leadership of the new school was first challenged, it is necessary
to summarize Stockhausen's earlier work.

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN

Boulez and Stockhausen share skills derived from Messiaen’s
rhythmic teaching, a fervent admiration for Webern’s music! rather
than for the Viennese serial principle, and a naturally exuberant
iconoclasm; and they at first retained enough in common for each to
act as a valuable stimulus to the other’s inventiveness. But this rivalry,
industriously promoted by their disciples, never concealed fundamental
divergences in sonorous ideals. These emerge clearly even in works of
comparable technical complexity, so that the new music, like that of the
past, is powerfully coloured by the personality of the composer.

Stockhausen’s pertinacity in a long and varied training is in illuminat-
ing contrast to Boulez’s brilliant but impatient apprenticeship. After
acquiring conservatory disciplines under Frank Martin and Hermann
Schroeder at Cologne, Stockhausen moved to Paris to study with
Messiaen and Milhaud. At a time when many composers were sampling
the desultory charms of musique concréte he abandoned them for a more
systematic investigation of electro-acoustics, phonetics, and information-
theory under Meyer-Eppler at Bonn. These studies contributed to the
command of electronic resources displayed in his work at the Cologne
Studio,? but the passion for analysis and synthesis which they imply has
equally marked his instrumental writing. Acoustic research has proved
as strong a stimulus to the imagination for Stockhausen as literary
sensibilities have been for Boulez. To this more common stimulus the
German might appear wholly unresponsive, yet the affecting sounds into
which the biblical words of Gesang der Jiinglinge (Song of the Youths)
are transmuted spring as much from a contemplation of the text as from
the wish to demonstrate a hypothesis.

The hyphen in Stockhausen’s title Kontra-punkte (1953) underlines
one technical assumption of this first published work (the earlier
Kreuzspiel (Cross Play) has subsequently been issued in a revised
version). But strict pointillisme is not the only relation in which he sets
the tone colours of ten instruments, reduced progressively to solo piano.
Already there are examples of an opposite extreme—superimpositions
of rapid passages which fuse into aurally inextricable entities of a given
pitch width. Interval correspondences rarely reproduce Webern’s sim-

! Cf. the tributes to Webern by Boulez and Stockhausen in Die Reihe, ii, (Eng.) pp. 40
and 37.
2 Cf. pp. 489-92.

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN 455

plicity but are no less persistent: innumerable patterns are derived by
octave transposition from the addition of a perfect and an augmented
fourth (see the last two bars of Ex. 204(1), and in Ex. 204(1) the assembly
of the chromatic total from these intervals). Permuted dodecaphonic
successions are used, but a less expected link with Schoenberg is pro-
vided by occasional weighty ‘chromatic’! harmonic texture, especially in
the piano, as at Ex. 204(i). Accurate realization of the many irrational
rhythmic groups is made more hazardous by their dispersal among the
instruments, yet they remain calculable against an essentially rigid 3/8
beat.

With the Klavierstiicke I-IV (1954),? experimental pages revealing
little of Boulez’s natural pianistic élan, Stockhausen abandoned the
restrictions of the humanly practicable in his notation of simultaneous

Ex. 204 |
Фф = с. 126)
Mini y Iv uc pue. "iniu О а о И? LS
т ЕМ бє жы, tel
= 24 2 = Ее TEN
Ыы кр сс з m PLE E
ЕССЕ
Piano
Instruments

lie. retaining the tension of chromatic texture such as Schoenberg's Op. 11, по. 3,
written when tonality was so recently exorcized; contrast the weightless sound characteristic
of Webern.

2 The third piece is analysed by Dieter Schnebel in ‘Karlheinz Stockhausen’, Die Reihe,
iv, (Eng.) pp. 126-31.

456 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Piano

Instr. 3 = =

457

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN

гр

458 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Piano

Instr.

(ii)
Interval constitution
of the last two bars

dynamics—see Ex. 205(i)—and duration-proportions. His demands
(e.g. the doubly irrational groups in Ex. 205(ii)) are so detailed that it is
disconcerting to learn that the player, after familiarizing himself with
their complex relation to a metronomic tempo (as fast as possible), may
reinterpret them as less taxing proportions in varying tempi. Patient
study of such notational problems might conceivably lead to a control,
tauter than that of an impromptu rubato, of the discontinuous tempi
essential to the structure. But Boulez has written in an implied re-
ference to these pieces, ‘it is better to substitute an alteration of tempo"!
and the distinction he then makes between concepts of time appropriate

* Boulez, ‘At the ends of fruitful land’, Die Reihe, i, (Eng.), рр. 23-24; see also comments
by Nicholas Ruwet and Henri Pousseur in Die Reihe, vi, pp. 67-68 and 77-78.

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN 459

(= chromatic
segment

Piano

to electronic and instrumental music respectively is fundamental to an
understanding of Stockhausen's development:

In the first case, an unchanging tempo within which durations may be sub-
jected to almost unlimited degrees of variation; in the second a tempo which
is itself subject to the greatest degree of variation but within which there are
limits to the degree to which values may be varied.!

This wide-ranging essay by Boulez abounds in such speculations, often
brilliantly apposite but not always reflected in his own music. Stock-
hausen prefers to work out the implications of his ideas in both com-
posing and theorizing. His next instrumental works, Zeitmasse (Measures
of time) (1955-6) and Gruppen (Groups) (1955-7), apply the concept of
fluctuating tempo to a small chamber group and to large orchestral
forces, while his essay on musical time? has become a required text in
that study. The five wind players of Zeitmasse, although their parts
present unprecedented difficulties, are not required constantly to inter-
relate them on the basis of an identical beat. At times each moves at an

! Boulez, loc. cit., p. 25.
? Stockhausen, ‘How time passes . . ., Die Reihe, iii, (Eng.) р. 10.

460 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN.MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

even but individual tempo, or several parts engage in an independent
accelerando or ritardando with or without even tempi elsewhere; or one
part may rely entirely on cues provided by another. Stockhausen's
theory of time-fields,! degrees of permissible deviation from mathemati-
cal precision in the realization of complex rhythmic notation or in
ensemble performance at tempi without common multiples, rationalizes
the tendency of post-war composers to break free of the old constraint
imposed on horizontal movements in time by rigid vertical ‘harmonic’
alignment. In Webern interval-patterns vary freely between the succes-
sive and the simultaneous, but it is only when intervals as objects for
individual perception have been abandoned in favour of complexes of a
given note-content (see e.g. bar 2 in Ex. 207(iii)) that the composer may
claim that discrepancies in the progress-through-time of the total
sound-constituents no longer impairs intelligibility. In fact, Stockhausen
ensures that his simultaneous tempi do not lose the proximity he intends
and can resume precise alignment; he has calculated the superimposi-
tions with the musical craftsman's awareness of instrumental possi-
bilities. Action-durations,? such as the time which a competent executant
will take to play a given passage 'as fast as possible' or the time dictated
by the requirement “аз slowly as possible, in one breath', provide at
once a feeling of freedom to the player and a measure of some tolerance
rather than of utter unpredictability. і

Clearly, such freedom could not be extended far beyond the confines
of a small chamber group, and Zeitmasse has become legendary for its
rehearsal demands. In writing for bigger forces, Stockhausen concen-
trated on freedom of movement between, rather than within, the tempi
of three orchestras, each with its conductor, and enhanced this for the
listener by separating them in space.? Gruppen demonstrates the com-
poser’s view, prompted by his electro-acoustic researches, of time
relations as a reflection in the *macro-structure' of those existing in the
*micro-structure' (i.e. as vibration frequencies). As a pitch doubles its
value in our conventional temperament after twelve increases by the
twelfth root of two, he experiments with a comparable ‘chromatic’
scale of tempi*—contrast Messiaen's additive scale of durations; see
pp. 439-40 and 446, and Ex. 206(1) and (ii).

This scale can be arranged serially, and with three orchestras each may
have rests in which to prepare the next tempo (see Ex. 206(iii)). Having
equated tempi with chromatic fundamental pitches, Stockhausen then
equates constituent rhythmic values with the superimposition of

! Stockhausen, loc. cit., р. 30. ? Stockhausen, loc. cit., pp. 34-35.
? Stockhausen, *Musik im Raum', Die Reihe, vi, pp. 61-62.
* Stockhausen, ‘How time passes . . .’, Die Reihe, iii, (Eng.) р. 21.

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN 461

Ex. 206

(1) 277.2 311.2 349.2 392.0 4400 493.9

Vibration frequencies 261.6 293.7 329.7 3700 415.4 466.2 5232
(per second)
= pitch е efe

Gi
Fundamental phases 636 714 801 899 1009 1123

(per minute) o= 60
= tempo 674 756 849 952 1069 120

(Баг 4) J = 120 end of Group 1

i Ем

Tempi of opening

groups in = 95
МН Пи = 3 Бы
(4 represents the beat; II г
for the manner of its silent beats

subdivision, see Ex. 207 iii)

Group 2 begins =127 (from III)

ПЕЕ 2 S525 сыга о

Group 3 begins

X ЕЕ ee = SSS

silent beats

harmonic partials that produces tone-colour, overlaying his funda-
mental tempo phases—e.g. the semibreves in Ex. 206(ii)—with a variety
of ‘formants’, fractions which coincide to reinforce the beginning of
each fundamental phase! (see Ех. 207(ii)). Thus the use of irrational
values foreshadowed by Webern and favoured by Stockhausen's
generation, is interpreted as a magnification of the natural phenomenon
of timbre: ‘rhythm of the sound’ is paralleled аз ‘rhythm of Ше Баг’.
This brings us no nearer aural perception of the analogy, since a wealth
of formants? suggests no transformation into a higher unity, though it
does merge like a wealth of partials into an inextricable sound. Yet
1Tbid., pp. 16-18.

2 Ibid., рр. 26-28, gives an explanation of the ‘formant spectra’ which regulate the
selection of formants sounded.

462 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Stockhausen's theory does enable him to plot the fluctuations in rhyth-
mic density so typical of his work, and many transitions in Gruppen
exploit the territory between apprehension of rhythmic activity as tempi
and as eventful but opaque, and therefore immobile, sound.

A similar distinction is made between co-existent instrumental
textures that merge and those with a high degree of 'permeability'.!
But Stockhausen's spatial lay-out also permits arresting motions of a
uniform timbre; a quasi-fugal exposition of nine brass entries is dis-
tributed in space and its climax-chords dynamically manipulated so as
to swirl round the orchestras. By a clear scheme of timbre predominances
and transitions almost two hundred small ‘groups’ of material are
welded into far longer sequences. Together with organization of tempo

Ex. 207

PARTIALS 12
x2 x3 x4 x5 хб хт x8 хо хю Xll Xi? 4.
ел LE

Vu а e

FUNDAMENTAL
FREQUENCY

(i)

‘FORMANTS?

FUNDAMENTAL
PHASE

* Ligeti, ‘Wandlungen der musikalischen Form’, Die Reihe, vii, pp. 8 and 14.

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN 463
(ш) 4-19

Flute

Alto
Flute

Тр,

Holz-
Trommel

Trommeln

Marimba

Keyed
Glockenspiel

Harp

I
Vins. Il

IH
Vins. IV

Violas

>. E c
Dee normal и

1 ГЕ
сае тя те

mf Tutti senza vibrato D mf

Chromatic segment Fundamental phase: 4
(‘band width’) Formants: 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

464 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

and timbre a third serialism, of ‘band-widths’, functions no less directly.
Activity within the groups 15 often no more than a constant flickering of
many formants between pitches selected by a super-row, but these
present the utmost diversity between a tight cluster of semitones (see
e.g. the first bar in Ex. 207(iii) and its activation in the next bar) and a
punctiliously spaced wide distribution of twelve pitches (occasionally
more—octaves pass unnoticed at moments of densest activity). As
many of these distinctive sound patterns remain immediately recogniz-
able despite reorganization of scoring and rhythms, they provide another
source of the work’s remarkably integrated effect. The formidable
theoretical concepts of Gruppen are reflected in diversity of detail con-
tributing to a form of powerful simplicity. The espressivo of its string
writing and the furious vigour of its jazz-influenced climax provide the
closest ties with familiar rhetoric in all Stockhausen, while its frank
emphasis on the spectacular element natural to orchestral performance
may yet help to establish this score as a valuable bridge between the
composer and an uninitiated public.

Stockhausen’s spatial distribution of orchestral sound logically re-
solved the contradiction posed by the delicate elaboration of post-war
serialism and the gargantuan apparatus of the nineteenth-century
orchestra: when composition is stratified the listener can concentrate on
local detail or broader relationships. His example was followed by
many of his contemporaries, including Boulez (in Doubles, performed
in 1958 but subsequently rewritten), Nono, and Pousseur, and has also
had important consequences for a natural fusion of electronic and
instrumental sound. In Carré (1960), Stockhausen essayed spatial
writing for four choral-orchestral ensembles. This comprehensive score
has many impressive (and some humorous) moments, but seems to lack
the dramatic cogency of both Gruppen and Gesang der Jiinglinge. Mean-
while Stockhausen’s pioneering had attracted at least as much emulation
in another field.

Klavierstiick XI (1956) has gained a notoriety incommensurate with
its absolute worth as a prototype of indeterminacy and the musical
‘mobile’. (The term was used by analogy with the artistic forms of
Calder and others, in which spatial relations are variable.) Chance modi-
fied only the synchronization of the strata in Zeitmasse and Gruppen, but
in writing for a single performer Stockhausen allowed it to regulate the
succession and quality of events. Nineteen pieces of piano-texture face
the player, who chooses their order at random but follows instructions
in each one as to the manner (i.e. tempo, dynamics and mode of attack)
in which he shall play his next choice. This provision does ensure con-

1 Ligeti, loc. cit., p. 8.

РЕАШЕГХ

КНАЧЅЕМЅ ZYKLUS, 1959 (see p. 465)

A page from the score

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN 465

trasts of material, but means that pitch and rhythm relations have been
composed with no fixed idea of the kind of music they represent. From
this attitude to one which abandons all concern for the precise notes
played may appear a small step, and it had already been taken by the
American, John Cage, and in the ‘graphic notation’ used for works like
Sylvano Bussotti's Piano Pieces for David Tudor. Having recognized the
vanity of earlier dreams of absolute control through multiple serialism,
some composers decided to relinquish what has traditionally been
regarded as their prime function, the construction of exact sound
relationships. However his disciples may have profiteered from this
cheapening of their craft, Stockhausen still retained too much of tradi-
tional German skills to exercise his aural imagination merely in peri-
pheral matters and to decline responsibility for the sounding substance.
His Zyklus (1959),? for an enormous battery of percussion instruments
controlled by one player, explores a field of sound in which pitch con-
tinuity is naturally exceptional. Here operations of chance and idio-
syncratic notation both contribute to a tour de force that admits yet
directs the improvisatory vehemence associated with these instruments
in their most developed environments—tribal music and jazz. In the
Refrain for piano, celesta, and vibraphone (1959), the effect of spon-
taneity does not exclude a keen regulation of sonorities, and this short
attractive piece suggested that Stockhausen's use of his talents was not
to be dictated simply by the principle of novelty at any price.

Boulez first introduced some freedom of performing procedure in
works that appeared later than Stockhausen's. Whether he was at least
as early in conceiving the principle? is less significant than his distinctive
view of it. In allowing an incredibly large number of possible orders of
events in Klavierstück XI, Stockhausen shed the artist's responsibility
to create what he believes to be effective order. Even if we regard
cumulative rhetoric as dependent on tonality and substitute discon-
tinuous “ореп” forms, the very existence of music as ап art presupposes
that some sequences of sound are more satisfying than others; and it
is a perversion of the serial ideal to insist that we should discover these
only by dint of working through many less engaging permutations.

Boulez was repelled by the artistic indifference implied by the in-
finitely variable mobile and ‘indeterminate’ notations, and in his Third
Piano Sonata he can be seen weighing the effect of permitted

1 Stockhausen lectured on *Music and Graphic Arts' at Darmstadt in 1959; see report by
К.Н. Wörner, Musical Quarterly, xlvi (1960), р. 271. Cf. also *Notation-Interpretation'
by Cornelius Cardew in Tempo, 58 (1961), p. 21. Cardew was responsible for the ‘realization’
of Stockhausen's Carré: see his article in Musical Times, cii (1961), pp. 619 and 698.

2 See pl. VI.

? See Goléa, op. cit., pp. 228-9.

466 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

modifications on structures whose broad design remains within his con-
trol.! The five ‘formants’ may be placed in various orders, but the massive
‘Constellation’ or its alternative retrograde version, ‘Constellation-
Miroir', must remain the centrepiece. Within the movements the inter-
preter must choose from alternative routes according to principles so
carefully drawn up that no haphazard presentation of the total material
is countenanced. In the simplest piece, ‘Antiphonie’, each of the two
sections may be played in either the original version or in a variation
printed on the opposite page, a degree of liberty scarcely exceeding that
of many a Baroque structure. “Тгоре” is published in a spiral-backed
form that allows a variety of starting points in the cycle of its four
sections; as one of them (‘Commentaire’) appears twice but is to be
performed on only one of these occasions, a wider range of possible
orders emerges. In addition, two of the sections are composed of obli-
gatory and optional fragments in constant alternation; thus, it is
unlikely that the enterprising player will ever reproduce the same
pattern, yet the sequence is always one that Boulez has planned. Simi-
larly the alternation of blocs (dense harmonic textures) and points in
‘Constellation’ leaves the player free to choose innumerable different
itineraries from this ‘map of an unknown city’,? but the composer
ensures that he does not double in his tracks. The remaining formants,
‘Strophe’ and ‘Séquence’, have not yet achieved their final shape and,
given this concept of the sonata as ‘a moving, expanding universe,’ it
is to be expected that every modification to one movement will tend to
change the composer’s attitude to those he had thought to have per-
fected.

The influence of Mallarmé’s Livre on the flexible shape of this
sonata has been noted. At least four more works by Boulez already
performed remained for long, or still exist as, ‘work in progress’,
due to his view of form as intelligent compilation and to his enthusiasm
for revision. The most ambitious of these, Pli selon pli for soprano and
orchestra, is a tribute to Mallarmé built around three Jmprovisations on
his verses. The impression of the whole work is of the composer’s most
mature achievement, in which his splenetic violence and lyrical sonority
contribute not so much to bizarre contrasts as to a comprehensive
pattern. Boulez has acknowledged his debt to a study of Debussy and
Ravel’s Mallarmé settings,* and the influence of the former is not far to

1 Ibid., pp. 229-30; Boulez’s views on chance are expounded in ‘Alea’, La Nouvelle
Revue Française (November 1957) and Perspectives of New Music, iii, 1 (1964), р. 42. On
the Third Sonata in its first form see Ligeti, ‘Zur III. Klavier-sonate von Boulez’, Die
Reihe, v, pp. 38-40; оп a later stage, see Boulez, ‘ Sonate, que me veux-tu?” °, Perspectives
of New Music, i, 2 (1963), p. 32.

2 Boulez, loc. cit. 3 Ibid. * Goléa, op. cit., p. 251.

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN 467

seek in the evocative, hovering harmonies. The initial poise of the vocal
line gives way to ecstatic convolutions of multiple grace-notes (produc-
ing an inevitably free tempo); and though the orchestra in the final
*Tombeau' reaches a climax of dense improvisatory activity, it is with
the impassioned return of the voice that the work's great circle is
completed. Among the provisions for interpretative liberty built into it
are alternative circuits of procedure selected by the conductor, and
durational schemes controlled by the singer's breath (cf. Zeitmasse): in
Ex. 208, from the second Zmprovisation, all the instrumental groups аге
played freely between the singer's moves.

Ex. 208 4, Senza tempo
-%---------------Б.Қ,Ь>>ББББББ5
Hes
ы
Нагр
Fra

Vibraphone [As
BNE,

Piano

р-н ?
pi *
= ай

= T

p сы

Р:

та

ШЕ въ Не)
BUILT ©

М2 — Д i i
Jpp————— . | trés rapide

Celesta presque aussitot 216—4 Ж> А С ТОР

2: z< y

ГИ b

91% —— Ба

Voice TA |
me, fo -

1 dun seul souffle, aussi lent que possible КЕ REED

468 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

étouffer toujours sur le temps

o. ON ae
ma o a

p chaque fois p
comme un
echo de

8:
h
к= 2 ү е тр
а ==
sec А: =
mor ne
SE SS _ aO [4
© === —
tres а =
2
Ley: m
= == ==
Е : i
P тр i
y ——— = -ło ы
Ga ===
con - tre 1а vi - tre
ta (id) —— m ар

The general transition of the avant-garde from a fanatical ordering of
every detail in time to such fluidity has sometimes seemed a уойе face
explained only by capriciousness or despair; but for Boulez this with-
drawal of attention from the precise construction of each moment has
never involved the purely fortuitous, and has encouraged a breadth of
structure so far without parallel among his contemporaries.

THE AVANT-GARDE IN ITALY AND ELSEWHERE

Despite differences of musical temperament that confirm national
traditions, Boulez and Stockhausen showed obvious parallels, even

THE AVANT-GARDE IN ITALY AND ELSEWHERE 469

reciprocity, in their early technical development. A third composer
whose name was often linked with theirs, Luigi Nono (b. 1924), presents
a further, and very distinctive, national inflexion, but also a single-
minded direction of technique towards the immediate expressive pur-
pose, often of a dramatic urgency. Both Nono and another Venetian,
Bruno Maderna (1920-73), owe much to the teaching of Hermann
Scherchen, a conductor and profound student of modern music who
championed Webern and foresaw his importance for the new generation.
Maderna acquired professional skill as conductor and composer while
Nono was still reading law, and could therefore guide his early develop-
ment. Their attendance at the Darmstadt courses in 1950 founded
contacts between the European advanced movement and the composers
of Northern Italy which flourished in the succeeding decade and
produced some of its most distinguished music. These cultural ties,
altogether closer than may be traced in Petrassi’s neo-classicism ог
Dallapiccola’s dodecaphonic allegiance, imply no renunciation of
national predilections. Nono's Intolleranza 1960 was the first opera of
the avant-garde, but its passionate involvement in the endless protest
against oppression recalls not only Dallapiccola but the revolutionary
Verdi. And Dallapiccola’s concern for lucid sonority and lyrical flow
are reflected, despite constructional devices far more schematic than
his, in the works of his sometime pupil, Luciano Berio (b. 1925).

In basing his Canonic Variations (1950) on a twelve-note row by
Schoenberg, Nono paid tribute to Viennese expressionism and to
dodecaphonic principle, both of which he was to transmute in forging
his mature style. The chamber medium of Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica
(1951)! prompted an uncharacteristic sharpness of line, but the Epitaph
for Federico Garcia Lorca (1951) included Nono’s first attempts to pit
constructive ingenuity against the expressive compulsion generated by
a text, to ‘live in a state of tension between rational and emotional
creative thought'.? The Due Espressioni (1953) are important studies in
the conversion of Schoenberg’s Klangfarbenmelodie to the ambivalent
textures, immobile yet quivering throughout with restless activity, that
have become Nono’s distinguishing sound. Such textures, of constantly
fluctuating colour, dynamics, spacing and density of events, invite the
description pointilliste since instruments and even voices frequently
contribute no more than isolated notes. Here too an ambivalence is
apparent, for the sense of cohesion is stronger than that of isolation.
Much of Nono’s art lies in his scrupulous dispersal across many
registers of notes that are firmly tied together in serial durational

1 Udo Unger, ‘Luigi Nono’, Die Reihe, iv, (Eng. ed.) p. 5.
2 Ibid., p. 10.

470 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

successions (several strata operate at once, based on different sub-
divisions of a fundamental beat) and by the constant, indeed automatic,
revolution across the events in time of a pitch-series: see Exx. 209(1)
and 210(iii). By 1955, many composers had abandoned the fixed twelve-
note succession as a working principle, but Nono's Incontri (Encounters)
for twenty-four instruments consists of forty-one reiterations of a row
and the repetition of the entire structure in reverse. Yet the very auto-
matism of the procedure reveals how far it is from the privileged thema-
tic status of the Schoenbergian series: here the succession merely ensures
an even supply of homogeneous material, while the listener's attention
is occupied by endlessly new engagements between the same notes due
to activity in the other parameters and to register changes (see Ex.
209(1)) Repeated-note flourishes in conflicting durational strata
generate a conventionally ‘rhythmic’ excitement and make a climactic
epigram of the central bar, in which the first and last notes of the row
compete before they exchange roles; but, as with Le Marteau, an
impression of uniformly attractive or intriguing sound may in fact dull
response to the changing ‘encounters’ produced by this method.

In Г canto sospeso (The interrupted song) (1956), variation of or-
chestral and vocal resources in nine short movements ensures a
continued freshness of sound. Due to the consistency of colour within
a choral texture even pointilliste distributions tend to cohere as melodic
strata, while the solo voices still more forcefully reinstate melodic
criteria; it is perhaps not only for ease of singing that Nono forms near-
tonal groupings (overshadowed but not concealed by their contexts) in
setting texts of such simple but harrowing pathos as these last letters of
Resistance workers condemned to death; see Ex. 210(1). To use such
potent literary raw material is to risk disrupting the poise, the distillation
of the experience, without which music becomes inchoate; the more
powerful the impact of such lines on the composer, the greater his need
tó discipline his means of communicating it. Nono has denied Stock-
hausen's claim that his technique of sharing dissected words among the
voices (see Ex. 210(ii)) deliberately masks their intelligibility,! but the

Ex. 209
(i)
Грета} [—— ус соо
ofa = а retro inv. of b

[2 онт
бъз о е Шо = с v =

* Stockhausen, ‘Musik und Sprache’, Die Reihe, vi, p. 42, and see footnote on p. 44,

THE AVANT-GARDE IN ITALY AND ELSEWHERE 471

(ii) 2 rallentando

Ob.

Cir.

Fags.

Hn.

To. Ha
as

Tbne.

rallentando

[e
Cellos

D.B.

(all instruments notated at sounding pitch)

MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

472

ра $m

=
ЕЕ

У}

й
С

5422

|
v. Ты
SII
| г з
| В B

||
li
Це

к
Бараа ри
M — €—

T
г

| 4
| Sy as
| |
Ips +
сыба ma 7 >
[NY [| -

THE AVANT-GARDE IN ITALY AND ELSEWHERE 473

listener finds that it often disperses their immediacy while elevating their
meaning, a traditional and unique function of music. Stockhausen’s
discovery of a serialization of vowel sounds in J canto sospeso may reveal
more of his own cast of thought than of Nono’s; but the latter’s practice
of flooding the whole musical fabric with the colour of specific vowels
(see Ex. 210(iii)(c)) identifies him with a general preoccupation of his
contemporaries with the sounds of language.

The technique is essentially that of Incontri; though the straight row
(Ех. 210(ii)(c); cf. Messiaen's row at Ex. 200(1) ) is not preserved for
every movement, Ex. 206(ii1) shows a typical unfolding of it across four
durational strata (units J^, J', J'? and «^— ее Ex. 210(iii)(a)) according
to a proportional series produced by successive additions—1.2.3.5.8.13;!
dynamics are also serialized, by a dual ordering.? Indeed, of the works
of this period which have impressed audiences as putting artifice
to the service of expressive ardour, // canto sospeso is superficially
nearest to the unsubtle rigidity of totally predetermined texture. Though
the composer's choice of register has been noted as the key to the
beauty of the sound, it 1s his choice of different determining mechanisms
which is elevated here to a decision involving all his artistry. For the
dramatic contrasts spring directly from this. The overwhelming menace
of the wedge of choral sound widening from a vast unison at the words
*Le porte s'aprono. Eccoli i nostri assassini' (The gates open. There
are our murderers), or the powerful compassion of the crescendo-
diminuendo arch in the orchestral interlude surrounded by shimmering
close spectra of string harmonics, realize designs that are in themselves
triumphs of the creative spirit.

Whether Nono surpassed this achievement in essaying a still more
ambitious and overtly dramaticschemein Intolleranza (1960) is debatable.
The elaborate symbolism of Angelo Maria Ripellino’s libretto has not
encouraged as unified a vision, and the note of protest sometimes
rings shrill; but Nono remained the composer most likely to re-create a
peculiarly Italian tradition in terms of the new art. Other works
after П Canto show greater intricacy in applying basically unchanged
methods. The Cori di Didone (1958) to lines by Giuseppe Ungaretti
exploit fanwise chromatic movement and syllabic dissection still further,
yet the level of musical intensity directly reflects the words. Nono has
declared himself against indeterminacy,? but the possibility of an
entirely accurate performance of this work seems dubious. And in the

1See analyses by Stockhausen, loc. cit.; R. Smith Brindle in Musical Quarterly, xlvii
(1961), p. 247, and Unger, loc. cit., p. 10, all are in fact oversimplified accounts of Nono’s
procedures.

? Stockhausen, loc. cit., pp. 48-49.
? Nono, ‘The Historical Reality of Music Today’, The Score, xxvii (1960), p. 41.

MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

474

Bocca chiusa

Solo Soprano

va,

a quasi chiusa

Bocc

ter-

Pu-mi-da.

nel

Күр
DE
| na | 22

Al
yis

| ex Да

Timp.

THE AVANT-GARDE IN ITALY AND ELSEWHERE 475

A Ррр

Eep — наара

poem fe fue c efe ice — [oj Со ———— |
aa Е Тый = mEROm 0 c a EMI
Seer

(a) Durational
Series
1. 2. 3. 5. 8. 13. ( & retrograde)
operating
across strata
of units

как исак Бы ака СЕРА
NOS Е
еее ===

MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

476

ыы

p-5 ф=—)5== ES
ТИИ E Dg E T LER eee

E
кеш

3 Hi» Пе /

l^ ЩО Ще
ци

я! Е.

Ши

EXTA ANT OS

(b) Pitch series

| | E bt
Ыш" E
MIN E ME if J
T A as. | 3 &
Lk RT al a
a 7 |( |
з ы.
%
та и
БІН ПБ ШЕ
SEN hi
Ба o.h E.
| PER DR Ц
Ш}
is C та Е |
Г T у Я
че © Ц ШЕ
В ei Е < ( ы 4

- Ја

nul

рі

VER
eee

=
non

THE AVANT-GARDE IN ITALY AND ELSEWHERE 4

ч
ч

orchestral stereophony of his Composizione 2 (Diario polacca 1958)
(Polish Diary 1958) he demands of a vast apparatus (such as Stock-
hausen devised for the flexible relation of tempi), a precision of timing
across the four orchestral groups which is vital to his purpose yet
extravagantly taxing. The opening bars, at Ex. 211 (brass only), show
comparatively simple entry-delays that move the focal point of the
sound.

Nono's recognition began in Germany, and for some years his work
was scarcely known in his own country. In contrast, Luciano Berio
played a decisive part in stimulating Italian interest in new music, as
founder of the Milan electronic studio in 1955, of the concert series
‘Incontri Musicali' in 1956, and as editor of the journal of that title. In
his early works he excelled in sensitive orchestral colouring and in
handling variation-forms easily apprehended as such. This might

за

478 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960
Ex. 211 Тре.

(J = ca.60) a uer
() [pn И Аи
= —
ORCH. Hn. ум: Tons C а pee ees
n E Ud. 2 A 5
р пт Но. Г 2 1
ЗЕ А ee
Vw
Tone. || а үч 31 га mf—f Р— тр
4 [ки тті 1 Im
(ре —
ГА
ORCH. Hn. ж Е 7 —— p um
(brass) p= mf На. сен ен!
Ley: z ЕЕ.
EZ ( = 5 Ееее
3 Tone. 3 OL g y e ЖИН” JH
() ТИ Пеева Та
P [—— pure
ЕКА
ORCH. Hn. 22.2. Tone. Uem a sn. И

ш
(brass)

ORCH.
IV
(brass)

Pitch series (cf. Ex. 210 iii, b)

върне RE =

suggest a merely decorative talent, but the arrangement of material in
Omaggio a Joyce! is cumulative, and the five variations of the early
orchestral piece Nones (from material for an oratorio on Auden's poem)
are formed into a larger structure. Berio deliberately reinstates here

1 Cf. p. 492.

THE AVANT-GARDE IN ITALY AND ELSEWHERE 479

pitch polarities (their serial superstructure permitting spacious articula-
tion) and the octave—as a unique phenomenon that can be neither
surreptitiously overlooked nor systematically excluded. By building on a
symmetrical row (see Ex. 212) that includes two Ds, he is able, dramati-
cally yet logically, to expose the open octave as the opposite extreme

Ex. 212

retro. inv. of x

to the density of the total chromatic spectrum.! The middle territory
includes many familiar chordal formations, and the work has more of
the Schoenbergian espressivo than is implied by its technical premises
of multiple serialism; the sudden dissolution of climax-texture to quiet
string harmony is a gesture much used in later works. In Quaderni
I (1960), it is almost a cliché, and the widening or narrowing chromatic
spectrum is a very direct means of controlling emotional tension; the
orchestral invention may have been stimulated by experience with
electronic processes yet it remains idiomatic and unfailingly attractive.
Although the five sections may be played in various successions, their
inner forms retain Berio's characteristic simplicity. The String Quartet
(1956) seeks to compensate for an essentially monochromatic medium
by systematic use of vibrato, pizzicato, sordino, and col legno effects,
influenced in this by Maderna's quartet of the previous year.? Here too
variation-principle is at work,? on material of great nervous intensity.
But Berio avoids overtaxing the listener by diluting the stream of
events at times, and his practice of dividing long durations into repeated
notes even provides a link with the rhythmic world of Stravinsky and
Bartók (see Ex. 213).

Berio's Allelujah II (1956-8) profits from the example of Gruppen in its
spatial and temporal conception of five instrumental bodies, but the
scoring and the chain of transformations forged from the initial material
maintain personal traits. Circles (1960), for soprano, harp, and two
percussion players, supplements Stockhausen's views on the progression
between tone and noise, intelligibility and basic speech elements.* The

1R. Smith Brindle, Musical Quarterly, xliv (1958), рр. 95-101; Piero Santi, ‘Luciano
Berio', Die Reihe, iv (Eng. ed.) pp. 99-100.

2 On Maderna’s quartet, see Giacomo Manzoni, ‘Bruno Maderna’, Die Reihe, iv (Eng.
ed.) pp. 115-18.

3 Santi, loc. cit., р. 100. 4 Cf. pp. 470-3 and 491.

480 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Sas
Ve. аа

[У.О. = vibrato ordinario]

disintegration of language is begun here by the poet, E. E. Cummings,
but taken by the composer to the point at which individual consonants
are recognized as additional percussion instruments. Similarly the
musical content is also gradually reduced to ‘noise’, and the entire
process is then reversed for the second half of the piece. The percussion
writing derives from Zyklus, each player controlling fifteen types of
instrument; and its improvisatory practices include the free ‘expression’
of words omitted in the singer’s restatement (see Ex. 214(ii)), while the

THE AVANT-GARDE IN ITALY AND ELSEWHERE 481

singer is twice required to walk to a new position. Although this work
was denounced as a farrago of modernism,! in fact it demonstrates a
notable gift for evocative imagery that has nothing to do with theoretical
speculation (see Ex. 214(1) ) and an arched form naturally adapted to
its descent into elemental sound and recovery of musical meaning.

Ex. 214
(1)
| ae с 7-2” ШЕ а Е]
Voice Нач кшк ишкс SS Ss 4
ті - ver-ly 15 ү
- 5 Ia, -—
Wy 2! кес XI em |
FD El
j р sempre
Harp ;
ENE de
wen [TIRE > [— 1o — г
-- кес E 4 — — — [2
pues no mue Е Ш Е м | -x— |
lascia vibrareb 1
иг = 3—1 2=—
SSS SS EE E келі h E BESS
io. == = Eee bee SS ee ро ра. "d j= А m]
ыы Cf a mır Fu үк - Иа с ааа НЫЕ]
М.у p
flow - er — gone so - Шу by tomb
f) Ц

Y РР
то - - - - -(sly)
^ b te b
7 — жазала E. EI = =:
je Р "DD

1 See the review by К. F. Goldman, Musical Quarterly, xlvii (1961), p. 239.

482 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960
Gi)

Bongos таа
5
қ Тот-Тот |. — та ағасы!
IC.
Pare) 3 Triangles | AREA
3 susp. Cymbals - lis hushed AL. 5

Voice Еа a И eS ааа
5 Ы 2
-rain night
where night
Tamburino basco c ра EUREN
2 Вопро$ of dreamsend| 7”)
П 2 Congas = nun

As two of the most forceful creative personalities of the new music,
Boulez and Stockhausen strongly influenced the development of
numerous lesser men. Any well-publicized artistic movement will
attract untalented imitators, to some of whom the avant-garde implies
only the pursuit of the dernier cri. The restrictions of total serialism and
the freedoms of indeterminacy are equally easy to reproduce, and
innumerable personal foibles can be devised by any composer merely
intent on writing an impressive score. When the average score is of
formidable complexity, the number of those capable of mentally
formulating its sound must be very small; and so the historically un-
precedented position arises in which works reach performance because
no one has felt able to pronounce with certainty that they were unworthy
of it. Fortunately the deception cannot be sustained indefinitely, and
the barrage of technical information thrown up around many new
works—another curiosity of this period—is unlikely to conceal from
the experienced listener evidence of patent ineptitude in the manipula-
tion of sound relationships, rather than of their symbols on paper.

The charlatanism of music that simply apes the fashionable must
not discredit the efforts of composers whose genuinely exploring cast
of mind attracts them naturally to the new paths. Not all of these
composers depended slavishly on the enterprise of the two pioneers.
The Belgian, Henri Pousseur (b. 1929), an associate of Stockhausen
in the earliest electronic investigations, has also shown the German's
influence in his instrumental works. But his individual treatment
of texture has developed from a detailed study of Webern,! and from

1 Henri Pousseur, ‘Webern’s Organic Chromaticism’, Die Reihe, ii, (Eng. ed.) pp. 51-60;
also his comparative study of Schoenberg and Webern, Incontri Musicali, i (Milan, 1956).

THE AVANT-GARDE IN ITALY AND ELSEWHERE 483

speculation of evident integrity.! His important analysis of Webern's
*organic chromaticism'—chains of connexion through the semitone
and its octave-transpositions that dispel the polarizing tendencies of
other intervals (even including the octave)—has led directly to the
predominance in his idiosyncratic harmonic system of the major
seventh and minor ninth. Twelve-note serialism is not relevant to his
schemes, but the Quintet (1955) in memory of Webern adapts the
interval succession of the row in that composer's Op. 22 Quartet. Each
interval is regarded as a chromatic scale segment, all its semitonal
constituents appearing, but as octave-transpositions; as their order of
appearance within a given time-span is free, the relations of the various
strata can be regulated so as to control the by-product of other
intervals.? In later works, Pousseur has diversified his consistent but
monotonous harmonic material by acknowledging non-chromatic
intervals as primary factors, but systematically neutralizing their polar
tendencies through added chromatic relations. Ex. 215 from his
Impromptu shows a simple example founded in whole-tone intervals:

“Ех. 215

Allegretto (^ c. 96)

Tritones

1 Pousseur, ‘Outline of a Method’, Die Reihe, iii, (Eng. ed.) pp. 44-88.
? See the critical analysis of the Quintet's procedures in G. M. Koenig, ‘Henri Pousseur',
Die Reihe, iv, (Eng. ed.) pp. 16-28.

484 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

accel, - - E Ea is Zr PE im E.

Tritones )

It also shows an early attempt to perfect a notation for the ‘qualitative
relationship’ of durations, freed not merely from complex irrational
values but from all numerical rigidity. Grace-notes within the square
brackets are included within the main note- (or rest-) value, and the
conventions of commas, dashes, and plus-signs allow the player to
concentrate on immediate subtleties of proportion such as the listener
can detect. The Mobile for two pianos (1958), in extending this liberty
to two players, naturally exploits the flexible relation of the strata first
explored by Stockhausen! and possibilities of their varied arrangement
such as Pousseur had already provided in his electronic piece Scambi
(Exchanges) (1957).

It was among the circle associated with Stockhausen in Cologne,
mostly of musicians from peripheral countries, that the pursuit of
innovation sometimes outstripped any demonstrable urge towards new
expressive media. Bo Nilsson (b. 1937), a Swedish composer of pre-
cocious talents, in his vocal works Méádchentotenlieder (Dirges for Girls)
(1958) and Ein irrender Sohn (A straying son) (1958) fluently synthesized
vocal resources and instrumental colourings reminiscent of Le Marteau
with the temporal freedom and stereophony of Gruppen, adding some
distinctive treatment of octaves (as tone colour) and of near-conven-
tional line. The nervous sensitivity of these works is signally lacking in

1 Pousseur, ‘Musik, Form und Praxis’, Die Reihe, vi, pp. 82-83.

THE AVANT-GARDE IN ITALY AND ELSEWHERE 485

the grotesque Zwanzig Gruppen (Twenty groups) for piccclo, oboe, and
clarinet. By applying simultaneously the action-durations of Stock-
hausen's Zeitmasse and the ‘mobile’ principle, Nilsson contrives to
accumulate up to one hour's sound from the superimpositions of diverse
unequal lines selected in random order from sets of twenty per player.
Since no further control is imposed, and indeed entirely unforeseen
juxtapositions must be the only subjects of the listener's attention,
it is difficult not to believe that an indistinguishable effect could be
produced from any suitably complex material; a few random groups
(Ex. 216) will reveal the contrast between their meticulous performing
directions and the anarchy of their relations.!

Ex. 216
а verlangsamen ( А: )-.- =
} Фр
Piccolo (8va)
Oboe
. Clarinet
(sounding notes)

——————— -——— [d
a карты

К===Е= beschleunigen РР =
D e

Не: verlangsamen

Ch.

1Cf. Hans Rudolf Zeller, ‘Mallarmé und das serielle Denken’, Die Reihe, vi, p. 29,
n. 11. On Nilsson’s divorce from practicalities in devising an electronic score, see G. M.
Koenig, ‘Bo Nilsson’, Die Reihe, iv, (Eng. ed.) pp. 85-88.

486 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Picc. -(р

Ob.

L3:24 13-24

Си.

— пай ЕЕЕ
г-9:2- verlangsamen

mE
Picc.-f?
МЗ!

Ob.

Cit.

The Argentinian, Mauricio Kagel (b. 1931), has sought constantly to
enlarge the sonorous possibilities of familiar media, introducing quarter-
tone harmony as well as familiar indeterminacies in his String Sextet
(1953-7) and creating some beautiful new piano sounds through the
percussion player іп Transicion II (John Cage’s influence is more than
modish here), but his Anagrama (1957-8) extends its play on the
assonances of a speaking choir to an inordinate length without aspiring
to the musicality of Berio's Omaggio.

Behind such projects, however admirably executed, lurks the tempta-
tion to “épater le bourgeois’. Confidence іп the essential vitality of the
new movement is sustained by many musicians from all over Europe
who accept some of its idioms as a natural vehicle for undemonstrative
craftsmanship of a very high order. The adoption of advanced serial
techniques by composers of the Eastern bloc, and the contemporary

MUSIC ON TAPE 487

music festivals there (Warsaw, from 1956), might be interpreted as
nostalgia for old artistic alliances or as spirited repudiation of Soviet
aesthetic ideology, but the development of men like Haubenstock-
Ramati (b. 1919) and Witold Lutoslawski (b. 1913) suggests a less
factitious sympathy with new methods. Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, in
his Symphonies de timbres (1957), finds a convincing role for development
and (reversed) restatement of material, a fluid rhythmic variety thatstops
short of insuperable difficulties, and a distinguished range of orchestral
colourings; evidence of such mastery compelled respectful investigation
of later, more enigmatic, scores like the Mobile for Shakespeare (1960).
Haubenstock left Poland in 1950, but Włodzimierz Kotonski (b. 1925)
took the lessons of Darmstadt back to Warsaw and worked at the
electronic studio there. His Kammermusik (1958) and Musique en relief
(1959) show a gifted miniaturist with a remarkable ear for ingratiating
textures; so gentle an introduction to modern techniques may well win
them an audience. Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933) set out from a similar
position, and in his subsequent career he has shown a remarkable
ability to adapt new techniques to ends which quite unsophisticated
listeners find compelling: the opaque textures (for fifty-two string parts)
of his Tren—Ofiarum Hiroszimy (Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima)
(1961) marked an important stage in this development. Lutoslawski's
Muzyka zatobna (Funeral music) for Bartok (1958) similarly marked the
beginning of a new style in a development which has shown initiative
and imagination in the use of new techniques.

MUSIC ON TAPE

Тһе rough distinction made earlier! between a French ordering by
instinct and а German organization by system 15 reinforced by the
different approaches in these countries towards a music that eliminates
the interpreter. Musique concréte is above all an art of tasteful arrange-
ment of existing sound shapes, while electronic music, faced with an
infinite wealth of sound potentialities, must shape according to rigidly
restrictive principles if it is to avoid a chaotic prodigality. Their direct
construction of the means of production is perhaps no more significant
ultimately than their recognition of finer distinctions in aural pheno-
mena formerly classed indiscriminately as ‘noise’, distinctions which
may contribute to the balance and contrast that form musical experience.
In this respect, electronic music, founded in acoustic synthesis, offers
incomparably more precise criteria for a new tabulation of sound since
it can order its inner structure.

1 Cf, pp. 441-2.

488 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

The patchwork construction of forms from an arbitrary assembly of
‘concrete’ pieces of sound (by manipulation of magnetized recording
tape) offers an obvious parallel to collage methods in the visual arts.
Both demand of the creator more aesthetic judgement than conven-
tional craftsmanship, and both may confuse our sensibility to the whole
by an appeal to sentimental associations with still recognizable con-
stituent objects. The works which have achieved the widest note since
Pierre Schaeffer's experiments! began in Paris in 1948 are frankly
directed towards programmatic or impressionistic ends. In the Syrn-
phonie pour un homme seul, by Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, a technique
which has proved admirable for prompting a wealth of suggestions
during a few moments of incidental sound is used to produce an
evocative pattern far more ramified than that of L'Aprés-midi d'un faune
with means often cruder than those of Pacific 231. Ballet, which has so
often reduced the status of music intended to be self-sufficient, has come
to the rescue of this type of concrete music by providing a visual
continuity around which the sound can conjure up its momentary
fantasies.

Several French composers, intent on a music that should justify its
continuity by an inherent logic, experimented with the equipment
assembled by Schaeffer. Though his stock of sounds was too ad hoc to
offer possibilities for a permutational treatment of their constitution—
rather than of their juxtaposition, already practicable in serialized
instrumental timbre—the techniques of tape montage? did offer a
guaranteed precision in the execution of complex rhythmic superimposi-
tions such as seems likely to remain for ever beyond instrumentalists'
skill. Boulez constructed two Etudes (1951-2) setting out respectively
from a single sound and six types of sound, but he was satisfied by his
results only in the field of durations.? Messiaen's essay Timbres-durées
(1952) merely worked out at greater length some formulas of his con-
temporary instrumental music. By now most composers whose ideas call
for direct contact with the sounding material are more attracted by the
wider and measurable resources of electronic sound-generation. Yet the
unusually penetrating quality of Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jiinglinge
and Berio’s Omaggio a Joyce springs from an analytical treatment of the
most evocative of all ‘concrete’ sources—the sound of the human voice.

When such existent sources are abandoned and musical composition

1 Schaeffer, A la recherche d'une musique concrète (Paris, 1952); see also Lowell Cross,
‘Electronic Music 1948-53’, Perspectives of New Music, vii (1968), р. 32.

2 On musique concréte see Schaeffer, op. cit., and Goléa, op. cit., pp. 150-3; on electronic
music, various articles in Die Reihe, i; see also the bibliography іп. Aurelio de la Vega,
‘Regarding Electronic Music’, Tempo, 75 (1966), and in Journal of Music Theory, vii (1963).

3 Boulez has stressed that his concern was for organized duration, not for a mere juggling
with the physically impracticable: Die Reihe, i, (Eng. ed.), p. 24.

MUSIC ON TAPE 489

begins from the electro-acoustic fundamentals (the pure sinusoidal tone
and, at the other extreme, the *white noise' in which all pitches are
present), the composer can only abandon a rhetoric based on principles
of physical tension and relaxation that no longer have any relevance
to a patently ‘effortless’ aural phenomenon. АП sounds—of whatever
pitch, duration, volume, density, or timbre—are then without associa-
tions of graded human achievement and are a priori equally feasible.
This limitless repertoire did not become available until a few years after
composers writing for conventional resources had begun to attempt a
music that should order these parameters simultaneously (Webern and
Messiaen) or make distinctions as fine in the sphere of noise as in that
of note (Varèse). In fact timbre, never the most satisfactory element in
the total serialization process, has ceased to be a parameter in the old
sense and is recognized as the organization at another level (the micro-
structure) of relations of time (i.e. vibration-frequencies)! and intensity,
the familiar tone colours being no more than particular examples (with
their partials in ‘harmonic’ proportions) from a continuously variable
and thus serially permutable range.

An appropriate attitude to its control on two levels therefore existed
before the new medium, but its surrender to such control emphasized
how much instrumental performance had been fertilized by individual
unpredictability and idiosyncrasy. The investigation of this latter field
has been noted ;? but at the same time as ‘live’ music was being made to
depend increasingly on the unique, unrepeatable quality of the individual
performance, music for mechanical means of production, instead of
being the petrifaction of one such performance, was seen to be most
aptly conceived as a precise correlation of measured sounds. The onus
remained with the composer-operator to demonstrate in the process
anything more widely compelling than the appeal of the underlying
pattern of calculations. Yet he was confronted at each stage of his work
by the aural implications of his theories,* and so empiricism inevitably
became an important modifying factor.

The challenge was taken up with enthusiasm, if not with consistent
success. Within a few years of the establishment in 1951 of the first
studio, at Cologne under the direction of Herbert Eimert (1897-1972),
attempts to synthesize familiar sounds? were rejected as distractions

1 Cf. p. 460 for some consequences of this attitude in Stockhausen's instrumental music.

? Cf. pp. 464-8.

3 See С. M. Koenig, “Во Nilsson', Die Reihe, iv, (Eng. ed.) pp. 85-88, on the folly of
planning an electronic composition without access to its realization in sound.

4 Herbert Eimert, loc. cit., p. 5; Stockhausen, ‘Elektronische und instrumentale Musik’,
Die Reihe, v, p. 50.

5 E.g. Eimert's Glockenspiel (1953-4), based on an analysis of bell sounds.

490 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

from the task of relating an external musical order to the internal
acoustical order: ‘everything is designed not to escape from the nature
of electronic sound but to go further into it’. Stockhausen's Studie I
(1953)? was restricted to sinusoidal tones, but their superimpositions
were determined by a serial plan relevant to the structure of the whole
piece,? not by a deliberate creation of harmonic series fusing into single
timbres nor by any restriction to the tempered twelve-note scale. As
well as some rather characterless chords, i.e. combinations without
fusion, it uses the less familiar and aurally intriguing phenomena known
as tone-mixtures, combinations in which the constituent pure tones
merge to some extent, yet not so as to produce the impression of a single
note. Eimert's Etüde über Tongemische (Study in tone-mixtures) (1954)4
deploys five mixtures, each of nine partials and each transposed to nine
different registers, with results far more congenial to the medium than
the relapses into instrumental styles of his Fünf Stücke (1954—5).

Though the new territory of tone-mixtures was the most immediately
attractive, investigations were made on both sides of it. Paul Gredinger
in Formanten reached back towards the nature of instrumental sound in
seeking to regulate the harmonic ordering of partials so as to produce
a gradually changing timbre. Stockhausen, in Studie II (1954),9 the
first electronic work to be published as a diagram," varied the widths of
mixtures and the closeness of their superimpositions, often approaching
the dense band of adjacent frequencies of ‘coloured noise’ (i.e. a filtered
segment of white noise, referable only to a pitch area); the durational
plan of this short piece is heard as a rhythmic life, diverse yet coherent.
Here the recognition of individual pitches is no longer of prime impor-
tance and the music is characterized by just that ‘atonality’ which
Schoenberg scorned as an impossibility. In the Klangfiguren by Gottfried
Michael Koenig,® the material is restricted to ‘noise’, so diversely
graded as to suggest a musical potential higher than that of a conven-
tional percussive apparatus.

In Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (1955-6),? electronic sounds
take on a disturbing ‘otherness’ when set in relief by the humanity of a
boy's voice, racked at times out of intelligibility, but never out of

! Eimert, loc. cit., p. 10. ? Recorded on DGG LP 16133.

3 Stockhausen's analysis in Technische Hausmitteilungen des NWDR 6 (1954) is sum-

marized by Burt in “Ап Antithesis', ТЛе Score, xix (1957), p. 64.

4 DGG LP 16132.

5 Pousseur, *Formal Elements in a New Compositional Material, Die Reihe, i, (Eng. ed.)
p. 32, and Gredinger, ‘Serial Technique’, ibid., р. 40.

ê DGG LP 16133.

? Vienna, 1956.

з С. M. Koenig, ‘Studio technique’, Die Reihe, i, (Eng. ed.) pp. 52-54; 'Studium in.
Studio', Die Reihe, v, p. 74; Klangfiguren is recorded on DGG LP 16134.

9 DGG LP 16133.

MUSIC ON TAPE 491

recognition, by the dissection of its speech elements. Effects such as the
distant murmur of multitudinous identical voices have a dramatic
impact far more direct than Stockhausen's comments on the work would
suggest; his concern is to incorporate vocal sounds as natural stages
(complemented electronically) in the continuum that links tone to noise,
vowel to consonant.! His vivid imagination for broad effects is further
revealed in the spatial direction and movement of the sound by multi-
channel distribution.? This has subsequently become a crucial aspect of
electronic composition and has helped to combat the faintly ridiculous
sensation with which an audience concentrates on sounds emanating
from a single ‘pseudo-instrument’.* Stockhausen’s fanatical devotion
to this art is sustained by a vision of public music rooms (spherical
ideally) giving continuous performances of spatial music.* However
jgminiscent this may seem of some deplorable cinematic techniques,
complex stereophony is an altogether natural development of machine-
music and may help it to achieve a persuasive idiom owing nothing to
instrumental practice.

Another achievement which lies ahead is that of a basis for the
criticism of electronic music. Such ‘scores’ as exist are instructions to the
technician but a dubious boon to the musical, rather than acoustic,
analyst;? often the composer who has constructed his own work keeps
no record of his procedures and has no further interest in them. In this
unprecedented historical situation the critic must rely largely on an
instinctive perception of formal balance. His recognition of certain
broad classes of sound may become as automatic as that of fixed instru-
mental timbres, but there will always remain a degree of uncertainty in
the means which will compel him to consider more searchingly the end.
The pointed avoidance of emotional overtones in such titles as Continuo
or Perspectives should discourage him from seeking raisons d'étre out-
side the sounds themselves. This quandary may ultimately be beneficial,
but meanwhile electronic works have found more receptive ears when
presented less enigmatically. Artikulation, for example, by Gyórgy
Ligeti (b. 1923) is acknowledged to be humorous in intent.® Its sounds,
individually suggestive of screams and whistles, pistol-shots and bath-
water, were long ago drained of risible potential, but are juxtaposed and

1 Stockhausen, ‘Musik und Sprache’, Die Reihe, vi, p. 52; 'Actualia', Die Reihe, i,
(Eng. ed.) p. 45.

2 Stockhausen, ‘Musik im Raum’, Die Reihe, v, p. 60.

з Boulez, ‘At the ends of fruitful land . . ^, Die Reihe, i, (Eng. ed.) р. 28.

* Stockhausen, Die Reihe, v, p. 60.

5 Зее however B. Fennelly, “А Descriptive Language for the Analysis of Electronic
Music’, Perspectives of New Music, vi (1967), p. 79.

® Stockhausen, ‘Elektronische und instrumentale Musik’, Die Reihe, v, p. 53; see also
Ligeti, ‘Wandlungen der musikalischen Form’, Die Reihe, vii, p. 14.

492 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

counterpointed here with so much wit and musical craftsmanship that
the piece 15 exhilarating rather than farcical.

The facilities of the Cologne Studio could not provide for all the
composers with ideas that called for realization in the new medium.
Under the direction of Maderna and Berio, a studio was opened at
Milan in 1955, and Pousseur worked there until facilities were available
at Brussels in 1958, while a Dutch studio was used by Henk Badings.
Eastern European interest іп Western musical developments was con-
firmed in the institution of a studio at Warsaw and, still further afield,
America and Japan Joined the pioneering movement. Many of the early
works produced at these centres are no more than studies, but two
pieces made at Milan call for notice. Pousseur's Scambi (1957) attempts
to compensate for absence of the interpreter by introducing the element
of choice so industriously cultivated in instrumental music like his own
Mobile for two pianos. The individual strata of Scambi are composed by
a characteristic application of precise filtering-techniques to the
random phenomena of white noise, and the operator may select from
a variety of possible schemes his own sequence and superimposition.!
Berios Omaggio a Joyce (1958) depends more heavily than does
Stockhausen's Gesang on the concréte medium of a human voice, here
reading a passage from Ulysses. Having analysed these sounds, Berio
proceeds to manipulate them into an edifice of disturbing beauty in
which ‘musical’ values—of colour as well as pitch—become far more
important than verbal intelligibility. The lyricism of this work and its
satisfying emotional curve are Italian qualities which remain recogniz-
able in more orthodox pieces like Berio's Momenti and Maderna's
Notturno. Both composers have also experimented with the confronta-
tion of electronic and instrumental sound.

A pointer towards such synthesis was provided by Edgar Varése
(1883-1965). After the intrepid acceptance in his early works of ‘noises’
as essential extensions of music's basic material —sound (this in itself
being a concept for which few were ready in the early thirties)?—Varése
had withdrawn from composition, but not from vigilant enquiry into
the nature of noise. More than any eccentric of this century's music he
saw his ideas pass into common currency, for the perfection of tape-
recording techniques and of electronically generated sound gave them
an unsuspected validity. Though his early works have been discovered
with enthusiasm, the example of Déserts (1954) has been more widely
followed in its combination of instrumental sounds (piano, wind, and

1 Marc Wilkinson, “Тууо Months in the Studio di Fonologia', Тйе Score, xxii (1958), p. 45.

? Wilkinson, “Ап Introduction to the music of Edgar Varese’, The Score, xxi (1957),
р. 5; Milton Babbitt, *Edgard Varése: a few observations of his music,’ Perspectives of
New Music, iv (1966), p. 14.

CONSERVATISM AND COMPROMISE 493

percussion) and a recorded tape (of noise sources); its crude vitality
proved his musical nerves to be as strong as ever, and his later Poéme
électronique (1958), dispensing with instruments, is a tour de force con-
structed for the multi-channel reproducers of Corbusier’s pavilion at
the Brussels World Fair. Meanwhile the integration of player and
machine proceeded through forms as various as Maderna’s Musica
su due dimensioni (1958) in which a solo flute plays against electronic
background, and Pousseur’s Rimes pour différentes sources sonores
(1959) which engages three orchestral groups and two loudspeaker
channels. In this field too, Stockhausen attempted an exhaustive
exploration: his Kontakte (1959-60) aims once again at a sound con-
tinuum (electronic sources providing transitional stages between
instrumental) but he brings a new ingenuity to spatial disposition and
rotation of sound produced from a circular formation of four loud-
speakers with the two players (piano and percussion) at its hub.! Though
these were among the earliest essays in synthesis, they already suggested
that audiences welcome the guidance of palpable patterns of human
achievement. This does not invalidate electronic media, and may indeed
hasten their development and recognition as artistic expression through
the ordering of sound—in short, as music.

CONSERVATISM AND COMPROMISE

Although many writers consistently deplored the manifold innova-
tions which obsessed some of the most notable creative talent in
European music during the sixth decade of this century, it was no longer
possible to envisage the emergence of a serious style which would show
no trace of the new strategic ordering of musical time, pitch, intensity,
and colour. There were composers, not belonging to the avant-garde,
who found that their slower progress had none the less brought them to
a point where they were able to contribute to some valid synthesis. Such
men, sometimes intelligently interested in their contemporaries’
explorations, found themselves a territory among the diverse technical
advances made but not fused during the first half of the century.
Conservatism proved the refuge of scarcely more of the untalented than
were to be found in esoteric circles, and was by no means automatically
a dismal academicism. The common sense that views tradition as a
measure of, not a defence against, the present can often adapt or
interpret new idioms in forms acceptable to a wider public.

Whatever the varieties of individual method to be found among the

1 The theoretical basis of Kontakte is discussed by Stockhausen іп ‘The Concept of
Unity in Electronic Music,’ Perspectives of New Music, i, 1 (1962), p. 39.

494 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

new serialists, they could draw confidence from their essential unity of
purpose; and they present a ‘movement’ that will continue to engage
historians' attention. Outside their confines no such solidarity exists, and
the species of craft practised permit no neat classification. Switzerland,
always unsympathetic to extremist doctrines, provides a typical cross-
section in the work of three composers of the generations after Frank
Martin. The operas of Heinrich Sutermeister (b. 1910) have a devoted
public, for their musical language firmly excludes any trace of recent
developments. Comparison of this innocuous diatonicism with Britten's!
flatters a pedestrian talent with none of Britten's gift for the unpredict-
able reassessment of the apparently obvious. Sutermeister's exact con-
temporary, Rolf Liebermann, has yoked twelve-note method to an
elegance that its originator never sought, notably by the use of triadic
rows;? these provoke none of Berg's unrest but a stream of figurative
chatter owing something to Hindemith. The Concerto for Jazz Band
and Orchestra fails to find much common ground between elements so
disparate as jazz and dodecaphonic music, but a keen sense of musical
theatre makes his operas apt, if rarely penetrating. The work of Klaus
Huber (b. 1924) represents the moderation of a later generation. Taught
by Blacher and familiar with all the resources developed in the first half
of the century, he has sought a personal synthesis, one that will convey a
mood rarely explored during those years, of religious mysticism; his
chamber cantata Auf die ruhige Nachtzeit (At the quiet night-time)
(1958) captures this in a serene contemplation of musical symmetries.

Synthesis does not always achieve this poise, and may do no more
than appropriate technical gains without a distinctive expressive note.
Karl-Birger Blomdahl (1916-1968) had an impressive command of tech-
niques that included serialism, and in his chef d'euvre, the opera Aniara
(1957-9), he also drew on tape montage. This work bravely attempts
to provide a comprehensive document for an age in which obsessions
of impending catastrophe are diverted by visions of planetary explora-
tion. But the score has little of the keen fantasy demanded by its
subject: its dodecaphonic basis merely produces a monotonously uni-
form harmonic level in stubbornly traditional textures and rhythms (see
Ex. 217), and so, instead of an imaginatively prophetic music, it presents
studies in the conventionally horrific, lascivious, or ecstatic, which rarely
suspend disbelief. Blomdahl was a pupil of Hilding Rosenberg, as were
two other Swedish composers who have shown the same determination
to escape from a paling nationalism through Central European tech-

1 Winfried Zillig, Variationen über neue Musik (Munich, 1959), p. 221.
2 See Liebermann’s contribution to Rufer, Composition with Twelve Notes (London,
1954), pp. 191-3.

CONSERVATISM AND COMPROMISE 495

Tran uillo a c. 66)
q - D

Jag läng - tar till — lan-det

(I long for the land that is not)

niques. Sven Erik Báck (b. 1919) and Ingvar Lidholm (b. 1921) have
now moved towards multi-dimensional ordering; despite the difficulties
of his compromise position, Blomdahl's work suggests the strongest
talent. In Denmark, an unpretentious synthesis of serialism with strong
inflexions of Stravinskyan choral style is practised in the church music
of Bernhard Lewkovitch (b. 1927).

To detail the innumerable personal solutions worked out by European
composers who have stopped short of complete association with the
advanced movement would be both tedious and confusing. Men like
Roman Vlad (b. 1919) in Italy,! Marius Constant (b. 1925) in France or

! Ronald Stevenson, “Ап Introduction to the Music of Roman Vlad', Music Review
xxii (1961), p. 124.

496 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Tadeusz Baird (b. 1928) in Poland, are evidently conversant with the
recent developments but cautious in profiting from them. The music of
such composers plays a vital part in the endless process of acclimatizing
audiences to sounds they would once have found incoherent, and its
craftsmanship may well surpass that of some who assist in the more
spectacular extension of the frontiers. Yet only an unusually compelling
creative power can give it a dominating position in the contemporary
scene: in the music of Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926), compromise
achieves its most persuasive justification.

Germany's role as chief patron of the new serialism soon extended
beyond the Darmstadt schools and the Donaueschinger Musiktage
(revived in 1950) to the commissioning of many scores by the various
radio stations. Their policy was enlightened and their nominations
catholic; good performances were ensured and audience figures were not
a determining factor. Thus the composer whose position was secured
might freely indulge an exploring spirit, seeking no stimulus outside that
of like-minded colleagues. These hermetic conditions inevitably
favoured extravagant innovation for its own sake, but the liberal dis-
semination of experimental music perhaps re-orientated some German
composers originally inclined towards more moderate idioms. Bernd
Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970) for example, whose Symphony
(1953) is an admirable mosaic of expressionist textures, in subsequently
pruning this opulence added to Webernian interval proportions a
strict regulation of other dimensions.! Giselher Klebe (b. 1925)? was a
pupil of Boris Blacher, and the early two-piano sonata suggests no
aspirations beyond the mixture of Stravinskyan rhythmic acuity,
chromaticized diatonicism and swing formulas to be found in the work
of his talented fellow-pupil, Heimo Erbse (b. 1924).3 But Klebe's need
to control a piquant fantasy by intellectual disciplines led him
through orthodox twelve-note techniques handled with virtuosic ease—
as in the String Quartet (1950) or the Rómische Elegien (1952)—to an
individual treatment of serial durations.* Neither this nor his experience
of electronic composition? has led him to abandon a refined thematicism
or the wealth of traditional ‘expressive’ analogy; yet his fastidious con-
cern for craftsmanship has deprived his works, including the opera Die
Rüuben (The Robbers), of the wider currency accorded those of the more
flamboyant Henze. Transition in the opposite direction, though excep-

! Reinhold Schubert, *Bernd Alois Zimmermann', Die Reihe, iv, (Eng. ed.) pp. 103-13.

? W.-E. von Lewinski, *Giselher Klebe’, Die Reihe, iv, (Eng. ed.), рр. 89-97, and A. D.
McCredie, *Giselher Klebe', Music Review, xxvi (1965), p. 220.

3 Francis Burt, “Ап Antithesis’, The Score, xix (1957), p. 71.

* Lewinski, loc. cit., pp. 92-94, on the Elegia Appassionata Trio (1955).

5 Giselher Klebe, *First Practical Work', Die Reihe, i, (Eng. ed.) p. 17.

CONSERVATISM AND COMPROMISE 497

tional, may seem а surer guarantee of popular success. Gottfried von
Einem (b. 1918), an Austrian pupil of Blacher, has shown increasing
attachment to a diatonicism seasoned with glib references to popular
idioms; his Dantons Tod (Death of Danton) (1947) was a landmark in
the post-war recovery of German opera, but a signal decline from the
Büchner opera it in some respects aped.

When the Nazi downfall permitted the vigorous resurgence of German
music, educators like Blacher and Fortner must have visualized a return
to musical literacy less violent than that which has reshaped the
language. Yet if they could not foresee a Stockhausen, they might well
have foreseen a Henze, for in many ways he was to remain faithful to the
ideals of those years. This is not to say merely that he became the
supreme exponent of a synthesis composed of all the major influences
of the first half-century, but that he pointedly dissociated himself from
his contemporaries' belief in intellectual canons as an arbiter of sound-
construction. The composer who in 1947 was seeking *widely-ranging
tender cantilenas'! was still intent on ‘tender beautiful noises’? twelve
years later, and this sonorous vision was far more fundamental to his art
than any one of the techniques he sampled in realizing it. Indeed, he
turned to twelve-note serialism largely because, under the spell of Berg,
he saw in it a way to a rich lyricism, not a substitute for tonal coherence
(cf. Schoenberg) nor one factor in predetermining structure (cf. the early
*post-Webern' experiments). As he soon abandoned its consistent use,
his typical methods have sometimes seemed to be as dependent as were
Stravinsky's on the empirical juxtaposition of apt sounds. But his train-
ing under Fortner and Leibowitz has ensured that spontaneously in-
vented ideas suggest appropriate, and often subtle, means for their
structural extension: ‘structural rules emerge from ideas laid down at
the beginning of a work; their development and variation are subject to
no arrangement imposed from without'.?

His earliest works show the assimilation of Hindemith and Stravinsky
which was then the routine German apprenticeship, and these influences
persist in works which adhere painstakingly to the serial letter. The
Piano Variations (1948) strive to reproduce the manner of Schoenberg's
first serial period (see Ex. 218(1)), yet hesitate to indulge his fearless
pungency of dissonance; Ше tonal implications of the row, Ex. 218(ii),
naturally produced harmony nearer Berg, but Hindemith and Stravinsky

1 Henze on his Violin Concerto, quoted by Reinhold Schubert in ‘Bernd Alois Zimmer-
mann', Die Reihe, iv, (Eng. ed.) p. 105.

? Henze's guidance to his librettists, quoted by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman in
‘Genesis of a Libretto’, Glyndebourne Festival Programme Book (1961), p. 37.

3 Henze, lecture at the Braunschweiger Festliche Tage Neuer Kammermusik 1959,
quoted by Diether de la Motte, Hans Werner Henze—Der Prinz von Homburg (Mainz,
1960), p. 60.

498 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

sometimes affect texture and rhythm. In the Second Symphony (1949),
though the row bristles with cadential possibilities (see Ex. 218(ii)) and
is progressively transposed, the harmony is already beginning to explore
the Stravinskyan immobility bred of inner contradictions (Ex.218(iii)(a) ).
German influences still predominate however: the movement structure
is indebted to Hartmann, the scherzo's twelve-note ground, Ex.
218(iii)(b), uses Blacher's variable metres, wittily reversed in the da capo
after a palindromic trio, and the finale emulates Hindemith's motoric

Ex. 218

(i) BS BS transp.
d=) = lp" "uod

Piano

499

CONSERVATISM AND COMPROMISE

Basic set of Piano Variations

Gi)

еріне p ее

min.

мен ене cece eee Bea

i || ==?
TD Бре ret
Жү Mecsas Sa ае

БЕНЕН occi

tria

min.

гл Triadic or quas
—— Leading notes

dic groups

.---- Tonal groups

Basic set of Second Symphony

W.W. D espressivo

500 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

counterpoint even to the Mathis-like climax in a chorale. One more
serial essay, the String Quartet (1952), is noteworthy for the technical
feat of preserving (free) twelve-note horizontal successions while dis-
tributing the series vertically,! but such skill only serves to emphasize
the faint aura of academicism which surrounds Henze's early instru-
mental music.

Academicism implies the mastery of a technique without a propor-
tionate urge to expression through it. Though much avant-garde music
is academic, that of a composer like Stockhausen reflects a preoccupa-
tion with the material's possibilities so ardent as to constitute his most
characteristic expression. For Henze, the nature of what is to be
expressed is the stimulus to composition, and this assumes more tangible
form in a verbal equivalent: the sonorous formulas cited provide less
pointedly the guidance commonly found in a literary text or a scenario,
and it was inevitable that he would discover his métier in word-setting
and the musical theatre. Experience in writing ballet music (Jack
Pudding reveals the flirtation with jazz which few German composers
can resist), vocal chamber music like the delicate Apollo et Hyacinthus
(1949, his most distinguished serial work of this period), and operatic
essays after Cervantes and Kafka, was summed up in the opera Boule-
vard Solitude (1951), a reworking of Prévost's Manon Lescaut. Having
found the key to his most personal utterance in these fields, he was
reluctant to abandon it in writing for instruments, and the Ode to the
West Wind (1953) for cello and orchestra follows Hindemith's example?
in using Shelley's poem as a continuous verbal undercurrent to the
music.

The extent of literary indebtedness is exceptional here, but a series of
instrumental works confirmed Henze's dependence on poetic moods
(Quattro Poemi, 1955; Drei Dithyramben, 1958). An attitude so redolent
of the previous century demands the qualities it prized: ‘harmony’ as а
basic concept (not a product of exceptional textural conditions), contri-
buting with orchestral colour to sounds considered in themselves
'expressive', though often used as background to one dominating
melodic line. Henze's employment of complex chords that, because of
their constitution from several contradictory triads, have piquancy
rather than acidity, provides an unexpected extension of orthodox
harmonic theory—see Ex. 219 from Drei Dithyramben. This luxuriance
stems from Berg yet avoids turgidity thanks to an ear for orchestral
clarity as scrupulous and inventive as Stravinsky’s. Henze’s melody

1 See Henze’s note on this in Rufer, op. cit., p. 185; also Rudolph Stephan, “Hans
Werner Henze’, Die Reihe, iv, (Eng. ed.) pp. 32-34.
? Cf. p. 406.

CONSERVATISM AND COMPROMISE 501

e b
== S эл ИИО

Огсһ.

is less consistently striking, but his admiration of Italy led him to
emulate the Verdian cantabile, often most effective when least aspiring,
as in the engaging Five Neapolitan Songs (1956). Yet these revaluations
of traditional means did not deter him from profiting by the innova-
tions of his contemporaries. Comparison of the ground from the
second Dithyramb (Ех. 220) with an earlier ground (see Ex. 218(iii)(b))
reveals how much of the new concept of line and rhythm he has
accepted. The 1959 Piano Sonata suggests a need to demonstrate his
freedom of movement in pointilliste textures, even to witticism at their
expense in the final fugue, while the pantomime The Emperor’s
Nightingale (1960) exploits the bravura flute writing and exotically
bright chamber sonorities beloved of the avant-garde as symbols
particularly appropriate to the legend.!

Such a range of style need not be disconcerting in an opera composer
who recognizes the principle of set numbers and the value of parody
techniques. After the prodigality of Kónig Hirsch (King Stag) (1956)
Henze curbed a fantasy sometimes too facile in meeting the challenge of

1 Colin Mason, *Hans Werner Henze', The Listener (17 November 1960), p. 913.

E "S NIGAME

502 MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM: 1940-1960

Ex. 220

a drama so powerful, and apparently so unsusceptible to musical en-
hancement, as Der Prinz von Homburg (1960). His association of
intervals with characters is no guarantee of musical cogency, but deve-
lopments of material such as the battle scene, a typical application of
serial principle to free thematicism, later pared down to a twelve-note
row, reveal how effectively his craft reinforces his dramatic instinct.!
Henze's admiration for Britten, a composer whose sublime simplicity
and fleetness he does not naturally share but most nearly captured in
Kammermusik 1958 (dedicated to Britten), may have prompted his
chamber opera Elegy for young lovers (1961). In its characterizing
instrumental colourings and its use of idioms ranging from jazz to ‘post-
Webernian' vocal fioritura, this summed up Henze's peculiar gifts, and
emphasized the role that synthesis would continue to play in realizing so
personal a vision of sound.

! Diether de la Motte, op. cit., pp. 32-38.

MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

By ARTHUR HUTCHINGS

INTRODUCTION

DURING the years immediately after 1918 music in Great Britain passed
through a tunnel rarely cheered by gleams of the light into which it was
eventually to emerge. Until nearly 1930 discerning critics had the uneasy
impression that Delius and Elgar towered head and shoulders above
their successors. One of the most intelligent representatives of the
younger generation, Constant Lambert, in his Music Ho! A Study of
Music in Decline,! showed the effect of war coinciding with the climax
of a nationalist movement among artists who had little or no commerce
with the avant-garde of other countries, for the war had prolonged that
delay of technical stimuli from abroad which has always flattered
insular conservatism. The last German romantic who had been hailed
as ultra-modern, Richard Strauss, was still deeply venerated, but there
was no comparable cult of French music except among pianists and
singers, some of whom belatedly recognized Fauré’s subtlety and veiled
power. Debussy and Ravel were not explored, but were represented by
frequent performances of two or three pieces which provided a Latin
sauce to the basic German fare. Sibelius’s symphonies enjoyed a popu-
larity in Great Britain that had no parallel in Germany but the Strauss
cult affected not only the importing of other central European music but
also indigenous composition.

Native new music offered no technical advance upon Strauss’s and
did not approach the professional invention or design of even his
poorest works. The so-called ‘nationalists’ at least offered a different
flavour; but it was several years before they offered more than songs
and short vocal or instrumental lyrics, mostly pastoral in character.

In 1919 Holst and Vaughan Williams re-entered the lists. Holst’s
suite The Planets, which had been played only privately in 1918, was
given at a public concert in 1920. Though it was immediately acclaimed
it could not easily be reconciled with the composer of Savitri (1908) and
some short choral works which Holst had published before the war.

1 London, 1934.

504 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

Vaughan Williams, whose name and appearance were almost symboli-
cally insular, had secured a reputation for consistent advance by Toward
the Unknown Region (1907), A Sea Symphony (1910), the song cycle
On Wenlock Edge (1909) and the Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis (1910);
but his London and Pastoral symphonies, first heard in 1920 and 1922
respectively, were more striking leaps forward. They were symptomatic
of the persistent British obsession with the symphony.

While the ambitious young French or Italian composer hoped to
write a successful opera or ballet, his British counterpart lost time in
straining to produce grandiose symphonies. Before considering those
who are held to have succeeded we should consider one who preceded
them.

BAX AND HIS ROMANTIC CONTEMPORARIES

In The Garden of Fand (1916), Tintagel (1917), and November Woods
(1917) Arnold Bax (1883-1953) had demonstrated his rare command
of the orchestral palette. His imaginative use of other materials is shown
in certain chamber works, especially his exquisite Nonet and some piano
sonatas, and Mater ora Filium (1921), a virtuosic motet for double
choir. The seven symphonies which he composed between 1923 and
1939 were well received, especially the Third (1929), which was less
bitter and turbulent than its predecessors; for Bax, shy even among the
friends who marvelled at the facility with which he translated complex
orchestral score into keyboard terms, seemed to release in these sym-
phonies dark moods and passions, their violence offset by dreamy
lyricism that suggested exhaustion after protest. Both passages quoted
here illustrate the last point, though they were not chosen to do so.
Ex. 221, from the Second Symphony (1925), shows how Bax could
write appealing melodies that fall just short of memorability and
distinction:

Andante
Strings

ARNOLD BAX 505

( 89 y
IM WEIT — T3 — d
И ӘД yy BR LT

Ex. 222, from the Third Symphony, how adroitly he improvised what
was needed at any point in a long work—in this case the coda to a big
movement:

Bax disproves the belief that Tristan or Elektra pushed chromatic
harmony to a point beyond which classical tonality finishes, or that
continental composers left little more to be drawn from a large romantic
orchestra. His weakest music is less banal than Strauss’s but his

506 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

strongest, rivalling Strauss in imagination, does not equal him in
coherence and distinction. Bax loved Celtic literature, the Irish land-
scape and seascape, and though his symphonies are not overtly pro-
grammatic their movements begin as if they were intended as tone
poems evoking Celtic legends, or as music for films set in a Celtic
atmosphere.

Bax and Cyril Scott (1879-1970) have been the two most inadequately
assessed among those of Strauss's and Debussy's British contemporaries
who are not labelled ‘nationalist’. To the surprise of his compatriots
Scott was thought by many continental musicians to be 'the leading
representative of modernism in England', perhaps because his compos-
ing chiefly for the pianoforte made him easily accessible. Moreover his
appeal is made almost entirely by impressionist harmony, usually more
complex than that of Debussy or Ravel, and sounding ‘perfumed’ or
*exotic' to an aesthetic served by Vaughan Williams.

Few others who aspired to symphonic poems, romantic symphonies,
music dramas, or works that would have been acceptable before the
war in France or Germany are remembered today. The ambitious
attempts by Joseph Holbrooke (1878-1961) and Rutland Boughton
(1878-1960) at Celtic emulations of Wagner's dramas are virtually for-
gotten. A few of the many songs and part-songs of Granville Bantock
(1868-1946) are still heard, but not his tone poems nor his choral
works, and he is honoured chiefly because he used an official appoint-
ment for the encouragement of young musicians. The only exceptions
are two composers who did not publish anything too ambitious for their
talents. Frank Bridge (1879-1941) might be known to very few concert
goers if it were not for Britten's acknowledgement of his indebtedness to
a fine teacher and mentor, yet so notable a *musician's musician’ as
Bridge deserves mention. He was a fine enough violinist and viola player
to deputize in the Joachim Quartet, and his name was often the first sug-
gested to direct a concert or opera at short notice. Though an admirable
advance can be traced through the major works he composed before and
after the war, his music has no strong public personality, but is cherished
among players of chamber music who recognize his remarkable feeling
for the character of their instruments.

John Ireland (1879-1962) also advanced his technique without
fertilization from Teutonic or Latin sources (except Debussy, who
influenced his keyboard style). Ireland's are among the most satisfying
of the many settings of verses from A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Гай;
and although he is best known by a few conservative works—the choral
and orchestral These things shall be, which is not far removed from the
cantatas of Parry and Stanford, or the picturesque А London Overture—

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS 507

his true artistic worth is better measured by the songs from poems by
Thomas Hardy (1925), the much later piano pieces, Sarnia, and fine
chamber works, such as the Fantasy Sonata for clarinet and piano.
Obviously Ireland took least risk with the largest forces: the basically
traditional harmony of his Piano Concerto, for instance, is merely
disguised by added notes and other decoration. This caution and his
small, finely wrought output testify to shrewdness, not insincerity.

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

Most of the next generation are widely regarded as satellites of Ralph
Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) whose discovery of a distinctively
English idiom is said to have provided a catalyst for talents which might
otherwise have remained ineffective, if not inarticulate, attempting
to do what Strauss and Debussy had done better.

Vaughan Williams was older than any of the musicians mentioned
hitherto, each of whom might have described himself, as Bax did, as ‘а
hopeless romantic. He was therefore more of a pioneer. We shall
see that he was partly led by a distaste for what he thought weak
in late-romantic music. The medical or psychological truth in the
diagnosis 'a late developer' is not easily judged when the subject is an
artist whose strong will and financial independence enable him to learn
or do only what seems to suit his purpose. Vaughan Williams was no
more docile than Beethoven; but it is foolish to pretend that an English-
man who in 1909 secured the orchestral effects, the adroit modulations
and witty technical points of Vaughan Williams's incidental music to
The Wasps was less than clever—although this was an epithet which he
disliked by temperament and upbringing. The apparent weaknesses of
the music—coarse scoring, missing climax, vague transition etc.—may
be no more due to inadvertence or incompetence than Beethoven's
unorthodox counterpoint and unorthodox treatment of instruments.

A clue to the solution of this problem is offered by his choice of words
for six operas, about fifty choral works, and some hundred solo, unison
and part songs. This friend and admirer of romantics shows distaste for
several favourite romantic emotions. He shuns words of a kind sought
by composers from Schubert to Mahler and by Britten and others today.
The self-pity and despair which cover a large field of the best English
verse from Shakespeare to Eliot are passed by; grief and anger are
represented, notably in Riders to the Sea (1937), but only from the
mouths of the strong or the brave. Erotic material is for mockery
or satire, and іп Flos Campi (1925) even the Song of Solomon is sub-
limated to chastity, its luxury a strong man's vision. There is more
human feeling than private devotion in his treatment of religious words,

508 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

though these are surprisingly frequent in the output of a confessed
agnostic. In fact his choice and interpretation of words plainly reflect the
liberai humanitarianism of his family and of Parry, together with the
ethic of his school mentors. Although openly hostile to imperialism and
insolent privilege, he paradoxically cherished pride as a virtue rather
than the first of the Seven Deadly Sins, seeing man as “а being darkly
wise and rudely great', not by the grace and mercy of God but by hisown
effort and courage—a conception directly opposed to orthodox Chris-
tian doctrine. He found the best of humanity either in the strong and
naive ‘naturals’ of folk-song, unspoiled by urban meanness and
sophistication, or in idealistic optimists like Whitman who exulted
above sophistication. Endurance—whether in Job, in Scott of the
Antarctic, in the bereaved heroine of Riders to the Sea, or in the political
prisoner—always inspired him, and he supported those who showed it
even when he could not support their cause.

His music neither complains nor protests, but reflects the endurance
of men braver than the ‘stout of heart’, for they are past hope or fear and
know only the duty to stand, not to understand. One might suppose this
seeming negation of feeling to be beyond music if it were not that such a
piece as the fourth movement (epilogue) of the Sixth Symphony (1948),
pianissimo and senza cresc. throughout, finds what music can convey
and words cannot.

Vaughan Williams’s limitations and strength came first from his up-
bringing, which was fortunate enough to prevent his associating the
words ‘noble’ and ‘manly’ with philistines. Romantic and impressionist,
he reacted against what he thought unmanly and weak in romantic and
impressionist music. This fact, not an archaeological interest, led him to
old music. The trunk and oldest branches of a tree are the strongest and
so are the earliest growths of an ascendant musical style. The most
powerful of effects is the unison; the most stark of harmonies are the
bare fifth and fourth; the modal melodic cadence which rises by a tone
seems stronger than one which rises by a semitone from a leading note.
Triads are strong chords; among the ‘weak’ and over-used are dominant
sevenths, ninths, elevenths, and chromatics other than those of
chromatic triads; but ‘accidentals’ cease to be chromatic when they
become the degrees of empirical or exotic modes and scales. Now as
in the sixteenth century the strength of counterpoint lies less in rhythmic
contrast than in the thrust of discord. Hence the ‘marching basses’,
alike in orchestral movements and in hymns or unison songs by Holst
and Vaughan Williams, a bass note often chosen for no other reason
than its recalcitrance with the upper harmony. Investigation of the
development of Vaughan Williams’s technique shows him instinctively

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS 509

seeking a higher degree of dissonance, though not chiefly violent dis-
sonance. He cannot be reproached for begetting or reaching high
tension so early in a movement that he cannot secure climax without
adventitious vulgarity.

Although it has been truly observed that the ear cannot always tell
whether Vaughan Williams's melodies are entirely his or whether they
are from folk-song, he would surely have found a technique for ‘manly’
expression if he had known no old music at all. Vaughan Williams took
what he recognized as his own in old music. That throughout his life he
gave far more than he took may be observed from two examples chosen
almost at random from his music.

The first is the beginning of the Pastoral Symphony (1922) omitting
the first three bars:

Solo violin ge T
бы ш

Violas & Horns

510 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

In it will be recognized the influence of impressionism and folk melody,
although only short phrases of melody can (unprofitably) be described
as in this or that mode, which may well be contradicted by the harmony.
The second quotation takes us forward thirteen yéars to the fourth and
most aggressively dissonant of his symphonies, but it is chosen from the
quietest movement:

Ex. 224 Vns. [8ve higher]

= == ЛЕНІ рауға

Cellos & Basses, pizz. 2 | |

жі ыы A
-= Dh ы ш 244444122
ыыы 132222

Here only the rhythmic contours in the violin melody show апу соп-
nexion with folk music. The passage is not difficult to grasp yet it is
neither diatonic, atonal, nor polymodal. It comes beautifully to rest on
G, yet G is not its tonic; it does not need more counterpoint to be fully
effective but it badly needs its context.

Here, as often when his effect is most clearly achieved, the composer
has patiently exercised his complex intelligence. The first movement of
the Fifth Symphony (1943), as original in its own way as the strident
Fourth, will provide a further example:

Ex. 225

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS 511

Vlas. Cellos к №

Қа... гене aa T и на г]
1 Е
E } е Ее =.

Vaughan Williams's reputation abroad was established with the 1909
song-cycle On Wenlock Edge for tenor, piano, and string quartet, several
features of which do not recur in his many later songs; his repute in
Great Britain was notably increased by two works first given in the
following year at provincial festivals. The choral and orchestral effects
in A Sea Symphony (1910) sometimes attain a splendour (distaste may
call it grandiosity) that did not recur even in occasional and exultant
pieces like the Benedicite (1931). In A London Symphony, we encounter
instead another quality which became all-pervading in Vaughan
Williams and may be called remoteness. It touches the symphony only
in a few places, notably the slow movement, *O vast rondure swimming
in space’, but we find it in the other admired work of 1910, Fantasia
for Double Orchestra on a Theme of Tallis.

Vaughan Williams has made his own not only Tallis's long and
lovely melody but its descant. The Fantasia and much subsequent
music seemed severe because it stirred the spirit more than the blood.
‘Remote’ had been used in judgement of romantic artists whose
subjects included “014, unhappy, far-off things', the remote figures of
legend, the remote lands of heart's desire, objects of longing and
aspiration, hills and landscapes that were romantic precisely because
they were remote, and horizons that were unattainable. Vaughan
Williams's remoteness is post-romantic and often extra-romantic, for in
his music even rage, pain, and desire become removed, no longer
subjective. His aesthetic as much as his ethical beliefs required restraint
of the immediate cry; man should endure these emotions, contemplate

512 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

them and recognize with awe their universal power. Little wonder, then,
that he was attracted by the story of Job.

Job: A Masque for Dancing (1931): resembles Petrushka, in that its
conception embraces two planes which must perforce be separate; and
just as the same figures in the most corporeal of the arts must here be
seen on both planes, so the same music makes a direct physical impact
yet encompasses a drama too vast to be contemplated until it is made
sufficiently remote. The physical appeal of this music is not just an
effect of its combination with stage scenes and personages, for it sounds
as fine when taken out of the stage pit to the concert hall. Here its
climax of terror—Job’s first vision of heaven with Satan enthroned—is
enhanced by a sudden crash of the full organ, a grim ‘deadweight’ use of
this instrument without parallel except in the third movement of
Sinfonia antartica (1953) where it adds the expression of diabolical
hostility to that of the vastness and remoteness of the polar regions.
The music of Job is far from disembodied and does not exclude the
pulsation of dancing, but the rhythms of pavane, galliard, sarabande,
and minuet impart a statuesque dignity rarely attempted in the theatre
after Gluck's tragedies.

Vaughan Williams supplied for Job a more admirable score than any
since Flos Campi, a suite for viola solo, small orchestra and wordless
chorus. Unconventional alliances of instruments, unbalanced or bizarre
textures, and opacity are here calculated effects. The inexact unison
between muted brass and reed instruments conveys Satan's baleful
exultation, the oily saxophone tone the false commiserations of Job's
comforters; and the thickening of harmonies by divided cellos gives
what would otherwise be too courtly and human a ‘Galliard of the Sons
of the Morning' the kind of impression produced by the angels on a
Byzantine mosaic or Romanesque tympanum.

There is a wealth of melismatic rhapsody in Job outside the ‘Dance
of Youth and Beauty', which recalls Тйе Lark Ascending "(1914).
The composer's rhythmic sense and wit were bent away from classic-
romantic contours, and posterity may yet praise him for his pioneer work
in showing that rhythm is not metre. If one of his movements seems to
lose grip, the fault is rarely attributable to loss of rhythmic interest.
He possessed the symphonist's ability to compose coherent and large
movements rich in ideas, to develop with fine rhetoric a single thought,
and to expand themes by other means than classical metabolism.

It would be easy to distinguish grades of workmanship if whole move-
ments could be regarded as failures—the somewhat facile cavatina in
the Eighth Symphony (1956), for instance, or the movement originally

1 See pl. VII.

ШЕКЕ МҮ)

uopuo7 “әлғәці әдридшед J} је uononpoad 28015 [ешо 3y} тор usisop e Jo 1елэле чэмо Ад sunured y

(21674 225) 1661 ‘ОГ S.SSINVITIIA NVHONVA

GUSTAV HOLST 513

associated, in a film, with seals and penguins in Sinfonia antartica. But
often the best of Vaughan Williams's music is inextricably entangled in
floundering growth. The finale of the Fourth Symphony, for example,
very clearly sets out upon the classical sonata plan, with first and second
groups of strong personality. Then, where we expect a sonata-coda,
comes the astounding fugal epilogue upon the chief motto-idea of the
whole symphony, savagely devouring the sonata themes as counter-
subjects.

GUSTAV HOLST

Gustav Holst (1874—1935), Vaughan Williams's contemporary and
friend, was born at Cheltenham and sprang from a milieu of profes-
sional musicians very different from Vaughan Williams's. He was “а
musician's musician' because he was fascinated by the technique of the
art, indeed by any musical sounds or music from any race. Though his
technical explorations were made at the prompting of creative desire
they are often held to have hindered its realization. He produced no
series of symphonies, nor indeed any large-scale undertakings which can
easily be examined as a series. It is significant that Stravinsky fascinated
Holst, who may well have had genius enough (if he had been born into
another tradition and granted health and freedom) to compose equi-
valents of The Fire Bird or even The Rite of Spring, though he rarely
achieved the effortless coherence found even in smaller Stravinsky works
like Apollon Musagéte. Could the composer of Ode to Death (1919), and
The Hymn of Jesus (1920) have achieved equivalents of А Symphony of
Psalms, Oedipus Rex, and Threni? The question is less vain than most of
its kind, because we cannot claim outright for Holst those symphonic
qualifications that were conceded to Vaughan Williams. However great
our admiration of Holst's achievement, in circumstances that would
have frustrated most men, it seems clear that he commanded his musical
materials better than their germinating processes, and could have found
a convincing synthesis in more than two or three works if he had lived to
be less interested in fertilizers than in the ground to which they were ap-
plied—often too liberally for immediate absorption. Vaughan Williams
evolved large-scale contexts for ‘tune’ (as distinct from prose-like line)
which was derived from folk-song, though often neither bucolic nor
deliberately insular. Holst, having found in folk-music and modes, or in
empirical and eastern scales and rhythms, an escape from Anglo-
German melody, continued with explorations that produced wholly
individual flavours. Yet when he wanted a ‘tune’ he continued to the
end of his life to introduce the contour of folk-song or dance into
refractory and recalcitrant textures.

514 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

It seems fair to illustrate some of these points from The Hymn of
Jesus. Near the opening the music passes from ‘Pange lingua’ to ‘Vexilla
regis’ with an easy mastery remarkable from a British composer in 1917;
the effect at the first performance in 1920 was as electrifying as that of the
subsequent full chorus: i

Lento

4 HE - 345 14.5:

After a verse from each hymn іп unaccompanied unison the orchestra
makes its next transition:

Ex. 221

GUSTAV HOLST 515

(Collies SSS 25

A short passage of routine imitation leads to the first of many six-
four chords, then more imitative work on the first half of the motive, the
harmonies becoming just sufficiently biplanar to avoid commonplace.
A few bars before the much-quoted biplanar ‘To you who gaze, a lamp
am Г:

Ex. 228
[Orchestral and lower voice parts omitted]

О 4
Ga’ 22 таа eem A ЕН
-Жы-ы-н poe cuum ЭЙ М ие eme ч Блез; cam — ВЕН

Semi Chorus
апай ©һо па ш т — ВА

2nd Choir

Organ bass

516 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

To уоп that know, a

you who knock, a door кт To -уош who fare, the
ES. EI 141525: — f БП Юю]? ДГ,

E 627% сар EINST ЕНЕВ CAL ГАР БТ QC =]
ЕЕ ЕЕ Е: ЕЕ СЕТЕ НЕЕ Е ЕЕжЕ ЕЕ
[NU TE A ае Раа

[63:4 —— Bo = een]
Е MA. o ee res
2n аа SS Se
SS SS eee —— 3 sepes] e e
go- O 2 Ө Ө
- = SS

we find harmony, in itself not despicable, that belongs to Stanford’s
Anglican church music.

Analogies with Pelléas et Mélisande and Oedipus Rex suggest that
Holst’s unification would have been less easy if the text (from the
apocryphal Acts of St. John) had been too slavishly followed from
image to image, or if the emotional content had been full-blooded
instead of allusive. Holst himself, for all his avoidance of publicity, was
no more the recluse, no more austere than many a man whose work
nobody has thought frigid; yet people once called him cold, severe, or
‘mystical’. If a mystic is one who expresses experiences that are incom-
municable except by a language of symbolism it is difficult to see why
Holst is more mystical than a host of others. His art is ill-suited to the
sort of subjects that appealed to Verdi, but he is more often mysterious
than mystical; and the more forbidding or abstract his theme the
stronger his brush. ‘Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age’ and ‘Neptune, the
Mystic’ are the best of The Planets,and Egdon Heathis his finest orchestral
work. This reflection poses what is surely the ultimate problem about
Holst, and it concerns the man rather than his technical experiments.

The Hymn of Jesus was greeted with an enthusiasm that bewildered

GUSTAV HOLST 517

the composer. He was unwise enough to concoct his own libretto and
indulgein elaborate parody of German and Italian opera for Тйе Perfect
Fool (1923); but in the same year the brilliantly scored ballet music from
this opera, together with The Planets and А Ғиса! Concerto raised the
composer to a peak of popularity. Then, during the twelve years left to
Holst, his new works were treated either with curious respect or frank
dislike. His daughter! records such press comments as: 'the chilly
vacillations of its harmonies, where cerebration tamed and bridled in-
spiration’—referring to the Choral Symphony, for which even Vaughan
Williams felt only “а cold admiration’. Ву 1931 Holst ‘was always feeling
exhausted’ and ‘dreaded that his ideas were drying up'.?

Nevertheless the orchestral piece Egdon Heath (1927), the Lyric
Movement for viola and orchestra (1933) and Scherzo for orchestra
(1935) already show such ‘third period’ features as a simpler harmony
and a new integration of purpose and style. Undoubtedly what we must
call vision, for lack of another term, seems to have become intense and
steady in Holst's last major works. Though Egdon Heath evokes Hardy's
description (in The Return of the Native) of an upland tract of Dorset
that is ‘mysterious in its swarthy monotony’, the music itself does not
sprawl or flounder. By the clock this is a short piece that merely suggests
man’s reaction to the vast, inhospitable landscape. It does not relent to
entertain the musician with points of technical interest as most of
Holst’s works certainly do. Imogen Holst says: ‘There is no hint of exile
in the loneliness of Egdon Heath: it is а home-coming.'? Clear vision
betokens the genuine mysticism that is less concerned to suggest
mystery than to pierce it and reveal the truth which it obscures.

Does the steady vision alone support belief in a ‘third period’? Holst
defies chronological classification. Few of his published works fit into a
‘first period’ that reflects as much of the nineteenth century as Beet-
hoven’s did of the eighteenth; and if penetration into regions (not
necessarily of the mystic) where nobody can guide him puts a man’s
music into a ‘third period’ then most of Holst’s major works belong to
it. Other classifications than the chronological are also unsatisfactory.
To speak of his ‘Sanskrit period’ is misleading unless we mean only that
between 1907 and 1912. Holst taught himself to read Sanskrit and
composed the Hymns from the Rig Veda and the one-act opera Savitri
(from the Mahabharata) to his own translations. Their musical features
—the spare texture, the recourse to quintuple and septuple time signa-
tures, the reticent declamation—are not just of one period. His leaning
towards the arabesque of eastern melodic lines does not belong only to

1 Imogen Holst, Gustav Holst (London, 1938), pp. 115-6. 2 Ibid., p. 149.
3 [dem, The Music of Gustav Holst (London, 1951), р. 101.

518 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

one stage in his output or only to works like Beni Mora and Two Eastern
Pictures. He needed it as he had needed folk-song, because its scales
and rhythms took him away from convention. (There is no actual rága
music in Holst's work as there is in Padmávati for he was not, like
Roussel, a connoisseur of oriental music.)

William McNaught wrote in 1939:!

... Holst occupied himself with intricate textural problems that seemed to
the outer world to be of little importance. A typical instance was a three-part
vocal canon with a different key-signature to each рагі... Either openly or
implicitly he was given to the solving of out-of-the-way problems of his
craft that kept him to the borders of the true road of music. His tremendous
creative power was partly frittered away by this preoccupation with artifice,
and it was only because the diminished impetus of that power was so great

that he made his impression. а

Some years later Wilfrid Mellers? wrote at length about the debt of
subsequent musicians to Holst's treatment of the English language.

Holst did not see in the folk-song cult any wistful reversion to а simpler form
of existence . . . he was interested іп [folk-song] because words and tune had
grown up together. . . . His own melodic idiom has affinities with that of
English folk-song . .. | | more ‘primitive’ but completely unsentimental,
it arouses expectations which it does not fulfil . . . Holst does sublimate
speech into a phrase of some considerable extent, but not to the pitch of song.

The lyricism compatible with polyphony іп Weelkes, Dowland,
Purcell and many more of Holst’s heroes seems to have been shunned.
Within Holst’s part-song settings from Robert Bridges are found some
of his rare foreshadowings of the polyphonic ease assumed by his
pupil Rubbra.

This austerity would be understandable in a minor composer for
whom words meant more than line and harmony, rhythm and texture,
but Holst was primarily interested in ‘pure’ music, music that did not
duplicate what words could say, but began where words failed. We are
left asking ‘Why? after reading Mellers’s perceptive comments :3

The link with folk-song still prevails—for instance in the pentatonic feeling
... but both the rhythmic plasticity and the tonality have acquired a sub-
dued wavering instability which gives to the line its coldly desolate effect . . .
His unique position, his oddity as a cultural phenomenon, consists precisely
in his allowing the prose phrase integral expression without trying to
emotionalize it or to compensate for it with a sensuous harmonic vocabulary.

And our ‘Why?’ is implied by the severest of all his critics, the composer

1 Modern Music and Musicians (London, 1946), p. 47.
2 Wilfrid Mellers, Studies in Contemporary Music (London, 1948) p. 145.
3 Ibid., р. 147.

PETER WARLOCK AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 519

himself. Imogen Holst tells us that, listening to Schubert's C major
Quintet in 1930:!

he realized what he had lost, not only in his music but in his life. He could
cling to his austerity. He could fill his days with kindliness and good humour.
He could write music that was neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame.
And he could grope after ideas that were colossal and mysterious. But he had
missed the warmth of the Schubert Quintet. At the moment, it seemed as if
this warmth might be the only thing worth having.

Holst's peculiar psychosis of austerity was purely artistic. It did not
belong only to the last years when he sat ‘huddled over the бге... as if
the spirit itself were numb'. Savitri dates from 1908, before the worst
onset of neuritis or the effects of concussion after a fall, but its lack of
sensuous appeal has earned it a reputation as “ап opera for spiritual
and intellectual aristocrats’.

PETER WARLOCK AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

The three or four men who produced distinctive work during the
decadence of the nationalist movement also refreshed themselves
directly from folk-music and the works of Tallis, Byrd, Weelkes, Wilbye,
Dowland, Gibbons and Purcell. The limited achievement of E. J.
Moeran (1894-1950) was exclusively lyrical, partly because he studied
the violin as a schoolboy and partly because he had absorbed the
Norfolk folk-songs which he collected. The best of his original songs
approach the quality of Warlock’s and his arrangements of Norfolk
songs are neither timid nor clumsy. In his works more ambitious than
songs none rises above the commonplace unless the original lyric gift
is to the fore. His Symphony in G minor (1937) fails to fulfil the promise
of an eloquently melodic opening; subsequent ideas lose character in
turgid passages that seem to derive their menacing moods from Sibelius.
On the other hand Moeran's Violin Concerto of 1942 has few longueurs
because instead of an imposing façade it offers simple geniality.
Moeran’s attempts to emulate other men’s complex harmony or
structure betray the student, not the master; when he was wholly
himself, as in two pieces of 1931 for small orchestra, he could realize
forms of quiet beauty that maintain their appeal. The second of these
two pieces uses the Norfolk song ‘Lonely Waters’ which he had already
issued for voice; the other, ‘Whythorne’s Shadow’, pays tribute to a
beautiful song from Thomas Whythorne’s collection of 1571.?

Twelve of Whythorne’s songs had been published in 1927 by Philip

1 The Music of Gustav Holst, p. 142.
? See Vol. IV, pp. 84 and 200.

520 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

Heseltine (1894-1930) whose own music was issued under the name
Peter Warlock. While still a boy he was moved deeply by the music of
Delius, with whom he became personally acquainted through a relation
who lived near Delius at Grez-sur-Loing. Later he became an enthusias-
tic disciple of Bernard Van Dieren (1884-1936) who migrated from
Holland in 1909 and became 'an enigmatic and portentous figure in the
background" of London music between the wars. Under his own name
Heseltine published books on Delius, Gesualdo,? and ТЛе English Ayre.
Under his pseudonym he brought out editions of Dowland's Lachrimae,
Locke's and Purcell's fantasies and other consort music, and numerous
songs and ayres of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In his own
compositions archaism and preciosity could sometimes be indulged with
overt panache and wit, as in the Capriol Suite for string orchestra (1927)
which uses dance tunes from Thoinot Arbeau's Orchésographie of 1589,
or in the piquant accompaniments to songs of sly gallantry and tavern
roistering. He could set a nursery or nonsense verse (as in the albums of
1923 called Peterisms and Lilligay with the consummate mastery that
he expended on verses from Shakespeare.

These veins of his muse are associated with his gnomic pseudonym,
but from the first songs which he published during the First War to the
last set of 1929—30 there came from time to time the expression of pity,
melancholy, or passionate devotion unparalleled in the setting of
English poetry since Purcell. His tragic expression owes its effect to
economy, and his taste for exactitude and orderliness is manifest even
in the frenzied nausea of “Take, О take those lips away’. This short song
perfectly catches a climactic moment in Shakespeare, yet does so largely
by a superb use of rich Delian harmonies that sound over-ripe and
bitter and suggest a passion that has been poisoned. Among the finest
of his sombre songs are two in his last four, settings of Bruce Blunt's
poems “Тһе Frostbound Wood’ and “Тһе Fox’. This set also includes
the exquisitely tranquil ‘Bethlehem Down’. Perhaps his supreme
achievement lay in works for solo voice with a small group of instru-
ments. A setting of Yeats's “Тһе Curlew' for tenor voice, flute, cor
anglais, and string quartet, which foreshadows Britten's skill in dealing
with a chamber group and solo voice, is surely one of the most beautiful
evocations of desolate melancholy produced outside opera by any
musician since Schubert.

Poverty, malnutrition and tuberculosis, following the effects of
wounds, gas and shell-shock, deprived first of his reason and then of his
life Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), a lyric poet of talent and a composer

1 McNaught, ibid., p. 53.
? Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa: Musician and Murderer (London, 1926).

ARTHUR BLISS 521

who excelled in the setting of English words. His musical remains are
insufficient in bulk and maturity to justify speculation as to whether he
would have reached Warlock's command of other accomplishments
than a wonderfully sensitive vocal line. Gurney's malady overtook him
before he had mastered the integration of vocal melody with harmony
and other points of technique, despite striking passages in which chords
or modulations perfectly fit verbal imagery. Few of the poems he wrote
while serving in France were set to music. An exception, 'Severn
Meadows', made his finest song which, with some of his Housman
settings, e.g. *Loveliest of trees’, ‘Desire in Spring’, ‘Lights Out’, and
‘An Epitaph’, justify an echo of Grillparzer’s tribute to Schubert: ‘a rich
treasure, but still fairer hopes’.

Gurney’s friend Herbert Howells (b. 1892) was, like him, a Gloucester
chorister who earned a scholarship at the Royal College of Music. His
affection for the cathedral atmosphere has elicited a large number of
anthems, motets, and canticles, some dedicated to particular founda-
tions, as well as more ambitious works for voices and orchestra,
such as Hymnus Paradisi (1950) and Missa Sabrinensis (1953). His music
for the concert-hall is less familiar than his rhapsodic organ pieces and
his two suites for clavichord. The fastidiousness of his textures, with
their restless polyphony, makes exacting demands, but both instru-
mental and vocal effects are calculated with the imagination of a
craftsman in filigree.

ARTHUR BLISS

Among composers who had already shown promise before the end
of the First War was Arthur Bliss (b. 1891), one of the generation of
Stanford pupils which included Howells and Gurney. He has been given
insufficient credit for initiating before 1920 the reaction associated with
the twenties in works musically superior to many which achieved a
succés de scandale. Bliss lacks a personal idiom. He has therefore been
most successful in works where strong personality is less important than
deft technique, the securing of telling effects and a high order of general
intelligence—in the films The Shape of Things to Come (1935), The
Conquest of the Air (1937), and Men of Two Worlds (1945), in the
incidental music to several plays, and in the ballets Checkmate (1937),
Miracle in the Gorbals (1944), and Adam Zero (1946).

His career as a composer has been unusual because, instead of moving
farther and farther away from his teachers, he seemed by the end of the
twenties to turn towards their ideals. It was in these works that he
revealed his full calibre and not just his enviable facility and humour.
Among them are Pastoral: Lie Strewn the White Flocks (1928) and

522 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

the admirably controlled yet rhapsodic Clarinet Quintet of 1931. The
Quintet is manifestly English, whereas the Pastoral draws most appro-
priately upon the technique and flavours of the nationalists in settings
for solo and chorus, with flute, strings, and percussion, of poems
by Jonson, Fletcher, Theocritus, and others. Bliss lets the singer
bear the main responsibility for details of interpretation and uses the
instruments with reticence, as in his background music for films. That
is probably why his choral symphony Morning Heroes (1930) moves
without discrepancy from a portion of the Iliad (Hector's farewell to
Andromache) to poems by Whitman, Li-Po, Wilfred Owen, and Robert
Nichols. The work requires an orator with chorus and orchestra.

The best of Bliss's earlier works, Кош for soprano and ten instru-
ments, using nonsense syllables purely for their sound (without the
associative subtlety of Edith Sitwell's verses that were issued chiefly
as studies in rhythm) and his Conversations for three string and three
wind instruments, both date from 1919 and represent more than
reaction against the amplitude of the romantic orchestra. The chamber
groups and the employment of the voice as another instrument were
means to musical wit in the strict sense of the word; every point,
humorous or serious, is rooted in the forms and processes of music.
There is wit not only in “Тһе Committee Meeting’ and ‘In the tube at
Oxford Circus' (Conversations)! but also in the Colour Symphony (1922)
which is serious, even romantic, for the four movements evoke the
symbolic associations of purple, red, blue and green respectively:
and Bliss’s wit does not forsake him in more sinewy and classicist
textures like the later Music for Strings (1935) and his two quintets (1931
and 1937). A piano concerto written for the New York World Fair
(1939) is a clever attempt to revive the grand manner and opulent scale
of the late nineteenth century.

Lord Berners (1883-1950) succeeded to his barony in 1918 but, as
Gerald Tyrwhitt, had already published such musical facetiae as Trois
petites marches funébres (for a statesman, a canary, and a rich aunt)
(1914), and the parodistic Lieder Album (1913) and Valses bourgeoises
(1917). Later he achieved originality in ballets which include general
parody of nineteenth-century music and manner, notably The Wedding
Bouquet (1936) with his own French provincial sets and costumes and
a chorus to a text devised by Gertrude Stein for its phonetic effect. Тйе
Triumph of Neptune (1926) was produced by Dyagilev with nautical
scenes devised by Sacheverell Sitwell from a Victorian toy theatre, and
Luna Park (1930) was included in one of Cochran’s revues.

1 Both recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x.

ALAN BUSH 523

ALAN BUSH

Alan Bush (b. 1900), an important influence upon adolescent talent
and judgement during the twenties and thirties, received his chief
professional training in Berlin, and his leadership before the war is
attributable less to his composition than to his strong personality and
didactic power. He has been compared with Hindemith, sometimes
ineptly, for though he respects (as fulfilling an obligation to society)
what he calls “educated music’ which may not be treasured by posterity,
he has formulated no harmonic-structural system to serve the composer
who needs premises. Consequently pupils do not need to unlearn Bush’s
teaching in order to follow examples as diverse as those given by
Stravinsky, Webern, Blacher, or Martin.

Bush’s music is polyphonic, and his first notable success was achieved
with one string quartet (1924) which won a Carnegie award, and another
(Dialectic, 1929) is still considered his masterpiece. If he sometimes
achieves only Kapellmeistermusik, of a solidity which suggests the
church musician rather than the 'people's composer’, it is sometimes
his commission that has prevented his using strings or voices in a first-
class demonstration of thematic argument; sometimes, as in the choral
finale of his Piano Concerto (1937) he cannot rise above an ephemeral or
naive text. The best of Bush’s instrumental works, such as the C major
Symphony (1940), Lyric Interlude for violin and piano (1944), and
Violin Concerto (1948), commended themselves to their first admirers
on more valid grounds than a technique not quite like that of Raws-
thorne, Rubbra or any other Englishman. Why, since he admired
Schoenberg and actually used twelve-note themes in two movements of
his C major Symphony, did Bush decline to join the radical serialists?
Plainly for reasons which are bound up with his acceptance of Soviet
composers’ manifestos concerning proletarian understanding of
ambitious music. Possibly Bush’s style would have become less complex
quite apart from his political conscience; but whatever the explanation,
this simplification furthered the composition of Bush’s operas, whose
heavily slanted librettos have won them success in East Germany—
Wat Tyler (1951) and Men of Blackmoor (1955). Musically these works
are chiefiy distinguished by their strong choral writing, foreshadowed
by The Winter Journey of 1946, a cantata in which Bush treats the
Christmas theme non-religiously.

CONSTANT LAMBERT AND WILLIAM WALTON

The first publications of three composers of the next generation—
Constant Lambert (1905-51), William Walton (b. 1902), and Lennox

524 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

Berkeley (b. 1903)—associated them with the reaction against patriotism,
romanticism, and high moral seriousness. Yet these young composers of
the 1920s were more considerable than any of ‘Les Six’ except Honegger.
However questionable the opinions in Lambert's Music Ho!, their
bitterness is passionately serious; and so, beneath sophisticated manner-
isms, is Walton's poignantly pessimistic lyricism, notably in the slow
movement of his Sinfonia concertante for orchestra with piano (1927)
and the outer movements of his Viola Concerto (1929).

In 1926 Lambert, still a student at the Royal College of Music, was the
first Englishman whom Dyagilev asked to compose a ballet. Romeo and
Juliet is set in a dancing school and has a ‘rehearsal’ plot culminating
in an elopement by aeroplane. Young Lambert's eighteenth-century
dances, with spicings and occasional jazzings, proved him an adroit
rather than an original composer, for the work called for parody and
pastiche. It immediately secured the commission for Pomona, also with
choreography by Nizhinska, but without farcical elements. To judge only
from the concert suite, Pomona (produced in Buenos Aires early in
1927) presented its pastoral myth in a manner as nearly ‘straight’ as
does, say, Apollon Musagéte; certainly it gave scope for mannered yet
vital melody, presented less with contrapuntal device than with attrac-
tive contrapuntal features. Despite the large orchestra required, this
athletic harmony and instrumentation commended Music for Orchestra
(1927) to its first audience; its urbanity seemed clean, yet neither sterile
nor made palatable with pseudo-sentiment from the jazz world. Some
thematic material from Music for Orchestra (Ex. 229), shown with a
short specimen of word setting from Summer's Last Will and Testament
(1935) (Ex. 230), will suggest the quality of Lambert's mind:

Andante
Vns. 8ve higher and muted 3
EUER х

(i)

525

CONSTANT LAMBERT AND WILLIAM WALTON

Allegro

es es ДАВА pl

yp qe я
D —i

E ЕЕ лду [ЕРИНО mcr Бесті

[e$ V |

Allegretto

Ex. 230

thanin a

be
и bd |

less

Al good things

fi
|
|

bbs

2и е0 ре
at bad

plea - sure

plen - ty,

Peace,

day,

526 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

He was a polymath who occasionally wrote incidental or film music,
transcribed old music, made arrangements for ballets, and was so fully
employed as a conductor and writer that his only other considerable
orchestral work was Aubade héroique, finished in 1942 but suggested by
an early morning of 1940 when the Vic-Wells Ballet Company was
escaping from Holland before the German invaders.

Before appearing as composer and conductor Lambert had been the
speaker in his friend Walton's Façade (1923), an entertainment devised
as a Gesamtkunstwerk, in which Edith Sitwell's verses, described as
*studies in rhythm, sound, and association of 14еа5, were spoken
through a megaphone in a screen which prevented any distraction caused
by the appearance of the speaker or of the instrumental ensemble
which played Walton's pieces. The score, virtuosic both in its original
form and in the full orchestral dress of its concert suite, and Walton's
brilliant Sinfonia Concertante (1927), which included brittle rhythms of
the kind associated with Milhaud's confections and some of jazz
provenance, were largely responsible for the coupling of Walton's name
with Lambert’s. These early works have been disparaged as ‘highbrow
jazz’, a defensive growth against the pathetic quasi-moral Philistinism of
schools or the drab and even more tyrannical Philistinism of democracy.
*The perverse highbrowness which indulges in the low, having gone be-
yond the primitive earnestness of the romantics’,! expressed during the
twenties the thwarted desires of so large a section of urban society that
in Germany and Russia government officials and indoctrinated artists
fulminated against it. Its frivolity, as much as the querulousness of later
generations, repels balanced minds. But Walton and Lambert were
convinced of the need to doff the prophetic mantle, to learn from light
music and jazz, just as the nationalists had learned from primitive and
folk-music; and Walton and Lambert wrote very little inferior music
before they passed to a less inhibited revelation of romantic earnestness.

It is mistaken to suppose that Ғасайе is inferior Walton or to recog-
nize the ephemeral superficies of the Sinfonia Concertante and not the
poignant beauty to be found chiefly, but not only, in its slow movement;
to suppose that Lambert published his Piano Sonata (1929) and his
Concerto for Piano and Nine Instruments (1931) only to be fashionable,
or to regard Walton's acid harmonies as *wrong note' effects like those
in the more vulgar pieces of Prokofyev and ‘Les Six’. Though Walton
proved more romantic and rhetorical, Lambert as a composer was either
intellectually more serious, as in Horoscope (1937) with its elaborate
musical palindrome, or emotionally more serious, as in the Dirge from

* Chapter on Walton by Colin Mason in British Music of Our Time, ed. Alfred Bacharach
(London, 1946).

CONSTANT LAMBERT AND WILLIAM WALTON 527

Cymbeline (1940) and Summer's Last Will and Testament (1935) with its
‘King Pest’ rondo and the culminating ‘Sarabande’:

Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye:

I am sick—I must die.

Lord have mercy on us!

Lambert scored one extraordinarily popular success in 1927, with
a setting of Sacheverell Sitwell’s The Rio Grande for chorus and
orchestra, ineptly described as symphonic jazz; not even the brilliant
solo piano part or the ‘damask’ blues chords in the quiet middle
section (‘The noisy streets are empty and hushed is the air’) keep to jazz
idiom which, according to the composer, ‘is a more plastic basis than
folk song or pre-jazz popular song. Jazz, like much exotic music,
depends more upon rhythmic and melodic inflection than upon a
square-cut scheme.’ Lambert was aware of the limitations of standard
jazz syncopations and jazz harmony, not altogether unlike the de-
ficiencies in all but the best music of the nineteenth-century German
romantic school, as Wagner himself was aware. Beethoven’s scherzos
were a serious composer’s development from minuets ‘as rhythmically
effete as commercial jazz’ and Walton’s Portsmouth Point (1925) in-
cluded jazz rhythms but produced ‘an atmosphere as far removed from
Harlem’ as Beethoven’s was from the eighteenth-century dancing room.
‘The jazz composer is now stagnating, bound to a narrow circle of
rhythmic and harmonic devices and neglecting the possibilities of form.
Itis for the highbrow composer to take the next step.’ Lambert shrewdly
noticed the ineffectiveness of many attempts to bring jazz into the
concert room; and he particularly disliked composers like Gershwin
who used ‘only the non-barbaric, non-vital elements . . . Jazz is not
raw material but half-finished material in which European sophistication
has been imposed over coloured crudity. There is always danger that
the highbrow composer шау... leave only the sophisticated trappings
... asin the Rhapsody in Blue.)

Perhaps the clearest statement of his belief lies in the words: 'I see
no reason... why a composer should not be able to rid himself as much
from the night-club element in jazz as Haydn did from the ballroom
element in the minuet, and produce the modern equivalent of those
dance suites of Bach which we treat with as much seriousness as the
sonatas of Beethoven.’

The development of Walton’s own temperament revealed a strain
of brooding and melancholy at odds with the sharp wit and smart

1 Music Но!, p. 228.

528 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

exterior features of his style. This is seen notably in his deservedly
popular dramatic oratorio, Belshazzar’s Feast (1929), upon a text skil-
fully arranged by Osbert Sitwell from the biblical narrative. Walton, like
Rubbra, Rawsthorne, and other British musicians born between 1900
and 1905, found in traditional quarries a seam scarcely large enough for
one man's needs throughout a normal working life. He was put to un-
usual labour whenever he avoided the obvious recourse to older seams
with which he made shift in commissioned and ceremonial music, and
his completion of major work has always been slow; but British
musicians of Walton's generation were more talented than most of their
immediate predecessors, and it is mistaken to attribute their restricted
range entirely to limitations of musical gifts. Without abnormal
competence they had little chance of a hearing. If they could not
appear original by adopting foreign styles they could do so only
by idiosyncracy of style. This Walton commanded without affectation
and cultivated in his best work by genuine compulsion. He begins
the slow movement of his First Symphony (1935) with a melody as
poignant as Ex. 231:

Ex. 231

and, despite echoes of its contours, throws it away until it is used as an
epilogue. He presented impassioned music like:

529

CONSTANT LAMBERT AND WILLIAM WALTON

and vehement music like Exx. 233 and 234 (also from the First Sym-

phony):

Ex. 233

530 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960
Ex. 234

5
> =>
Maestoso > >> > ee =

with detachment, sometimes implied amusement, remains urbane even
in the haunting close of the Viola Concerto (1929), embedding the
jaunty first theme of the finale within the soft valedictory texture,
offsets con malinconia with con malizia, reconciles Stravinskyan subleties
of accentual rhythm with long-phrased melody never commanded by
Stravinsky, finds a place in symphonic structure for fastidiously sensuous
orchestral effects, even to finely judged dynamics for Chinese block,
castanets, and minor percussion, and was not afraid of the taunt
that he reflected the taste of a sophisticated intelligentsia. There is no
insincerity in Walton's style, which is true to the man, known for taci-
turn good humour and the sardonic wit that informs his scherzos.
Walton's occasional additions to his musical vocabulary, for example
in his Cello Concerto (1959) or the passacaglia-finale of his Second
Symphony (1961), reveal no significant refreshment of his powers, and
he has not always succeeded in attempts to make his style serve a wider
range of expression than it did before the war. In his opera Troilus

EDMUND RUBBRA 531

and Cressida (1954), for example, the choruses and the witty music for
Pandarus showed the familiar Walton to his first operatic audience.
But his music for the protagonists rarely rises to lyricism as poignant
as in his best purely instrumental music, and hardly ever to ecstasy.
He often seems rather to be translating into his own idiom the responses
by which successful opera composers before him met the situations
requiring different moods and aspects of the grand passion. Aware both
of increased skill and also of an artistic impasse, Walton has from time
to time offered a work that resembles a second, perhaps more accom-
plished, fulfilment of an earlier task. Thus the overture Scapino (1941) is
better constructed than Portsmouth Point yet does not fully match its
youthful verve; the great beauty and skill of the Violin Concerto
(1939) would be admired without reserve if this work (by other points
than two quiet and lyrical outer movements enclosing an astringently
witty one) did not invite comparison with the Viola Concerto, which
is not only among the most attractive specimens of its genre but also
Walton's most consummate achievement. A similar comment is invited
by the Second Symphony (1960).

EDMUND RUBBRA

At almost every point of personal temperament and musical style
Rubbra is Walton's antithesis. Despite his wide reading, historical know-
ledge, and interest in the graphic arts, Rubbra cannot be described as
urbane. His music almost excludes epigram, impressionistic digressions
or sudden brilliance; most of its ideas have high lyrical potential and may
be suffused with lyrical sentiment from the beginning (as at the opening
of the Fourth Symphony) but they usually need ample time to become
impassioned. The rhetoric moves steadily to its climaxes, where emo-
tion glows to full incandescence as in filaments at some distance from
their source of power. Rubbra's achievement has been to combine the
classical principle of expanding variation with a continuously poly-
phonic texture—polyphonic not just in the Wagnerian sense, but in a
sense that has made people regard some of his movements as gigantic
motets. Indeed, the claim to have linked renaissance with modern
musical organisms, falsely made for composers whose texture was at
least half impressionistic (Vaughan Williams's Mass, for instance, has
more of Debussy than Byrd in it) can be sensibly made for Rubbra and
only for him. Rubbra does not seek incidental colour for its own sake.
Most of his ideas are song-like and grow by polyphonic texture wherein
the long phrases reach inexorably forward into big paragraphs—not of
balanced sequences and patterns of figuration, but of asymmetrical
sentences.

532 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

His First Symphony (1938) is fashioned from the materials Rubbra
has continued to use—the diatonic scales, with a predilection for the
melodic minor and a sparing use of chromatics except the sixth and
seventh degrees of the ascending minor scale. Contrary motion of the
parts, including that between the two directions of this scale, gave a
measure of discord unremarkable at the time, but the Symphony sounded
hard-driven because the ideas were hard-driven. They are so in many of
Rubbra's subsequent movements, across which may be written the
technical description гета ricercata, but less and less forcing was needed
as the ideas themselves became more fertile.

Already in the First Symphony Rubbra had established several
characteristic forms of tema ricercata, some of them by no means
motet-like or fugue-like. Only the two most strongly contrasted can
be described here. The movement corresponding with the minuet or
scherzo of a classical symphony is called ‘Périgourdine’. A dance-like
length of tune recurs without episode and with only such variation-
development as Purcell uses to vary the key in a long ‘ground’. Passing
harmonies, textures, and counter-themes seem to clutch at the swift
gliding tune, increasing the effect of unhesitating motion. The second
movement of Rubbra's Fifth Symphony (1948):

Ex. 235

Allegro
Уп. + 8ve - — —

EDMUND RUBBRA 533

shows comparable treatment of a most attractive tune—apparently more
naive than the *Périgourdine' yet in fact extremely subtle, and full of
spores which are transplanted for accompanying material but not
allowed to interfere with the main thread, in which the complete tune
recurs through all twelve major keys. This pruning back, with the
suppression of threatened climaxes in deference to the pattern of
repetitions, produces an effect of intense energy. The corresponding
first movements show a very different form springing from a song-like
idea, which gathers counterpoint but does not germinate only by
counterpoint and is not planned with countersubjects. In the initial
stages of this type of organism the main stem of melody will normally
make sense and suggest the play of smaller and larger climax even
if shorn of accompanying material. Some of these movements with
а strong ‘main stem’ have elicited the description ‘monistic’ from writers
who are well aware that its propriety, like that of ‘monothematic’, has
usually been questioned when applied to movements of symphonic
dimensions. When Rubbra reached more genial expression than his
First Symphony, he was not untrue to himself in allowing contrasts that
deceptively suggest as much relaxation as there is in most classical sym-
phonies. Thusthe staid melody which opens his Third Symphony (1939)
is at first paced rather than countered, gathers tension by generating
polyphony, reaches a distinct cadence (Ex. 236) and passes to what
seems to be an entirely new, contrasting idea of plain chords which
resembles the beginning of a classical ‘second group’; its punctuation
by a four-note figure from the previous polyphony is no stronger a
means of integration than the corresponding feature in the lyrical
second subject of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Yet when this homo-
phonic passage reaches its finish in the key from which it began, we
recognize it as a long extension of the cadence. The polyphony con-
tinues where it left off, gathering up the opening theme of the movement
along with the punctuating figure of the episode as if to compensate for
the relaxation.

534

MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

Ex. 236

===

Trb.

ү D
5-1

Ch
б
e
б.
D М

EDMUND RUBBRA 535

Рита
ени СҮН 2

If works on a symphonic scale did not take great time and labour,
we might wonder that Holst's disciple has written little vocal music.
What he has written achieves distinction (notably in the choral Dark
Night of the Soul, 1935 and The Morning Watch, 1941) and, when
liturgical, reconciles scrupulous propriety with imaginative power.
Moreover, it sometimes serves, like some of his few chamber works, to
disprove the supposition that he is never inclined towards the im-
pressionist's love of colourful or alluring effect. As a fine pianist, who as
a boy loved the late romantics, Rubbra has a connoisseur's appraisal of
harmony that makes an immediate impact, yet it cannot be denied that
his best chamber music reflects his symphonic breadth. His Cello
Sonata (1946) is among the noblest of its kind, his String Quartet,
no. 2 (1952), within its proper limits, secures emotional intensity
within imposing forms, and a piece for recorder and piano for Carl
Dolmetsch, Meditazioni sopra Ceurs désolés, contains within a mere
five pages an epitome of his art; yet his symphonies are his masterpieces.

Rubbra's symphonies, of which there are so far eight, stand unique
in British music. In them are combined inheritances that had been
thought irreconcilable—polyphony similar in principle to that in which

536 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

the greatest British composers of the past excelled, the dimensions of
romantic symphonies and their scale of climax and tension.

LENNOX BERKELEY

Although Berkeley (b. 1903) exemplifies the Parisian and Stravinskyan
influences of the 1920s, he belongs to no group, French or English, and
was little known until the 1920s were over. After a normal university
career, not devoted to music, in 1925 Berkeley went to Paris and worked
as a pupil of Nadia Boulanger in order to become effectively articulate.
Many have testified to those parts of Nadia Boulanger's courses that
are designed to broaden knowledge and taste; but in Berkeley (and in his
contemporaries under her discipline—Copland and Harris for instance)
1{ is possible to observe the effect of a complementary concentration
upon certain composers from Monteverdi to Stravinsky and upon
composition for prescribed groups and small groups of instruments.
The first long work which Berkeley sent to England, the oratorio
Jonah (1929), was scarcely coherent, somewhat congested and blood-
less; despite inventive and sensitively scored passages it rarely inspired
fine singing by soloists or chorus. Yet among the mature Berkeley's
chief merits are his assured clarity of thought and texture and his
outstandingly attractive vocal writing. Perhaps the most notable
example of the latter is Lady Nelson's soliloquy at the end of Act II in
Nelson (1953), but Berkeley's St. Teresa songs for contralto and string
orchestra (1947) touch an extraordinarily high level of inspiration as well
as craftsmanship.

To recognize his cautious but assured growth into a distinct per-
sonality one should compare his String Trio of 1944 with his Horn Trio
of 1954, or his two Symphonies of 1940 and 1958. None of these four
works is imposing or solemn; yet the advance in unpretentious musical
architecture during the eighteen years which separates them is as clear as
Mozart's more speedy advance from the serenade-like Salzburg sym-
phonies and concertos to the Viennese works, with their motivic and
contrapuntal integration.

Unlike the preclassical masters, Berkeley was not forced to earn by
purveying music of serenade gravity; but having abandoned the
promptings that led to his oratorio, he published between 1935 and
1950 a series of works which made people regard him as primarily “а
divertimento composer'. He was content to keep his movements short
and largely unrhetorical, to hold interest by buoyant rhythm, neat
harmony, and attractive fragments of melody rather than by the
musical equivalent of ‘great thoughts’. His Serenade for Strings (1939),
Divertimento (1945), Concerto for Two Pianos (1943), Nocturne and

ALAN RAWSTHORNE 537

Sinfonietta, or his Piano Sonata (1941) and Six Preludes, suggested that
Berkeley was capable of composition on a grander scale. Berkeley
would still rather charm than bore, but with the charm there was now
а concentration occasionally amounting to earnestness. An exception
is Nelson (1953) which nowhere depends upon ‘good theatre’ to hide
weak musical seams. In any other European country Nelson, as well as
Ruth (1956) and the amusing chamber opera The Dinner Engagement
(1954), would be valued. Admittedly Nelson is dramatically unequal and
episodic; so also are most of the established favourites of the lyric stage.

ALAN RAWSTHORNE

Alan Rawsthorne (1905-71) courted neither public nor minority
favour. He issued a score of admirable works, almost all instrumental
and with simple musical titles—quartet, sonata, concerto etc. An ехсер-
tion is The Creel (1940), a fascinating suite of short pieces for piano
duet, each corresponding with one of Isaak Walton's ‘characters’ of
freshwater fish (see Ex. 237(1) ). Rawsthorne's nationality is sometimes
said to betray itself in turns of melody, especially in lyrical passages.
Yet there are long stretches of this music, from the Symphonic Sketches
to the splendid Violin Sonata (1959), which could deceive Swiss, Dutch,
German, or Scandinavian listeners who did not know Rawsthorne (an
important condition, for he has a personal style) into believing that they
were hearing works by their compatriots. The First Violin Concerto,
one of the works which occupied him during his war service in the army
(though not played until 1948), was dedicated to Walton; yet here again
the similarities to Walton are often less striking than affinities with such
composers as Hindemith and Frank Martin.

Rawsthorne's music sometimes resembles Hindemith's (in passing,
not in broad structure) simply because he shares some of his aesthetic
ideals. He offers athletic design and neat figuration; hence the frequent
observation that his phrasing, patterning and decorative counterpoint
recall the baroque masters. But it is the score-reading eye rather than
the ear which links it with baroque technique. Undoubtedly his “соп-
ception of variation is not the melodic one of Haydn and Mozart but
rather that of Bach in the Goldberg Variations'.! Probably the most
personal element in his idiom is his very fluid harmony; and if he had
been required to theorize, he would probably have said with Hindemith
that he avoided atonal techniques because he needed a hierarchy of
tensions and relaxations among the degrees and intervals of the
tempered chromatic scale. His use of a twelve-note series has no more

1 Mellers, op. cit., p. 176.

538 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

significance than Walton's or Britten's; in the Quintet for wind instru-
ments and piano (1962), it merely emphasizes the unchanged elements
in his style.

Though Rawsthorne shapes complete movements as assuredly and
precisely as he does paragraphs and sentences, at least some of his
persistent characteristics can be observed in short excerpts which, taken
from very diverse sources, also show how intelligently self-imposed
limits have not restricted his range of imagination and expression as
they might have done. Scanning the following excerpts, we see the
variety of patterning and decorating but do not hear it as neo-baroque
pastiche:

“Тһе Sprat', No. 2 of Тйе Cree
Ех. 237 )
O vivace

кше
Phe. I

Pfte. II

GERALD FINZI 539

E Symphonic Studies
Gib Allegro piacevole m Put 0

Baroque patterning is a superstructure over a thoroughbass; in Raws-
thorne's texture functions are reversed, for it is the figuration or the
contrapuntal superstructure that holds together the mercurial har-
monies—the slippings from augmented triads, the constant major-minor
alternations, and the elusive tonality.

If Berkeley had not composed religious songs and a romantic opera,
his temperamental as well as his technical affinity with Rawsthorne
might have been more often noticed. The French atmosphere of his
work should not blind us to several parallels with Rawsthorne's
methods; and Rawsthorne's music is far from being a bloodless
exhibition of design and form. There has been no need for Rawsthorne
to compose a Nobilissima Visione, or even his admirable Street Corner
Overture (1944), merely to prove the redness of his blood.

GERALD FINZI

The songs of Gerald Finzi (1901—56) treat English verse as sensitively
as Wolf’s did German. Three cycles of songs from Thomas Hardy and
one from Shakespeare, issued between 1933 and 1949 (especially the
Hardy cycle of 1936 entitled Earth and Air and Rain) earn Finzi a
greater distinction than he has secured by music more frequently heard
in public, such as his cantata Dies Natalis (1939), a setting of five
Traherne poems for voices and strings, or his Concerto for Clarinet and
Strings (1949). A light polyphony resembling some of Rubbra's less
intense orchestral textures gives a quasi-symphonic effect to Finzi's
accompaniments, |

540 MUSIC IN BRITAIN.1916-1960

MICHAEL TIPPETT

After 1945 only extreme pessimists could fear a dearth of new and
original native music, for the 1940s confirmed. the impression that
Michael Tippett (b. 1905) would stimulate controversy with every new
work; and Benjamin Britten (b. 1913), some of whose instrumental
works of the late 1930s (especially the concertos) had produced un-
certainty whether the spate of his ideas would run deep or shallow, now
produced three fine operas in three successive years—Peter Grimes in
1945, The Rape of Lucretia in 1946, Albert Herring in 1947.

Despite the disparity of their ages, Tippett and Britten have tempera-
mental affinities. They read more widely than most musicians and are
interested in other arts than music. They differ greatly as composers yet
are both attracted by subjects (in songs, operas, or cantatas) dominated
less by direct expression of the primitive passions than by the pity, fear,
disgust, or amusement with which we contemplate their survival or
perversion among supposedly civilized men. They would be assured of
lasting distinction if they had been no more than the first modern
English composers whose operas aroused international interest, or the
first whose declamation has challenged the artistry of singers and
invited a new examination of dramatic word-setting from Purcell to
Mussorgsky.

Tippett's deep interest in the polyphonists and in Purcell was not
merely instilled but grew from inner compulsion. Tippett once confessed
himself unable to select the greatest composers of this century, but he
was willing to name the most important ones for himself and other
British musicians: Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bartók, and Berg. He ad-
mired Purcell’s emulation of the Italians and esteemed English composers
of the twentieth century for what they did not share. Bartók, he declared,
was well served by the asymmetry and fertilizing ‘barbarity’ of the folk-
music he collected, whereas English composers had been ensnared by
their lyrical folk-music.

Tippett's works are few in number and make no bid for the modicum
of popularity elicited by work that can be allotted to stylistic niches.
There are few points of style common to Tippett's quartets, cantatas,
and operas; few indeed can be traced from one quartet to another. Some
extracts from his Second Quartet may serve to show the originality of his
instrumental polyphony, indebted to English consort music but
not finding its integration, as that music did, in the kind of rhythmic
and melodic symmetry associated with the high baroque and classical
styles:

541

MICHAEL TIPPETT

Ex. 238

(i) 2nd. movt. Andante

(ii) 3rd movt. Presto

стезс.

542 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

The claim that bar lines are purely for the reader's convenience can be
justly made for a good deal of Tippett's musical thought; but he did not
reach a consistent and integrated instrumental style. His music can be
irritatingly insubstantial even when it seems polyphonic and, to the eye,
suggests rhythmic subtlety. The figuration of his accompaniments (to
vocal or instrumental lines) seems often to intrude unconvincingly with
ornamental figuration, not to support or challenge; and even his popular
Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1939) owes much to an illusion
of solidity produced by its medium.

His important vocal works are few and all are set to carefully
chosen words at the bidding of complex ideas, the symbols without
which he seems unable to express simple enough truths. The complexity
of his symbolism, and the fact that it begins before the further symbolism
of music has been imposed, would have distinguished Tippett from
Britten even if their music itself had not been so different—Tippett's
involved, elusive, sometimes inchoate, and Britten's disarmingly direct
and paradoxically both sophisticated and naive. To be fully articulate
Tippett needs words and the human voice; and even when he strains the
voice and sets syllables to melisma without obvious reason, he com-
municates the anxiety of a high intelligence. Whether spare or elaborate,
his music is produced by intense mental labour; so is Britten's, but
Britten rarely betrays labour.

Two exceptional and daring essays in seemingly incongruous juxta-
position have been made by Tippett and Britten, the first in 4 Child of
our Time (1941) by employing Negro spirituals as Bach did chorales, the
second in his War Requiem (1962) by interposing the operatic declama-
tion of Wilfred Owen's poems within liturgical treatment of the Latin
choruses from the Missa pro defunctis. Each caused a sensation at first,
yet Tippett's cantata is as innocent of vulgarity as Britten's masterpiece.
In the past, opera has been more effective when we have been caught up
in the feelings of protagonists than when we have been presented with
psychological symbolism and moral reflection, but Tippett's cantata
should be judged as a work sui generis. The difficulty of doing this is
increased by Tippett's tripartite plan. Each section begins with a chorus
and ends with a spiritual, suggesting parallels with Bach's Passions. As
in Bach, both choral and solo sections are used for narration as well as
for reflection. The intermingling of story and commentary, the quantity
and brevity of ‘numbers’, and Tippett’s elusively complex rhythms
enhance the effect of the spirituals which are presented without transla-
tion to the texture and harmony of other items.

The Midsummer Marriage (1952) brought into the theatre much of the
Tippett of A Child of our Time. He wrote his own libretto, giving himself

BENJAMIN BRITTEN 543

little scope for ‘characterization’ and much for symbolic representation;
his music is allied with moral problems which are beyond the bounds
of musical expression. Yet for its understanding the listener-spectator
needs no more than the barest outline of the composer's explanations.
Tippett observes that the classic comic plot presented hindrances to a
marriage, and that they were largely social; the chief modern hin-
drances to a good marriage or to any successful relationship are
ignorance and illusions, especially about ourselves. Therefore in the
course of his plot the characters discover their true selves, and he
himself has declared that “һе moral of The Midsummer Marriage is
enlightenment’ when in a final tableau we see the young lovers trans-
figured in light, like Hindu deities. A sensitive young man and a hard
young woman (‘whose illusions are spiritual), a tycoon and his vulgar
innamorata (‘whose illusions are social’), a mechanic, a clairvoyante,
ancient Greeks, priests and priestesses, ritual dancers, splendidly and
diversely caparisoned choruses, a spiral staircase that stops in mid-air
like something out of Cocteau, a cavern with gates, the play of light
from dawn to nightfall, the different seasons of nature—here is ample
mechanism for opera and for a phantasmagoria of symbolism which
seems to be the necessary catalyst for a Tippett opera; for, as 4 Child
of our Time shows, Tippett's music does not necessarily become second-
rate when his text becomes philosophic.

Music is powerful not only because it intensifies what words and
spoken drama can convey, but also because it expresses reactions of our
subconscious and shades of emotion which words can neither describe
nor even name. Tippett and Britten are modern composers because
they have sped music on this process of discovery; that their success
varies, or that their styles may be considered conservative, matters little
beside the fact that their sensibilities have kept pace with the ideas of
twentieth-century thinkers, poets and dramatists. Their libretti may be
symbolical or historical, but produce modern, even ‘problem’ operas
which disturb comfortably settled minds.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN

If Britten had died before setting libretti which tax both mind and
musical sensibility, he would still be acclaimed as one of the most
imaginative of composers, distinguished by the degree to which his
imagination is aural. Few composers so marvellously command the
acoustic and instrumental materials of music that they always secure,
by notation and a few spoken directions at rehearsal, the effects they
imagined before a note was written. This faculty in Britten almost
disarms criticism. Faced with a level of professional competence reached

544 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

by no other British composer since the seventeenth century, one may
dislike this or that effect and try to defend an objection of mere taste;
but it is normally dangerous to suggest improvements in the means
by which the effect is secured. The point may be illustrated from the
Sunday morning scene in Peter Grimes, during which Ellen's pleadings
and Grimes's expostulations are heard against evocations of the sea
and of the service proceeding in the nearby church. An initial suspension
of disbelief which accepts scenery and music that is only religiously
picturesque seems less vulgar than a series of adjustments to convention
at each change from the liturgical to the operatic. Peter Grimes wonder-
fully captures the style of the English village service from our grand-
fathers' time to ours; but the parson's intonings, the congregational
responsory and the incurably intrusive electronic organ reached those
outside church in spasms. Britten could hardly have flecked his score
with stray sounds of worship as Debussy did Fétes with distant sounds
of the fairground; yet had he not overstrained his mind's ear by trying
to assimilate sections of church-parody into his tense dramatic dialogue?
No. There is no incongruity between the stylized and the onomatopoeic
—between Britten and Victorian church chant.

Almost as disarming is Britten’s professional seriousness, for it has
often contradicted first impressions. The most conscientious artist may
occasionally pass what seem the idle thoughts of a busy fellow, and
when he is extraordinarily gifted as well as conscientious, the listener
may easily believe that he has been content with ‘facile brilliance’ or
‘shallow cleverness’. In addition to his share of salutary adverse criti-
cism Britten has also received adverse criticism that was contradicted
after subsequent closer acquaintance with the music. The instrumental
Sinfonia da requiem of 1940 (Ex. 239(1) and (ii) ) illustrates the kind of
expression to which few people had become accustomed in 1940, when
Britten was twenty-seven:

Ex. 239

Andante molto tranquillo === =ч НЩ

(i)

545

BENJAMIN BRITTEN

Sul D

|
|

ЗЕ:

рита

ED ЕН == а e ame eode Mts г ИР ЕСЕ mt]

zk Sarre Lae See Gee Е Ц
i. eee ey Se 4 7 | ]

546

Lael

MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

Andante

Gii)

BENJAMIN BRITTEN 547

Britten perplexed his early critics because he could be related neither
to a recognized contemporary school nor to a tradition. None of
Britten's English predecessors, whether nationalists or disciples of con-
tinental leaders, entirely abandoned criteria of harmony and texture
formed by ‘the classics’. His major works seemed insubstantial in
the same sense as Turner's later pictures—all air and light. When
he decided, as in The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), to
make his peroration with a fugue he sloughed parts or ran them into
unison to avoid opacity. Similarly chaconnes, canons, and pedals are
allowed no more complexity than is required for a desired total effect.

Britten's fugues and his Second String Quartet (1945)—the move-
ments of which are of more traditional design that most of Britten's—
suggest that certain designs discover his limitations. He does not
resemble the English teachers for whom he has expressed admiration
and affection—Frank Bridge, John Ireland, and Arthur Benjamin
(1893-1960). It has already been pointed out that these were among
the least nationalist of their generation and the least attached to any
school. Unlike Hindemith and Nadia Boulanger, they do not seem to
have inclined towards the manner of any modern composer or school.
If we did not know their names not even the title of the most virtuosic
of Britten's early instrumental works, the string Variations on a Theme
of Frank Bridge (1937), would lead one to mention their influence,
although Arthur Benjamin's 77e Devil Take Her (1932), a sparkling and
splendidly composed one-act opera, is one of the few pre-Britten English
works that might pass for Britten's, if we could postulate for him an
operatic ‘first period’. Benjamin wrote five works for the stage: unfortu-
nately the best music is found in the incomplete Tartuffe, which contains
spoken parts and is an English adaptation of Moliére's Le Misanthrope.

Britten is at his best when a plot, text, or vocal line provides the
thread that helps to make explicit the purport of his texture as a whole
and also bears the chief concentration of integrating technique. It is
possible that the revaluation of Sinfonia da requiem has been largely
the consequence of familiarity with his treatment of the voice and his
response to dramatic and pictorial situations; the thematic material is
subtly linked from movement to movement and there are also derivations
from harmonic formulae; moreover the three movements bear
titles and could have occurred in an opera or cantata. The examples from
the third and final movement, “Кедшет aeternam', provide a slight
anchorage for the listener. The instrumentation of Ex. 239(1) is possibly
from Stravinsky and Ex. 239(1) is Mahlerian; in both excerpts the
rhythms are conservative and the harmonies basically so. The flutes clash,
and several bass notes are discords, yet the sound is gently luminous.

548 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

Britten's harmony is as personal as his structure, and so linked with
structure that we must qualify the label ‘impressionist’. Britten is an
impressionist in so far as his chords are not conceived within a frame-
work of symmetrical harmonic rhythm. Singly, in pairs, or in short
groups they may be sustained, repeated, or varied as long as he needs
their initial effect. He rarely uses the lush chords of post-romantic
impressi nists but is fond of triads with added notes, augmented triads,
and indeed just plain triads divorced from traditional contexts. His
juxtapositions look simple but are not prefabricated ‘progressions’. The
lullaby from The Rape of Lucretia quoted in Ex. 239(iii) seems ап excep-
tion in Britten of four-part harmony with a regular tread, yet it is both
impressionistic and original in a way which only the dramatic circum-
stances and the proper instruments fully reveal. Britten’s chords, unlike
Bartok’s or Stravinsky’s, are rarely built up from fourths; he favours the
piling of thirds—triad, seventh, and ninth.

We cannot class Britten with impressionists who continued the refine-
ment of erotic romanticism, nor with those whose evanescent harmonies
and colours are mixed with mere wisps and scrappets of melody, for
the strongest of all his materials of expression is his vocal line. It has
been imitated but remains unique. Britten’s ‘line’ (vocal or not) gives
the complete texture a tighter integration than was necessary for former
impressionists.

In Peter Grimes several passages of arioso seem to flaunt the ideal of
‘heightened speech’. Lawyer Swallow’s declamations, of which Ex. 240
is a specimen, were quoted as examples of perversity:

As-sign your pret - ti- ness to йе, ІШІ сай ETE

real рго-рег - ty.

In his twenties Britten was manifestly attracted by Purcell's inspired
flamboyance, yet he never emulated Purcell to the extent of sounding
neo-baroque. Undoubtedly, however, seventeenth-century words in Тйе
Holy Sonnets of John Donne (1946) have prompted his most Purcellian

BENJAMIN BRITTEN 549

settings. The point could be best shown from No. 7, ‘At the round
earth's imagined corners', but one forbears to excise a quotation from a
song that 15 unified by a ground-bass technique, and therefore Ex. 241
is taken from No. 9, ‘Death, be not proud’. The extract is the trans-
formation of a quiet theme introduced at the words ‘From sleepe and
rest, which but thy pictures bee’:

Jf marcato ATN

And dost with

а =

poppie or charms сап make

550 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

а
[7
[AN D meme ые ПИРДИН ЧЫНЕ ш

Апа bet-ter than thy stroake;

Such direct and fiery Purcellisms now represent a comparatively early
stage in a composer who could hardly have reached the subtle integra-
tion of his later settings and yet retained vivid illustrative power if his
flamboyance had not been strong enough for pruning. He is now rarely
opulent and never ostentatious, but his refinement is not emaciated,
timid or affected; it comes from an invention so fertile that it might
have lost much of its power if it had run riot.

The stages by which Britten came to mastery in dealing with English
words invite psychological as well as musical inquiry. According to
Peter Pears! his thorough study of Purcell was not undertaken until the
general directions of his style were fixed and his originality recognized.
The 1936 settings of satirically sententious and sometimes obscure
verses by Auden in Our Hunting Fathers were by no means a waste of his
abilities; still less questionable was his determination not to set familiar
English verses from Elizabethan and Jacobean lyrics, or from later
sources, until he had met the challenge of French in Les Illuminations
(Rimbaud) and Italian in Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo (both 1940).

1 Benjamin Britten: a Commentary on his works, ed. Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller
(London, 1952), p. 64.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN 551

Pears’s comments on the factors which ordained Britten’s course
need not be echoed here, but we should draw one clear conclusion—
that, as Byrd declared in a misquoted and misunderstood passage, the
‘hidden power’ which elicits music at the reading of the right words
comes not from the words themselves but (Byrd’s phrase) from the
‘thoughts underlying the words’, and therefore Britten’s self-imposed
course was neither perverse nor affected. Before returning to his native
language he wished to kill any temptation to accept without question a
reciter’s values.

Britten’s return to English poets was signalized in 1943 by the
publication of one of his most attractive works, the Serenade for tenor
solo, horn obbligato, and string orchestra. The subject of evening and
nightfall links its six texts, chosen from different periods so that an
anonymous fifteenth-century dirge is flanked by familiar verses from
Blake and Tennyson, Jonson and Keats; but Britten’s wish to unify the
cycle precludes any attempt to relate musical styles to literary periods.
Particularly fine, both in itself and in its effect as a ‘frame’ is the para-
graph for solo horn that forms the prologue and is repeated distantly
(‘off stage’) for epilogue. It is to be played on the natural harmonics:
the feeling for the instrument, the punctuation of the paragraph and
the extraordinary power of its phrases to suggest both the main theme
of the cycle and a concentration of associations and memories testify to а
rare quality of musicianship.

The Serenade is among the most deservedly popular of Britten's non-
operatic works, but the key documents to his mature, unostentatious
integration in arioso are the three Canticles. For subtlety of organiza-
tion Britten has never surpassed Canticle 3 (1955) a setting of Edith
Sitwell’s ‘Still falls the rain’. The verses are interspersed with variations
for horn and piano, and only a long quotation could show the variation
technique as well as the relation between vocal and instrumental move-
ments.

There is hardly a better manual of Britten's later vocal style than a
set of songs which, unlike the Canticles or Nocturne, are almost domestic
music, though singer and pianist must be worthy of a modern
Schubertiad. Winter Words (1954) is an album of eight lyrics from
Thomas Hardy. The first, ‘At close of day’, accommodates a wealth of
illustration in variations of an initial idea, yet at the finish leaves us
aware that the dips of the line throughout depict the background of the
poem, the swaying of ‘tall trees’. The motor pattern of the second song,
about a poor lad’s railway journey from home on a bleak night, is a
traditional integrator; but the Purcellian melisma in the voice part
produces a total effect by no means traditional. The deliberately

552 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

РигсеШап arioso іп No. 5, “Тһе Choirmaster’s Burial’, is self-
explanatory. The last song, ‘Before Life and After’, is useful for short
quotation. Its trudging triads offer in themselves little scope for varied
expression but make a superb background for highly expressive vocal
inflexion. In Ex. 242 we note how they are halted, Schubert-wise, at key
points in the poem, the third time with an unemphatic false relation
which gives “по sense was stung' a vividness which eludes the words
alone:

as опе may guess Апа

toad very smooth
DIE

BENJAMIN BRITTEN

(ii)

or cross

er crash

>
©
8
Е

None cared

Brought wrack

(iii)

554 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

No sense was stung.

Britten withdrew his first opera, Paul Bunyan, and no part of it has
been heard in public. Peter Grimes (1945), comparable in resources and
musical ingredients with Verdi's Otello rather than any German music-
drama, remains his most popular work, having been translated into
many languages and acclaimed in many countries. Тле Rape of Lucretia
(1946) requires a string and a wind quintet with two percussion players,
and a cast of three men and three women to whom are added one man
and one woman who stand on either side of the proscenium as com-
menting chorus. It is customary to call this work and the ensuing
Albert Herring (1947) chamber operas, though Lucretia touches levels
of pathos reached in Britten's full-scale operas and Herring is one of
the better comic operas of our century. It is possible to deplore the new
forms of puritanism, manifest in gratuitous moralizing and in an em-
phasis upon squalid verismo for The Beggar's Opera and in the implica-
tion that we are wickedly heartless to acquiesce in Gay's idea of “А
Newgate Pastoral’; yet one may still marvel at Britten’s ability to meet
Tyrone Guthrie's dialogue and to extend or vary the original music
without once suggesting academic exercise. The Beggar's Opera (1949) is
rightly described as ‘opera in three acts’ and wrongly as “а new realiza-
tion of John Gay's Ballad Opera 1728'.

The Turn of the Screw (1954) also engages ‘single’ instruments. This
work, to which ‘chamber’ should never be applied as a diminutive, is
the finest as well as the most ingenious of Britten's operas. The less
complex and very directly appealing Billy Budd (1952)! which, marking
Britten's return to Verdian broadness, full cast, and orchestra, may be
considered the successor to Grimes. Its naval setting and consequent
all-male cast seems not to have affected its success. For the coronation
festa teatrale at Covent Garden in 1953 Britten provided Gloriana, an
episodic piece upon the relations between Elizabeth I and her favourites;
the two ballet sections and the incongruous spoken scene at the end are

1See pl. VIII.

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BENJAMIN BRITTEN 559

по the only features of this work which prove it to be no exception to
the rule that first-class operas cannot be secured from the most giftep
composer if he is restricted in choice of subject or given a time-limit.

Another work in a class by itself is А Midsummer Night’s Dream
(1960). Abbreviating Shakespeare so that cutting or botching is no-
where evident, Britten and Pears prepared a libretto which offers even
more scope than the tragic operas for Britten's characteristic techniques.
More than a dozen personages are thematically distinguished, their
musical characterization high-lighted by strong contrasts—Titania and
the transformed Bottom, the drugged and therefore fawning or scorning
lovers—and the already wealthy motivic apparatus is further enriched
by the palpable characterization of such concepts as The Wood, or
Sleep. Oberon's is a countertenor part and Puck's a speaking part for a
boy-acrobat; the dances and the onomatopoeic and scenic effects are
not the only wonderful features of a score without modern rival for the
variety of suggestive magic that is drawn from the quieter registers of a
large orchestra. Particularly original is the use of the lighter percussion
instruments.

In every one of Britten's operas the music carries the drama, is itself
the drama. The Rape of Lucretia, based on a play adversely criticized for
its preciosity, is furnished with an English text in the pseudo-poetry
practised by teachers and students of prosody. Yet objection is
irrelevant. If such a sentence as ‘Home is what man leaves to seek’ were
merely “еі” to the kind of music designed to let words speak for them-
selves, we should suppose it to be a literal and obscure translation. As it
comes through an exquisite instrumental texture from the female chorus
(during the folding of linen) nobody strains to catch its meaning: it is
simply part of a musical picture of domestic womanhood. The text of
Lucretia is no more a musical handicap than that of Grimes which,
based on George Crabbe, contains phrases not easily ‘caught’ as so many
words, e.g. ‘But when the crowner sits upon it, who can dare to fix the
guilt?’ It is as a musician that Britten is a consummate dramatist, and
he would have been so even if he had not composed his operas.

From the unpretentious, divertimento-like Cello Sonata to 4 Mid-
summer Night’s Dream Britten’s sheer composition has no parallel in any
British music by younger composers. And, with all its variety, it is
remarkably—and unconsciously—consistent. Britten expressed amaze-
ment when shown the similarity between the chords used in Ех 2431),
for the setting of Keats’s ‘Sonnet to Sleep’ іп the Serenade, and those
employed nearly twenty years later to evoke a similar atmosphere in
A Midsummer Night's Dream (Ex. 243(ii) ). In neither case did the fact
that four chords utilized all twelve semitones signify any indebtedness

556 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960
to Schoenberg or his technical successors. Britten's conscious aim was
to produce equal unexpectedness between the four chords and provide
a large enough basis for variations.
Ex. 243 в
(0) 4
Adagio

Tenor НИНА А
Voice ГЕ

тшш =
Violas E o o a uae Hr К зс [sje a д та ЕЕ,
ШАЛУ, LE 07 5 а j ;: [Ed е

Brass, muted

Str. muted

ELISABETH LUTYENS

Despite the structural use of twelve-note rows in The Turn of the Screw
(1954) and the Cantata Academica (1960), celebrating the 500th anni-
versary of Basle University, these are not twelve-note compositions; the
music is, as always with Britten, essentially diatonic.

The first 'twelve-note'" British musician was Britten's senior. То
Elisabeth Lutyens (b. 1906) must go the credit of first employing in
England the full Schoenbergian ‘method of composing with twelve
notes. As a viola player Lutyens had been attracted by Purcell's
fantasias, and it was her attempt to ‘organize “аіопа!” conceptions in
accordance with an indigenous tradition’ in a five-part string fantasia
which 'gave birth unconsciously to a twelve-note theme'.! She turned
permanently to serial technique in the Concerto for Nine Instruments of
1940, but she had shown full understanding of Webern in the String
Trio of the previous year. Until her Sixth String Quartet of 1952, how-
ever, she seemed curiously limited in rhythmic invention, although she
was said to be an admirer of Bartók. Her music is most impressive when
it includes voices, e.g. her setting of Rimbaud's O saisons, O cháteaux

1 Groves Dictionary (fifth edition) (London, 1954), v, p. 448.

IMMIGRANT COMPOSERS 557

for soprano, mandoline, harp, guitar, and strings (1946), The Pit (1947)
for tenor and bass soloists, with women's chorus and orchestra, her
Op. 27 Motet (1954) to words selected from Wittgenstein, and her
chamber opera Infidelio of the same year. Her contemporary, Benjamin
Frankel (1906—73), and two rather younger women-composers of her
generation, Elizabeth Maconchy (b. 1907), and Phyllis Tate (b. 1911),
are more conservative.

IMMIGRANT COMPOSERS

Three continental musicians of wide experience and forward-looking
temperament settled in Britain during the 1930s. Egon Wellesz (b. 1885),
though esteemed chiefly for his studies of Byzantine chant and of early
baroque music, has composed eight symphonies and nine string quartets,
much better known in Central Europe than in the land of his adoption,
as well as operas and liturgical works. A close friend of Bruno Walter
and Schoenberg he did not follow Schoenberg’s path but was constantly
influenced by his historical studies—eastern, medieval, baroque, roman-
tic, and modern. His music is recognizably Viennese and includes many
points of experimental interest, a fact which explains his wide influence
on adventurous young musicians, exercised not by expecting them to
imitate him but by shrewd understanding of European and English
traditions and by unfailing optimism and sympathy.

Ex. 244 is from his Eighth String Quartet (1963). The extended
Mahlerian character of this passage is clear in the wide intervals of
the melodic line in the first violin part and the reining-in before the
irregular metre of the climax.

Ex. 244

IMMIGRANT COMPOSERS 559

Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970) must have been the least docile and the
least Teutonic among Schoenberg’s pupils. Although his father was
Swiss and his mother French, he was brought up as a Catalan near
Barcelona. He came to England at the end of the Spanish Civil War and
lived in Cambridge.

In 1945 Gerhard adapted Sheridan's 7he Duenna for an opera in
which the juxtaposition of techniques is no more incongruous than
Sheridan's mixture of verses and conversational prose, or his relaxations
and accelerations of dramatic action. Gathering tensions among the
characters sometimes produce a Bergian polyphony, and the transitions
between arias and dialogue-music often engage serial technique. On the
other hand the charming verses are set to attractive rhythms in a style
that is often less complex than that of the strophic items in Stravinsky's
The Rake's Progress. Much in the declamatory and conversational vocal
line shows both subtlety of characterization and an awareness of
English speech inflexions that at times actually recalls Britten's.

An even more powerfully individual artist emerged in the instrumental
works which Gerhard composed after 1950, when he became an estab-
lished twelve-note composer, though without losing the love of sensuous
harmony with which his earliest work showed him to be abnormally
endowed. Gerhard has provided a clue to the harmonic and orchestral
allure which he achieves in works like the serial Violin Concerto of 1945,
Piano Concerto (1951), Symphony (1955), Harpsichord Concerto and
String Quartet (both 1956). He arranges and permutes divisions of the
twelve notes of a series (e.g. tetrachords or hexachords) as one does
when spacing or inverting chords of three, four, five, or six notes in tonal
harmony. In some ways he was more like Schoenberg than Webern was,
and could claim just as validly to have developed from a point at which
Schoenberg left off.

The third notable immigrant, Mátyás Seiber (1905—60), was a less
original and audacious composer than Gerhard, but more representative
of central European advances in composition as observed by a superb
teacher who assiduously practised composition in all styles.

Seiber, who settled in England in 1935, was among Kodály's pupils
and was much influenced by Bartók both before and after his appoint-
ment at Frankfurt-am-Main in 1928 as director of the newly opened jazz
department of the Hoch Conservatoire. Such essays in orthodox
Schoenbergian dodecaphony as the Second String Quartet (1935) and
the chamber cantata Three Fragments (1957) (the texts taken from
Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) attracted less attention
than the Third String Quartet (Quartetto lirico, 1951) and the cantata

1 On Gerhard, see also р. 426.

560 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

Ulysses (1949) in which Seiber set passages from Joyce's book for tenor,
chorus, and orchestra. Here we find, without obvious debt to Berg or
anyone else, Seiber's easy absorption of dodecaphonic methods along
with others. Ulysses disproved the charge that serial music is impractical
or ineffective for choral groups, and Seiber's work in general answered
critics who supposed that dodecaphonic serialism cannot sustain
lyrical rapture or that it cannot be integrated with techniques avoided
by its Viennese pioneers.

Ex. 245 is from Ulysses. Characteristic of Seiber are both his consi-
deration for the singers, whose individual lines are easy to pitch, and his
combination of canonic writing with bouche fermée to create an atmo-
spheric effect which is nevertheless truly, even traditionally musical in
the strictest sense.

Ex. 245
ri
а= c Hui jT e
Шал was. а. М = to. = pisi. — —9" NE ENSE:
| = Unis. резрг.
г. Eig а р, pafl
Ере
m и was а U - ры -әрі-а me dep (COS ушт

77 yA

= [EEE die EEE

Thatit was a U - to - pi-a E

Bass

poco a poco string.

(4-63)
espr. cresc
жы NUIT NE t
я 5 s В H 21 a

(бу ee, Не , E НЫ

т р | Ва в т 7

(closed) m

——————

/ È » |lL— ПР Я

ЕЕ" zz

(closed) m
Ц р К йй | j ; `~

(closed) m

poco a poco ues M
e

2a: RS C M pm
Ира не S me gru mL
TEE TE
Gb EA ЕЕ

(up to 76—80) Allarg. |

ан ты
querat reg rire |

A tempo (4 = | (d= circa 76)
Picc. eo dad NM. ---- |
44121471144 4411
REI

da Sm mcd „ер жЕ Де ашый

HUMPHREY SEARLE 563

HUMPHREY SEARLE

The writings of Humphrey Searle (b. 1915), who studied with Webern,
include Twentieth Century Harmony and translations of Schoenberg's
Structural Functions of Harmony and Rufer's Composition with Twelve
Notes. As a composer Searle glanced towards Stravinsky in Gold Coast
Customs for speakers, male chorus and orchestra (1949), but achieved
more distinction by his interest in Liszt. Searle hardly did more than
defy fashion with his first Lisztian piano concerto in 1944 but he proved
in the next few years that a Webern pupil need not abjure the reflective
beauty of his native song. His Intermezzo for Eleven Instruments, his
setting for soprano, flute, oboe, and string quartet of W. R. Rodgers’s
Put away the flutes, and his best work, the somewhat Bergian Poem for
Twenty-two Strings (1950) as well as the Variations and Finale for Ten
Instruments (1958) are stronger works than the more grandiose Piano
Sonata (1951) with romantic bravura and a Lisztian thematic technique,
and five symphonies (1953, 1958, 1960, 1962, and 1964). The River-Run
of 1951 affords more pleasure from the orchestral texture than from the
speaker of James Joyce’s words with Dublin intonations.

THE YOUNGER GENERATION

The new composers who emerged after the Second World War include
Peter Racine Fricker (b. 1920), Malcolm Arnold (b. 1921), Robert
Simpson (b. 1921), Iain Hamilton (b. 1922), Anthony Milner (b. 1925),
and Thea Musgrave (b. 1928). Fricker has given time and labour to a
relatively small output of high quality. Conscious of developments
abroad he owes allegiance to no single school or method, and even his
admitted indebtedness to Bartók is far from obvious. He took lessons
with Mátyás Seiber, and his 1949 Quartet is clearly influenced by
Bartók's Third. Before Fricker could have been at all considerably
influenced by Bartók he had produced harsh but emotional effects by
his textures; and if he did not command Bartók's rhythmic fertility,
Fricker has proved himself to be a master of rhythm in the broader sense
in movement after movement although (or maybe because) his rhythmic
articula are built into contrapuntal designs derived from those used in
classical teaching. What gives such distinction to the result is the
frequent composition of an athletic texture in which vigour, though
generated by ubiquitous counterpoint, appears to be concentrated in
an expansive, finely phrased, but urgent melody as in this excerpt from
the first movement of his Second Symphony:

564
Ex. 246

MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

Allegro

THE YOUNGER GENERATION 565

= HU UCET

Admirable thematic organization makes Fricker's Second Symphony
(1951) as a whole more rewarding than the First (1949), despite the First
Symphony's finale where inspired integration transcends its complex
detail. Perhaps the most assuring aspect of Fricker's composition is its
consistency and reliability. The symphonies and the Viola Concerto of
1952 happen to be impressive because they use the full orchestra, but
the same standard of composition is found in the String Quartet of 1949,
the Violin Sonata of the following year, and some works for small
orchestra composed at about the same time—a Violin Concerto and the
particularly attractive Prelude, Elegy, and Finale for strings, from which
part of the middle movement may be quoted on account of its lyrical
appeal:

566 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

Fricker does not seem to have introduced any serial features into his
compositions until 1955 with Litany for Double String Orchestra and
Sonnets for Piano. Even when his texture is unusually lean Fricker does
not write music like Webern's, but has brought twelve-tone melodies,
figurations, and chords into an already assured style. In his Twelve
Studies for Piano (1960) the contrasts are not between styles learnt from

THE YOUNGER GENERATION 567

this or that source—Hindemith, Stravinsky, Bartók, Webern—but of
keyboard technique in varying moods invented by an integrated
imagination.

Fricker successfully cast his First String Quartet (1949) in one move-
ment; his Violin Sonata (1950) and Second Quartet (1952) finish with
third movements that are also the slowest; all three movements of his
Second Symphony he regards as rondos. His command of extended
form served him well in 1958, when he undertook his only commission
for an imposing choral work, choosing for his text Cynewulf's Christ
interwoven with Hallelujahs and extracts from the Mass, and entitling
the whole work The Vision of Judgement. It moves from a stern peniten-
tial atmosphere to sustained apocalyptic glory, and is grateful to chorus,
soloists and the many instrumentalists required. The normal tautness of
his musical textures is relaxed in the immediately attractive Octet of
1958.

Iain Hamilton showed honest romantic rapture in his Op. 1 Varia-
tions for Strings, but a Symphony heard first in 1951 could not avoid
comparison with Fricker’s of that year. It took wing powerfully
in fine melody and reached no satisfactory culmination in its finale.
ЕпсКегз, on the other hand, showed its first movement to be the
shortest, remaining menacing and restrained even during passages of
sultry lyricism; expansive magniloquence crowned the work in its finale.
Hamilton's Violin Concerto of the following year was well designed and
intensely emotional in its appeal, but he then turned from this romantic
mode of expression, with its high violin melodies poised above alluring
discords. Since then he has experimented with chamber works, song-
settings, piano pieces, Scottish dances, a concerto for jazz trumpet, and,
more recently, serial works, following his study of Webern, Stock-
hausen, and other Europeans. It is only in these later works, which lie
outside the scope of this chapter, that Hamilton achieves a fully assured
style.

Neither Anthony Milner (b. 1925) nor Malcolm Williamson (b. 1931)
has followed Fricker in concentrating upon concert-hall instrumental
composition. They have had little difficulty in finding words, liturgical
and secular, to excite their musical 1magination towards an expression
as full-blooded as sincerity and modern sophisticated taste will allow.
Milner is the less romantic of the two and the more conservative
technically.

Milner's efficient chamber and orchestral pieces show that he is
dependent upon words or religious concepts to stimulate his invention.
In addition to an unaccompanied Mass and setting of vespers-psalms,
Milner's best works include his /mproperia for double chorus, strings,

568 MUSIC IN BRITAIN 1916-1960

and organ (1949) which, from its recourse to instruments, cannot be
intended for church use in the Good Friday liturgy, The City of Desola-
tion (1955), a cantata with soloists and orchestra, The Water and the
Fire (1962), a Three Choirs Festival oratorio on texts chosen by him
incorporating material from the Easter Liturgy, Our Lady's Hours
(1957), a song cycle for soprano and piano, and Variations for
Orchestra (1959) upon a fifteenth-century theme.

Williamson was born in Australia and heard little twentieth-century
music until his first visit to Europe in 1950. His deprivation did him
little harm, for he suffered no pressure from vogue and could form
his own judgements on Delius, Shostakovich, and the scores of
‘musicals’. He was ready to receive and examine any music in which he
recognized vitality. By 1953, when he settled here permanently, he had
taken lessons with Elisabeth Lutyens and been persuaded to use serial
techniques. His conversion to Roman Catholicism awakened his interest
in Dunstable and other medieval musicians (he uses isorhythm in the
organ variations on the Coventry Carol, Vision of Christ-Phoenix) as
well as in the music and theories of Messiaen. His one-time employment
as a night-club pianist and his admiration of tunes in Richard Rodgers's
musicals led to his own writing of more advanced musicals, including №
Bed for Bacon.

Williamson's exuberance finds full rein in his concertos, as it did in
the opera Our Man in Havana (1963). (One of his best works before
this was the unaccompanied Symphony for Voices of 1962.) Our Man in
Havana was an audacious and unequal undertaking, but its best parts
are not confined to the most serious or the most serial.

To choose names from among the still younger composers becomes
increasingly invidious. Of those who had begun to make their mark
before 1960, which is the chronological limit of this chapter, and have
gone on to prove their worth, one must mention Alexander Goehr
(b. 1932), Hugh Wood (b. 1932), Peter Maxwell Davies (b. 1934),
Harrison Birtwistle (b. 1934), and Nicholas Maw (b. 1935). Goehr,
Davies, and Birtwistle have become known аз ‘the Manchester school’
since they were fellow-students there; Wood studied with Milner,
Hamilton, and Seiber, Maw with Berkeley and Nadia Boulanger.

VII

AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

(i) Music In The United States

By RICHARD FRANKO GOLDMAN

THE BACKGROUND

WESTERN musical art is essentially international, but its expressions
and institutions vary locally. We can often distinguish English, French,
German, Italian, or Russian music by idiosyncracies of style, and can
trace these elements of style to national or regional backgrounds of folk-
music deriving from a remote past and from traditions of composition
handed down from one generation to another by a succession of
acknowledged masters. Elaborated or sophisticated art, and the
institutions for its presentation and dissemination, depend on a sense
of continuity and on a consciousness of a more or less homogeneous
culture. It is evident that these conditions for the development of an
indigenous art did not prevail in America for many generations, and
that an American music of consequence could not have evolved earlier
than the twentieth century.

American music inevitably reflected, as did American culture as a
whole, the diversity of its European origins. Musicians born or settled
in America were content to make the best effort within their powers to
continue, or perhaps to discover, the traditions of a highly developed
musical language. Musicians arriving from Europe in each generation
brought with them their ideas, traditions, and technical skills. There
were, unfortunately, no composers of dominating personality or impor-
tant attainment among them. American-born composers, until the
beginning of the twentieth century, necessarily went back to Europe,
and principally to Germany, to learn their craft. With few exceptions,
they became very minor German composers; and although almost
since the settling of the continent there had been a sense of the need for
discovering an artistic America, this discovery could not be effected by
exhortation. If certain American materials were already present, the
conditions for their recognition were not. And while Americanism as
such remained a preoccupation, there was at the same time an intense
desire to perpetuate, without the historical and social conditions that

570 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

had made them possible, many of the institutions and practices of
European artistic life. One feels that many of these efforts were primarily
competitive in impulse, and to some extent based on an idea of what
was proper rather than what was necessary.

In considering any aspect of American culture, a fundamental condi-
tion of American society must always be kept in mind: that the country
was settled by immigrants from every European background, and that
eventually the consciousness of an African background also became an
element of primary importance. Thus a part of the problem of the
American artist has always centred on his search for a real and usable
past, and one that could be assimilated in a sense as a common past
for all Americans. The first social and cultural traditions were of
course English, and English became the language to be learned by
Germans, Mediterraneans, East Europeans, and all others. But the
English past, including English folk-song or English hymnody as passed
on through New England musicians, represented a tradition alien
to increasing numbers of Americans of non-English background. The
theoretical *melting-pot' produced its tensions and conflicts, and it
would be a rash historian who would claim that these have ever been
completely resolved in American society.

Thus, while nineteenth-century American composers of serious
inclination and ambition were endeavouring to establish an American
art of conventional English and German pattern, they failed to notice
a lively and diversified popular art which was developing all about them.
The work of these composers was a provincial echo of the most facile
styles of Europe. From time to time, gestures were made in the direction
of the native picturesque, beginning with Hans Gram's Death Song of
an Indian Chief (1791), said to be the first orchestral score published in
the United States, and on through a variety of naive and condescending
evocations of the noble Indian and the happy, carefree Negro. Exception
must be made for the more interesting efforts of William Henry Fry
(1813-64), the first musical Americanist of consequence, and of Louis
Moreau Gottschalk (1829-69), a virtuoso pianist of New Orleans, who
took a genuine and cultivated interest in the Creole music of the
Caribbean as heard in Louisiana, and attempted to recapture its
flavour in many of his once-popular piano pieces. But in general, a
genteel and conservative manner, typical of provincial urban society,
set the tone of American concert life, and the representative composers,
from John Knowles Paine (1839-1906) to Edward MacDowell (1862-
1908) and Horatio Parker (1863-1919) echoed the styles of Raff or
Grieg. The so-called Boston school, beginning with Paine, did however
establish a standard of professional competence and craft, and provided

THE BACKGROUND 571

a basis for the schooling of later musicians. Paine became the first
Professor of Music at Harvard University in 1875; Parker later held a
similar post at Yale, and MacDowell at Columbia. They helped to
establish the important precedent of the teaching of composition and
other branches of musical art in American universities, a development of
the greatest significance for American music in the twentieth century.

Popular music in nineteenth-century America was not (nor is it yet)
a unified folk-music, if indeed it was a folk music at all within the usual
European definition. Perhaps that is why it was not recognized as such
even by those composers who most vehemently lamented the absence
of a folk tradition in America. American popular music was the music
of a diversity of people remote from the traditions of the concert hall
or of German symphonic music. It embraced hymns, revival songs,
temperance tunes, Negro work songs and spirituals, imitation (*black-
face’) Negro music of the minstrel shows, brass band quicksteps, the
composed songs of Stephen Collins Foster (1826-64) and others, and,
in a number of areas, survivals of British, Spanish, French, or German
secular folk tunes. Eventually ragtime and jazz, a fusion of many
elements, emerged in and around New Orleans. But all of these vigorous
manifestations of idiosyncratic music were considered, until the
twentieth century, as beneath the proper concern of cultivated musicians,
with the sole exception of the surviving strains of British folk-song.
These latter were regarded by some few composers as the only proper
and respectable sources for an American idiom; all else remained either
vulgar or alien. À new American consciousness, evolving in the twentieth
century, was required for the recognition and absorption of popular
diversity—cultural, racial, and even sectional—as the most genuine
possibility for an indigenous expression.

American music owes a great debt to Antonin Dvorak. Dvorak was
among the first composers of universally acknowledged stature to visit
the United States (1893—5), and the first to advise the American com-
poser to look about him at home, with particular attention to the music
of the Negro. Although Dvorák's own knowledge of Negro music was
superficial, he at least took this music seriously and gave others the
artistic courage to do so. He contributed greatly towards the creation
of the new environment for the American musician that began to take
shape in the early years of the twentieth century. The fact that he
was a Czech was not without importance. Gilbert Chase! correctly
points out that MacDowell's contemptuous dismissal of Dvorák's
advice was probably motivated by the fact that Dvofák was not a
German composer. But other composers were stimulated by Dvorak’s

! America's Music (New York, 1955), p. 392.

502 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

example and advice. Arthur Farwell (1872-1951) is best remembered
for his serious study of Indian music, undertaken as a direct result of
Dvofák's influence. But in 1903 Farwell also declared that music
other than German— French and Russian especially— needed hearing
in the United States. Farwell, an important figure in American musical
history (although his compositions have not survived in the repertoire),
felt strongly the need for an American manner of expression which, in
his view, would embrace ragtime, as well as the music of the Negro and
Indian, and which also would demand ‘new and daring expressions’.
In 1902 Farwell founded the Wa-Wan Press for the publication of new
American music, with the expressed purpose of launching “а progressive
movement for American music, including a definite acceptance of
Dvofrak’s challenge to go after our folk music’. The Wa-Wan Press is
important in American music as the first concrete and organized
effort to offer an opportunity of publication to composers representing a
new orientation and spirit.

Among the composers published by the Wa-Wan Press was Henry
Е. B. Gilbert (1868-1928). Although Gilbert was MacDowell’s first
American pupil, his musical aesthetic was diametrically opposed to that
of his teacher. Gilbert, like Farwell, saw the importance of the native
background. He travelled widely throughout the United States, earning
his living in a variety of ways, and absorbed a great deal of what he
heard. Like Gottschalk, he was attracted by the Creole music of New
Orleans, and based his symphonic poem 77e Dance in Place Congo
(performed as a ballet-pantomime in 1918 at the Metropolitan Opera
House) on tunes published in 1886 by the New Orleans writer George
W. Cable. Gilbert's Comedy Overture on Negro Themes (1911) is still
played occasionally. In other compositions, Gilbert turned his attention
to ragtime, to the music of Latin America, and to the hitherto neglected
tunes made popular in the blackface minstrel shows of the 1850s and
1860s. Gilbert was perhaps the first to recognize that these tunes had
become a kind of American folk-music.

Farwell and Gilbert, and other composers of their generation, repre-
sented what would eventually become one of the main streams of
American musical development. They were aware of the great variety of
unexplored and unexploited material available, and their work, though
not in itself of permanent musical value, prepared the ground for later
composers by calling attention to that material and to its possibilities.
Their contribution towards the establishing of an American musical
consciousness can be seen at a distance as more important than that of
MacDowell, who was recognized without question in his time (and for
some time thereafter) as the ‘greatest’ American composer. MacDowell

THE BACKGROUND 573

achieved something of an international reputation, the first American
composer to do so; and this accomplishment was important in that it
gave Americans of his time a sense that a native composer of acknow-
ledged stature had finally appeared. MacDowell's music has been over-
praised and under-estimated; at its best it has charm and individuality,
but the style he represented was that of a period reaching its end, and its
connexion with the major movements of musical art was that of a late
arrival.

American music may be said to have been, until the end of the First
World War, in the process of discovering itself. The war of 1914—18
marked a turning point in the cultural as well as the political history of
the United States. America's emergence as a world power brought with
it a heightened national consciousness and a sense of history that could
be translated into a new and vigorous expression. Earlier consciousness,
as for example in Whitman, had been largely prophetic. The Transcen-
dentalists had spoken for the individual. But the new sense of awareness
was both collective and retrospective; a new identity, formed of
European elements but in spirit non-European, took shape for the
first time. It was not accident that the variety of memories and traditions
existing during the periods of immigration and settlement should at this
time have begun, at many levels of American culture, to fuse into
memories and traditions with some meaning for all. The material of
American culture required synthesis, and in so far as American culture
can be said to have a character, it is synthetic in the literal meaning of
the term. In art, as in politics, the emergence of Americans of other than
English or German origin, dates effectively from 1918, and it is again
not by accident that in order to be American, American art had first
to acquiesce in internationalism. The prominence of American com-
posers of, for example, Italian descent (Walter Piston, Paul Creston,
Peter Mennin, Norman Dello Joio, Gian Carlo Menotti) and of Jewish
descent (George Gershwin, Ernest Bloch, Aaron Copland, William
Schuman, Marc Blitzstein, Hugo Weisgall, Leonard Bernstein, Leon
Kirchner) is a purely twentieth-century phenomenon.

From this standpoint, a more immediate interest and awareness of
contemporary European currents was also of importance. The end of an
age throughout the world, reflected in art as conscious revolt, gave
American artists a sense of being able to overcome the lateness of their
start and to begin a new movement on an almost equal footing. The
universal awareness of new aesthetic orientations and ideals had a
liberating influence, both technically and psychologically, on artists
throughout the world, with whom, for the first time, Americans were

able to feel a sense of community and of contemporaneity. The
38

574 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

American musician felt a welcome sense of release at being able to
throw off, at the same time as everyone else, the weight of competition
with Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner, or even with Raff and Grieg. A
surge of freedom, reflected in ‘advanced’ music, was necessary not only
as an assertion of independence, but even as a condition for making
conservative music once again interesting.

The influence of European events was felt not only as a result of
travel and communication, but also through the arrival in the United
States as permanent residents of musicians of the quality of Edgard
Varése (1916) and Ernest Bloch (1916). Whether Varése and Bloch
are to be considered American composers and musicians is open
to question, but one cannot question their importance and in-
fluence in the American musical scene. А younger ‘immigrant’
whose importance was temporary, but who attracted much attention
for a brief period, and who did much to make the public conscious of a
radical new stream of musical thought, was the Russian-born Leo
Ornstein (b. 1895). In the years before 1920, a small current of French
music and influence was reflected in the compositions of Charles Martin
Loeffler (1861-1935), born in Alsace, but long resident in Boston, and
of Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920). Griffes was a composer of
marked gifts, and several of his works entitle him to continued respect
and attention. Among these are The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan,
written as a piano piece in 1912, and performed in an orchestral version
in 1919. The White Peacock was similarly composed for piano in 1915,
and orchestrated in 1919. The Poem for Flute and Orchestra (1918) and
the Sonata for Piano (1918-19) are also representative. Griffes may be
described as an eclectic composer, but he was alive to the interesting
currents of his time, and much of his music can still be heard with
pleasure. He was aware of the contributions of Debussy, Busoni, and
Stravinsky, and he was interested in Arabian, Japanese, and Amerindian
music. It is worth noting that among those who encouraged him most
strongly was Farwell.

CHARLES IVES

Before turning to the main currents of American musical activity
in the 19206, it is necessary to consider the extraordinary phenomenon
of Charles Ives, one of the truly great *originals' in the history of music.
Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut, on 20 October 1874, and died
in New York on 19 May 1954. His life thus spans the entire period in
which American music may be said to have established itself. The
extraordinary circumstance of Ives's life and work is that none of his
music was heard or known, even in professional circles, until the 1920s,

CHARLES IVES 575

and that important public performances of his major works did not take
place until 1939 and after. With the exception of the Concord Sonata,
which Ives had privately printed in 1919, and a collection of 114 Songs,
similarly printed in 1922, none of Ives's music was available in published
form until 1929, by which time he had ceased composing.

The position of Ives in American music, indeed in the history of
contemporary music, is unique. One need not agree fully with his bio-
graphers, Sidney and Henry Cowell, that he was one of ‘the four great
creative figures of the first half of the twentieth century'—the others
being Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók— but it is impossible to
question his originality, his power or his authenticity. He anticipated
many of the ‘discoveries’ of his contemporaries and juniors, using
techniques not widely accepted until a generation later, including
harmony based on fourths, polytonality, tone-clusters and poly-
rhythms of extreme complexity. Passages in his work have a freedom
and boldness of imagination that is not only astonishing for its time (all
of Ives's work was done between 1891 and 1921—the most important
was completed by 1916) but that still seemed inventive and advanced to
musicians at the mid-point of the century. Most important, however, he
was the first to realize completely what it might mean to be an American
composer, and his career and work illuminate in the most telling
manner what it is to discover a musical world.

The world of Charles Ives was a world in which Beethoven and Bach
met Stephen Foster, New England hymn-singing, ragtime, circus quick-
steps, country fiddling, and every variety of spontaneous music-making
that characterizes the activity of a rural environment. This world was
shaped by an imagination conditioned in childhood to believe substance
more important than style and to shun dependence on musical customs
and habits. But it was an imagination coupled with intellect, with deep
roots in the New England past, and strengthened by a complete
acceptance of the New England environment as expressed in its most
ideal terms by Emerson and Thoreau. Ives had the independence that
can come only from tradition and discipline, the solid base over which
the most diverse elements can be assimilated and made into a new unity.

Ives received a conventional training from his father, a bandmaster
and music teacher who was himself ceaselessly interested in experiment
and fascinated by the nature of sound itself to the extent of improvising
devices for the performance of quarter tones. Beside giving his son a
conventional training, he invented exercises designed 'to stretch our
ears and strengthen our musical minds'. Later, young Ives studied under
Horatio Parker at Yale, doing ‘correct’ exercises for the classroom, but
writing for his own satisfaction music that shocked everyone but

himself. His Variations on ‘America for organ, composed in 1891,

AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960
employed bitonality, and other pieces composed before 1900 utilized

576

other techniques and materials that could only have seemed incom-

prehensible to his contemporaries. Here is an extract:

Var. III Allegro

Қ ld.
ДЇ! ДШ
GNL GN

CHARLES IVES 577

Se rey Der БЕЯ

oe те 1
[— JepES.: 7 ccc ecep pn
Е ае ооо кси сыс ыйы ышк шш

Characteristically, these early pieces include works based on or para-
phrasing hymn-tunes, circus marches, or other types of popular music,
set in textures ranging from extreme simplicity to extreme dissonance
and rhythmic complexity. |

Ives evolved his techniques and chose his materials not according to
апу formulated theory of musical composition, but rather in an attempt
to solve what to him were important questions about the nature of art
and expressiveness. To write ‘correct’? music (which he was quite able
to do) was of no interest to him. Ives sought to express a variety of
things (this was his view of ‘substance’ as opposed to ‘style’) that to him
were vital and meaningful: the particular quality of life as perceived
and enjoyed by a given man in a given time and place, here, in New
England, and beyond that the transcendental reality of man and the
universe in terms that had come most immediately from Emerson. Ives
was not afraid of large thoughts; his own philosophy was forceful and
articulate, and for him an art divorced from life, whether eternal life or
daily life, was utterly without point.

Whatever the merits of Ives's philosophy, the student of American
music can learn much by reading his Essays before a Sonata,* privately
printed in 1920 as an adjunct to the Concord Sonata for piano. It
becomes clear that Ives 15 the first composer in America who did not
look to European music for models, but to Bach and Beethoven as if he
felt that he understood what they meant.

It is not surprising that Ives could find no audience. No public was
ready for this music, and Ives decided soon after leaving the university
that he would have to make his living as a business man. Characteristi-
cally, he did not feel that this involved any conflict. In a statement made
for the Southern poet and novelist Henry Bellamann, Ives wrote:? *The
fabric of existence weaves itself whole. You cannot set an art off in the
corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality and substance. There can
be nothing **exclusive" about a substantial art. It comes directly out of

! Reprinted in Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music (New York, 1962).
2 *Charles Ives: the Man and his Music’, Musical Quarterly, xix (1933), p. 45.

AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

578
Ex. 249
Allegro moderato
CE Был ылы а
ЕІ.
(СР)! 5 Т qe. 3 muss ЕЕ и ииси
ES ENT мест 5-2: --! уг КӨН RE x
Ob. = 2
"Cil
in Bb
Bn.
Hn. |Р
inF
"Trpt.
in Bb
Tromb.
Tuba
Timp.
Piano
ЛЛУ М
Allegro moderato К trem. sempre (ad lib.) a
em к> ЦЕ he >
I dw == XL ж
Violins (ZF) trem. sempre (ad lib.) ге Кен!
Г: i is 2 < :
II
(27) ар.
> f
=
Vioks || (2 4 TN ~y "mds
- aha == - E

Cellos (072 ) I A

CHARLES IVES 579

в. ees
мы —— Ó ШЕЛ Ч
Ob ТЕ И == ы
сі.
in Bb
Bn.
Hn.
inF
Trpt.
in Bb
Tromb.
Tuba
Timp.
Piano
I
3 [EE OR] a ay
Violins
ГИШИ атре абе)
“еб за ^h ВВ ратман з 4

tae р Е ЕЕ-Е ЕЕ =

Violas

Cellos

580 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

the heart of experience of life and thinking about life and living life. My
work in music helped my business and my work in business helped my
music.’

Occasionally Ives was able to hear portions of some of his works in
readings by friends or occasionally members of local theatre orchestras,
hired at his own expense. For a time he made efforts to have his work
performed, but the total lack of understanding, and in many cases the
derision, with which he met, eventually discouraged him. A reading of
parts of his First Symphony by Walter Damrosch in about 1910
produced only annoyance on all sides. Ives resigned himself to the fact
that his way would have to be made slowly. In 1919 he decided to
publish himself some of the works he had written, hoping that if enough
copies were distributed (gratis, of course) a few, through the operation
of the law of averages, would find sympathetic readers. This proved
true, and the first sympathetic notices of Ives’s music were written by
Bellamann. Some time afterwards, the enthusiastic interest of a number
of musicians, including Nicolas Slonimsky and Henry Cowell, and
eventually many others, was aroused, and by about 1930 (though not
earlier) the name of Ives began to be current in avant-garde circles. The
first major performance of a major work of Ives was that of Three
Places in New England, performed by an orchestra directed by Slonim-
sky in 1930 in Boston. Examination of Ex. 249 will give the reader some
idea of the harsh dissonances, polyrhythms, and performance difficulties
involved in this work. It was not, however, until the performance of
the entire Concord Sonata by John Kirkpatrick in New York in 1939
that Ives achieved anything approaching ‘recognition’ by even a small
part of the musical public. This example from The Anti-Abolitionist
Riots will give the reader an idea of Ives’s style of writing for the piano,
as well as of his improvisatory style without bar-lines:

Ex. 250
Adagio Maestoso

um NP EQ
6—6] те с
У ра:
His —9-
0—2 =

М2
— = quen usos
Р 7 ^ 3
be n] А
ЕЕ
о а ee ee ee
| ^
"m е

581

CHARLES IVES

—
=>
m

|
(

>, 2
a oe EE occ e

и даши:

= В et A

582 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

Ives wrote much, including four symphonies, a variety of music for
various small and large instrumental combinations, some chamber
music, choral works, music for piano, and songs. The songs are extra-
ordinary in their variety, and often in their originality, and they con-
stitute in themselves a chapter in American music. No other American
composer has approached Ives’s richness or power in this field. The
Concord Sonata, actually entitled ‘Second Piano Sonata “Сопсога,
Mass., 1840-60” ’, is almost universally recognized as the most powerful
and impressive work of its kind in American music. Its technical pro-
blems are great; Ives was notoriously indifferent to practicability and
at times wrote music that he himself admitted mighi be impossible to
perform (see Ex. 250). This constituted, in his view, no reason for not
writing it, if the expression in itself was justified by what he felt necessary
to say. It was not until 1964, for instance, that Leopold Stokowski
was finally able to present a complete performance of the Fourth
Symphony.

The Concord Sonata is in four large movements, each an evocation of
Concord’s past. The first is entitled ‘Emerson’ ; the second, ‘Hawthorne’;
the third, ‘The Alcotts’; and the final movement, ‘Thoreau’. Ives him-
self wrote programmes for each of the movements, and described the
work as ‘an attempt to present one person’s impression of the spirit
of transcendentalism ...’ He uses the terms ‘impression’ and ‘impres-
sionistic’ several times; yet the music is not what is generally associated
with impressionism. It is intensely strong, with a structure obeying its
own organic laws; there is nothing else quite like it in the literature of the
piano. Powerful dissonances alternate with quiet quotations of hymns,
delicate passage work with brash allusions to circus parades. It is an
impression of all that Ives knew of New England both in thought and in
sound, an impression of a New England universe. The scope is not
exaggerated; among the many sketched and unfinished works of Ives
is a Universe or Universal Symphony, ‘not intended to be completed
by the composer himself or by any other man, because it represents
aspects of life about which there is always more to be said’.

That Ives was ahead of his time in many ways hardly needs emphasis.
When first written his harmonies could not have failed to seem barbar-
ous, his melodies and sonorities crude or vulgar, his rhythms unplayable,
and his musical orthography merely eccentric. By the time his music be-
came known, however, most of his ‘innovations’ had become familiar in
the works of other composers, and his use of popular materials had
become a part of American musical language. But Ives’s importance
does not reside in his discoveries or anticipations; it resides in the facts
that his music communicated life and vigour, that he was neither a

GEORGE GERSHWIN AND AARON COPLAND 583

miniaturist nor a docile follower, and that what he had to express spoke
persuasively to a few musicians in the 1920s and 1930s and to a large
public thereafter. It is perhaps incidental, but by no means unimportant,
that Ives's music was clearly the first music of large intent and dimension
that could not have been written by any but an American. He believed
strongly in himself as a man living in an environment which he con-
ceived in a way no one before him had done. That is why his place is
large in American musical history, and why he has come to be an
image of great importance for so many American musicians. It is the
substance that in the end justifies Ives, as he himself would have wished.
There are crudities in the style. Some of these might have been resolved
had he had the opportunity of hearing more of his music, though this
cannot be certain. Aaron Copland suggested! that Ives ‘lacked neither
the talent nor the ability nor the métier nor the integrity of the true
artist, but what he most shamefully and tragically lacked was an
audience’. And further, *...the drama of Ives...is that of every
American composer of serious pretensions. The problem of the
audience—not a passive audience but an active one—an audience that
demands and rejects music, that acts as a stimulus and a brake, has never
been solved.’

Obviously, Ives's influence, both technical and spiritual, could not
have been felt until his music had become known, and in the 1920s it
was known to very few. But many of the strands of American music in
that decade were converging towards the kind of synthesis that Ives had
in a sense achieved, and one can see how justly the discovery of his
music coincided with the emergence of a new generation of American
composers. The native materials of ragtime, jazz, and popular hymnody
were put to use by a number of composers who were at the same time
learning the devices and techniques of ‘modern’ music from Stravinsky,
Milhaud, Hindemith, Ravel, Bartók, Prokofyev, and the other new
masters in Europe, as well as from experimenters at home. It remained
only for the impact of Schoenberg and his school to be absorbed, some
years later, for American music to become completely international.

THE DECADE 1920-30: GERSHWIN AND COPLAND

The 1920s were eventful years, not only because of the arrival on the
scene of a number of strikingly gifted composers, but also because for
the first time concerted efforts were made to give their works a hearing.
The International Composers' Guild was founded in 1921 by Edgard
Varése (1885-1965) and Carlos Salzedo (1885-1961) for that purpose,

! Our New Music (New York, 1941), pp. 160-1.

584 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

as was The League of Composers two years later. The New Music
Society of San Francisco was founded by Henry Cowell in 1927, and,
beginning in 1928, Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions joined forces to
produce the stimulating Copland-Sessions concerts. These were among
the most important groups, but there were others; and contemporary
music, with special emphasis on contemporary American music, began
to engender an atmosphere of enthusiasm and excitement. These groups
not only performed, but did active propaganda, and although they could
not bring new music to the attention of the great public, the stir they
created eventually spread. A few sympathetic critics, notably Paul
Rosenfeld, appeared on the musical scene, and many of the composers
themselves turned their hands to writing. The magazine Modern Music,
established by The League of Composers in 1925, was, until its dis-
continuation in 1947, an influential force in American musical life.

The atmosphere of the early twenties is suggested by some lines of
Paul Rosenfeld, written in 1922. ‘It 15... no longer true... that there
is no vitality in the native musical production. What has been charac-
teristic of the painting and the writing of the land has now become
characteristic of the music. The country can produce really gifted
youth. Society has become sufficiently settled to permit the talent to
assert itself; there is even . . . enough of a real community to permit the
musical gesture, the gesture of the interpenetrated group, to be made."!

It may be said that the characteristic of American music during the
decade was its diversity of style and its unity of spirit. The spirit was one
of new confidence and assertiveness; composers (and some performers)
felt united in a common cause, that of new music and the modern
temper. For the first time, too, American musicians felt that they were
part of the main current, and not timorous artisans on the periphery.
The atmosphere was lively and the activity enormously accelerated.
This was the decade in which the names, and the music, of Aaron
Copland, Roger Sessions, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Henry Cowell,
Walter Piston, Randall Thompson, Howard Hanson, George Antheil,
Carl Ruggles and Wallingford Riegger were becoming known, and
in which George Gershwin composed his Rhapsody in Blue. It was
of course also the decade in which the musical style known as jazz was
for the first time taken seriously, as something vital and new and
unquestionably American.

The jazz-influenced idiom was but one of the manifestations of
American music in the twenties. John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951)
of Chicago had employed a type of ragtime jazz in his Concertino `
for Piano and Orchestra (1915), in his ‘jazz pantomime’ Krazy Kat

1 Paul Rosenfeld, Musical Chronicle, 1917-1923 (New York, 1923).

GEORGE GERSHWIN AND AARON COPLAND 585

(1921), and in Skyscrapers (1926). Carpenter's music enjoyed a vogue
for a time, for it was basically conservative enough to appeal even to
the conductors of major orchestras and their audiences. A more
seriously assimilated jazz appeared in several works by Louis Gruenberg
(1884-1964), one of the composers active in the early days of the
International Composers Guild and The League of Composers.
Gruenberg's The Daniel Jazz (1923) and Тйе Creation (1924), both for
voice and a combination of eight instruments, had some solidity and
originality as stylizations of Afro-American material. (It is interesting to
note that The Daniel Jazz and Milhaud’s La Création du Monde were
written in the same year.) But it remained for two composers of quite
different orientation to establish definitely the consciousness of jazz as
an artistic reality in American music.

George Gershwin (1898-1937) achieved early fame as a writer of
popular tunes and musical comedies. But he studied music seriously
with Rubin Goldmark, then the most esteemed teacher of composition
in New York, and felt that material derived from jazz and the idiom of
American popular songs could be used in works on a larger scale, even
symphonically. The Rhapsody in Blue, designed as a demonstration of
*symphonic jazz', was commissioned by the band leader Paul Whiteman,
and was first performed on 12 February 1924, in New York. Its success
was instantaneous, and the date is a memorable one in American music.
Probably no work written in America is as well known, nor is there any
other work that has appealed to such an extent to audiences on every
level. It may be termed one of the genuine American ‘classics’. This is
not to make a musical judgement, for the Rhapsody in Blue is a hybrid
work, which in fact is not jazz, but which combines a real feeling for
American popular style with a romantically eclectic harmonic and
orchestral style. Ex. 251, showing one of the Rhapsody’s principal
themes, clearly illustrates these features:

Ех. 251

(poco scherzando)
а

Эй

al
ИШИ]
a -
Ша

586

AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

Orch.

GEORGE GERSHWIN AND AARON COPLAND 587

[21а жа 1 ees poe Що
Bee EET fel
==”

Nevertheless, the Rhapsody in Blue was a genuinely original conception,
realized with great success; and although the idea of ‘symphonic jazz’
could not survive its inherent contradictions, the Rhapsody influenced
American music both positively and negatively. It demonstrated both
what could be accomplished on a large scale by a talented composer
using a popular idiom, and at the same time the serious limitations of
using a conventional ‘symphonic’ style as a vehicle for this type of
musical speech. The Rhapsody compelled the attention of both serious
and popular musicians, however, and the effects of its success cannot be
under-estimated. Gershwin continued active in both musical comedy
and serious composition for the remainder of his life. His works in the
latter category include a Concerto in F for Piano (1925), Three Preludes
for Piano (1926), the orchestral An American in Paris (1928), a Second
Rhapsody (1932), the Cuban Overture (1934), and his masterpiece, the
opera Porgy and Bess (1935).

Gershwin's natural language was made up of ragtime, the blues and
jazz, to which in Porgy and Bess he added melodic contours resembling
spirituals. Out of these elements he made something unmistakably his
own. Porgy and Bess has not only never been equalled in its genre, it
has not even been approached. Gershwin called it a ‘folk opera’, and
whether or not it is opera at all, in the conventional definition, would
hardly seem to matter. Its tunes are part of the American vocabulary,
and it has outlasted every other American work for the musical stage.
Gershwin had the instinct of a natural dramatist, and while Porgy and
Bess may be defective in terms of formal operatic convention, or even
material, it is moving and compelling. Its success, not only at home,
but throughout Europe, indicates that it makes its point as authentic
American music that could have come from no other place in the
world.

588 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

On 11 January 1925, not quite one year after the first performance of
the Rhapsody in Blue, the first major work of another young American
composer was performed in New York. This was the Concerto for
Organ and Orchestra by Aaron Copland. Copland, born in Brooklyn
in 1900, was, like Gershwin, a pupil of Goldmark’s, but he had gone to
France where he had become a student of Nadia Boulanger. His
striking talent was recognized not only by her, but also by the
American composer Marion Bauer, who had called his name to the
attention of The League of Composers. Copland came on the scene
with considerable force; his first works demonstrated unusual power and
originality, and there was little question from the start that a major
voice in American music had arrived. The Organ Concerto had many
derivative elements, notably from Stravinsky, and was not wholly
successful (Copland later rewrote it as his FirstSymphony, without organ).
But Copland's next work, commissioned by Sergey Kussevitsky, stands,
like the Rhapsody in Blue, though on a different plane, as a milestone in
American music. This was Music for the Theater, a suite in five move-
ments for small orchestra. Here a ‘jazz’ style, combined with sophisti-
cated twentieth-century techniques of composition, including poly-
tonality, resulted in a work of exuberant vitality which for the first time
indicated how effectively ‘Americanized’ the international idiom could
become. Although Milhaud had already written his ‘jazz’ ballet, La
Création du Monde, a comparison of the two works makes clear how
much more direct and meaningful was Copland's relation to jazz
material.

Jazz is the essential American contribution to the world's music, but
it has given rise to disputes that come near to being as subtle as those of
the medieval scholastics. It was not, historically, until the 1940s that the
discussion of jazz assumed the dimensions of a new musicology, with
learned and pseudo-learned contentiousness devoted to defining what is,
or was, jazz, and what is not. From the purist point of view, jazz must
be improvisatory, among other things. Although this is true, it also
remains true that it can be the informing element in music that is not
literally jazz, but that is either an evocation of jazzin art music, or else the
reflection, in formal terms, of some of its characteristics. In the 1920s,
no such fine lines were drawn, and the distinction between what is
today properly called jazz and the music that derives from it was
neither sharp nor consistent. The historian of American music must
note that ‘true’ jazz had actually to be revived in the 1940s and 1950s,
and again in the 1970s.

With these reservations, Copland’s early style must still be described
as a ‘jazz’ style. All the works of this period, and notably the Piano

GEORGE GERSHWIN AND AARON COPLAND 589

Concerto of 1926, are based on characteristically American rhythms
which Copland himself understood as jazz. He used them consciously
until he felt that he had exhausted their expressive possibilities. He
noted also at the time that the use of a jazz style was “ап easy way to be
American in musical terms';! but later in his career he found other,
and equally persuasive, ways of writing recognizably American music.

After 1930 Copland's music alternated between what has been
called his ‘austere’ style, best represented in the Piano Variations (1930),
the Short Symphony (1933), and Statements for Orchestra (1934), and a
style based on folk-music elements, designed to appeal more im-
mediately to a large public. An important inner evolution seems to have
taken place in the years immediately preceding 1930, and the Piano
Variations and Statements for Orchestra remain fundamental for any
evaluation of Copland's mature achievement. These works, which are
tight-knit, strongly dissonant, vigorous, and hard in sonority, may
properly be called severe in style. The Piano Variations has remained,
thirty years after its composition, a landmark in American composition;
all of the works of this period, taken together, revealed to musicians
the emergence of an original personality in full command, intellectually
and emotionally, of a striking and forceful idiom.

Copland himself felt that these works might be too advanced for any
but the most sophisticated audiences, and in the mid-’thirties began to
make a conscious effort toward achieving what he termed “ап imposed
simplicity. To accomplish this simplification, and to please a wide
audience without losing the marks of a personal style is a difficult task,
yet Copland's success in this respect must be considered remarkable.
Among the first works in this more accessible vein were the orchestral
El Salón México, and a small opera, The Second Hurricane, written for
performance by high-school students, both completed in 1936. Е/ Salón
México is based on authentic Mexican folk and popular tunes, handled
with great brilliance and vigour, with characteristically colourful
orchestration and shifting rhythms. The use of folk-tunes, or of material
related to folk-music, was carried a step further in scores composed for
the dance productions Billy the Kid (1938) Rodeo (1942), and
Appalachian Spring (1944), all of which were recast in concert form.
Appalachian Spring remains the work by which Copland is probably
best known to the general public, and through which he most effectively
realized his hope of communicating with an audience not exclusively
composed of devotees of avant-garde music. The diatonic and folk-like
Copland manner may be studied in the excerpt from Appalachian Spring
(Ех. 252) where a simple Shaker tune (“Тһе gift to be simple") is treated

1 Our New Music, р. 227.
39

AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

590
Ex. 252

591

GEORGE GERSHWIN AND AARON COPLAND

D
Sl ЕР
FM али жиа аа E
CS) 1 аара |
LSY —
()
Шр ДЕШЕ, ara и ЕЕ
sy ы pepe esp pe pon pe Т
(Ду D 5b л LER
2 a еее — етене
0
ЖЕН а Se eel Fe Se y |
ee ee "ле
| (jb —Àu————p———-—]
eee (ae ae

: m

КР Гы
[TS — -D— == ЫР” ^.

м |

(n Bb) I

{

|
Щи

ОБЕ

Glock
sounds 8va

=.
hind

ed
e
=
<

fie ria
i di
> ie 2 M
LM ПЕЙ
——-
- =
> 5

592 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

canonically in a texture of great transparency. Many of his works in
this vein have not only remained in the standard American concert
repertoire, but have also received frequent performances by school
orchestras and bands, a sure proof that they have deeply penetrated the
American musical consciousness. Copland's scores for films are
generally also in his simpler style, and have aided in making his idiom
familiar. These scores are extraordinarily sensitive, and several must
rank with the best music of this genre that has yet been produced.
Copland's film scores include Of Mice and Men (1939), based on the
Steinbeck novel; Our Town (1940), based on the Thornton Wilder play;
and Тһе Heiress (1948), after the novel by Henry James. Related in many
ways to his film scores as well as to his dance scores is the opera The
Tender Land (1954), one of the few major works of Copland that has
not enjoyed either popular or critical success. It may be said that
Copland's music, while full of strength and motor energy, is on the
whole more lyrical than dramatic in quality. The vocal writing in The
Tender Land is sensitive, as it is in his settings of Twelve Poems of Emily
Dickinson (1950), yet it is perhaps too elegant and refined to succeed on
the large scale of the operatic stage.

That Copland's work has been frequently imitated, or has served as
a stylistic point of departure, seems evidence enough that the music
exhibits a very personal and easily distinguishable style. This is true of
both the ‘austere’ and the ‘accessible’ styles, which are in fact not as
different as they may often appear to be on the surface. One may find
elements of both manners in the Piano Sonata of 1951 or the Sonata
for Violin and Piano of 1943,! and certainly in the Third Symphony of
1946. Copland always writes with clarity and brevity, with an honest
lyricism and lack of grandiloquence, and an elegance of line and phrase.
The sound is generally open and lean, with a remarkable sense of
timbre and spacing. These qualities remain constant in his work
throughout his career and through what appears to be his adoption of
different manners.

In later works, such as the Piano Quartet (1950), the Piano Fantasy
(1957) and the Nonet (1960), Copland adapted serial techniques, and
although his previous work is essentially diatonic, while freely dissonant,
the similarity in fundamental musical orientation to his earlier Piano
Variations is striking. Copland's music is often open in texture,
occasionally bitonal, and marked by the frequent occurrence of simple
triads. The language is severely disciplined and the craftsmanship
impeccable. The first page of the Piano Fantasy, with its wide spacing
and isolated sonorities, is representative of Copland's more ‘severe’ style:

1 The slow movement of which is recorded in The History of Music in Sound, x.

593

GEORGE GERSHWIN AND AARON COPLAND

Ex. 253

Slow d ; (d = circa 76) * in a very bold and declamatory manner

4
в

Ред. оп each note

9 ee

же

ES
“ы a

594 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

*Metronome markings throughout are to be understood as approximations only.

During the second quarter of the century, no composer in America
exercised greater influence on his contemporaries, both through his
music (and his leadership in exploiting varieties of material), and
through his activities as teacher and lecturer, organizer, and propa-
gandist for his colleagues. Copland was one of the first to make im-
portant contributions to music for those twentieth-century media, the
radio and the motion picture. His contribution towards the musical
re-orientation of the American musical scene cannot be overestimated.

Apart from the débuts of Copland and Gershwin in the 1920s, there
was an immense and spontaneous variety of musical activity along
many lines. In retrospect, it must seem that this decade was in many

GEORGE GERSHWIN AND AARON COPLAND 595

ways the most expansive and optimistic of recent times. Financial
support for ‘modern’ art was forthcoming from enlightened patrons,
and the artist, as well as the small but growing audience, seemed to be
looking (despite the often-cited disillusionment of the post-war period)
confidently at the present and future. After the First World War,
Western civilization in general began to look at its past in a new light—
to reinterpret or paraphrase what it did not actively reject. Leadership
in style and manner still came from the great European figures: Stravin-
sky, Picasso, Joyce; later, in music, Schoenberg and Webern; and
the American artist felt closer to these than he ever could have felt to
Wagner or Brahms or Debussy.

The decade was one, moreover, in which the new art—whether music
or painting or literature—was not taken for granted. By mid-century,
novelty as such was assumed as a matter of course to be a sine qua non in
art; the composer was expected to produce a new technique or a new
theory each week. But in 1925, the new could still be surprising and
often pleasant, and attitudes could be tried out to see if they were
possible to maintain. Experiment was fresh rather than desperate.
Critical and public hostility towards new art may have been helpful,
although not apparently so at the time to the artists concerned; it
solidified their ranks in a way that has not been known since that period,
when musical currents had not become as schismatic and mutually
exclusive as they were to become later.

All composers of any standing were ‘modern’. Some inclined more
than others towards experiment for its own sake, or towards the explora-
tion of ‘new musical resources’, as Henry Cowell phrased it. But even
some of the most conservative composers felt that they were part of an
important tide. Thus, for example, Howard Hanson (b. 1896) wrote
symphonies and other large-scale works in a romantic style perhaps
continuing the manner of MacDowell with echoes of Sibelius; yet
Hanson as Director of the new Eastman School of Music organized in
1925 a series of American Composers' Orchestral Concerts which were
extremely important in helping to make new American music known,
and in giving composers a chance (for the most part denied them by the
established symphony orchestras) of hearing their larger work. Hanson's
opera Merry Mount (1934) was one of the few works by Americans pre-
sented by the Metropolitan Opera Association; others heard in the
1920s and 1930s were two by the even more conservative Deems
Taylor (1885-1966), The King's Henchman (1927) and Peter Ibbetson
(1931). The most interesting American opera produced by the Metro-
politan was Gruenberg's The Emperor Jones (1933), а Ча22” opera based
on the play by Eugene O'Neill.

596 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

RADICALS OF THE 1920s

The avant-garde groups could hardly afford to present large orchestral
works, much less operas, and their presentations had to be limited to
chamber music and music in smaller forms. Büt much of this was
memorable. The stir created by performances of the French-born
Varése's Octandre апа Нурегризт (1924) still seems vivid. Cowell's
pounding of tone-clusters on the piano (often with the aid of a board)
seemed outrageous, and gave Cowell a notoriety that unfortunately
obscured his achievements in other experimental aspects of com-
position, and for a long time made people forget the mastery of
dissonant counterpoint shown in such works as his Sinfonietta of
1925. Virgil Thomson appeared on the American scene, as a young
man returned from Paris, with Capital, Capitals, a setting of words
by Gertrude Stein for four men's voices and piano, performed at
one of the Copland-Sessions concerts of 1928, and with other works in
which the inspiration of Satie and ‘Гез Six' made its most effective
American appearance. The greatest public sensation of the time was
made by the Ballet mécanique of George Antheil (1900-59), a former
pupil of Ernest Bloch’s who had spent the years 1922-5 in Europe, where
he had aroused interest by his compositions utilizing jazz elements. The
Ballet mécanique, scored for ten pianos and an assortment of noise-
producers not usually employed in orchestration, proved, when
revived many years later in New York, a rather dated expression of
‘futurism’. Nevertheless it was a scandal in its time and so made its
contribution towards a public awareness of the changing climate.

Carl Ruggles (1876-1971) is a minor composer of some interest who
was associated with the ‘radicals’ of the 1920s. With Varése, Riegger,
Cowell, and others, he was active in the Pan American Association of
Composers. One can hardly place Ruggles in the mainstream of musical
development in America, and it is questionable that his tiny output of
work has exerted much influence. His half-dozen or so completed
compositions have, however, had ardent admirers. The four major
works of Ruggles were all written between 1921 and 1933; they include
Angels (1921), originally for six trumpets, later re-written for four
violins and three cellos, or four trumpets and three trombones; Men
and Mountains (1924) for chamber orchestra; Portals (1926) for string
ensemble or string orchestra; and ТЛе Sun Treader (1933) for large
orchestra. All these works are characterized by extreme dissonance
and concentration. The technique is linear and very free, though
calculated with extreme care. The music is non-tonal, and gives an
impression of great intensity. Ruggles was an original voice, though a

HENRY COWELL 597

small one. For many years his music was rarely heard, though often
discussed, and it was only in the 1950s that it became generally known
and admired.

Works such as these caused the greatest amount of excitement,
opposition, and noise. Many of them have been forgotten; the works of
Varése (1883-1965), on the other hand, were understood by very
few when they were first heard, and the importance and vitality of his
work came to be appreciated only very much later. In every important
respect, Varése anticipated the musique concréte of the 1950s, and
showed а musicality and verve that make many of the newer ‘abstract’
composers seem inhibited by their own theories. Varèse was influenced
by the famous Italian ‘Futurist’ manifesto of 1913, and his training in
mathematics and engineering makes him seem a destined precursor of
the mathematically serialized music, and the electronic experiments, of a
later generation. His works of the 1920s lead directly to his Poéme
Electronique of 1958, composed directly on electronic tape for the
World's Fair of Brussels; they can be seen in retrospect as early examples
of what Varése termed ‘organized sound’. Jonization, composed in 1931,
is scored entirely for percussion: thirteen players, using thirty-seven
instruments, including two sirens, with chimes, celesta and piano heard
briefly towards the end of the work. It differs basically from the Poéme
Electronique only in the means of sound production. Hyperprism (Ex.
254), composed in 1924, also uses an extraordinary assortment of
percussion, and a small orchestra composed entirely of wind instru-
ments. All these works are original and striking; although stark, after
many years they no longer impress as being brutal. The music of
Varése seems to reflect the positive achievement of a mechanical and
technological civilization, not its doubts, nor does it give that impression
of retreating which is characteristic of so much twentieth-century art.
Like Ives, Varése was at least a generation ahead of his audience.

HENRY COWELL

The early work and activity of Henry Cowell (1897-1965) placed him
in the foreground of attention as a radical and controversial figure in
the 1920s. During his very active career as composer, performer, author,
and lecturer, Cowell was associated with almost every development
in American music. In the 1920s he was a radical among radicals, pro-
ducing works in a bitingly dissonant counterpoint and exploring new
possibilities in rhythmic organization. At the same time he startled
audiences with his novel piano pieces in which he used what he termed
‘tone-clusters’ (massed chords of any size built on major and minor
seconds) and also struck, plucked or brushed the strings directly, used

598 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

Ex. 254
Moderato poco Allegro
Flûte === ILE
Petite Flüte gue...
() = SS eee el

e
: Hip тсе irme ERE
y molto
E
2 [а =
DS pos e га
ыы e
ЕЕ a A ш |
3 ЕЕ
7 SSS aa 47
І Hipp E EE LLL
Тәшен T cep EDEN
I-A Гиан саас)
as Aft ж
E = m—— о
sourd. V s ите es З =
те (SS ee
Bass RES
Moderato poco Allegro md

Snare drum A 5
тр<ұ/- тр
T sourdement Т) Г) гара

Indian drum д oe 7 S ws
mom Букш к=
Bass drum Z 2 » x
Tambourine 4 AER
ж
Crash Cymbal 4
sas ш long Laissez vibrer
hf N et s’éteindre
2 Cymbals = 2
ВЕ |е LV. et s'éteindre
A

Tamtam A =

Anvil |
Slap Stick 2

А ii
high ye 989
cE

ow
Lion Roar д =- -
BENED Lens — |

Siren

Flite
Petite Flite

Clarinet en тї}

1
Cors en fa
2
Cors en fa

1
Trompettes en ut
2

Tenor
Trombone
Bass

Snare drum

Indian drum

Bass drum
Tambourine

Crash Cymbal

2 Cymbals

Tamtam

Triangle

Anvil

Slap Stick
high

2 Chinese blocks
low

Lion Roar
Rattle

Big Rattle

Sleigh Bells

Siren

HENRY COWELL

T
м l al
4

subito molto crescendo

prm
eS 2 phu ae

(1) sur rebord D 1 n

(2) membrane

frottées l'une 7 ==
ee
ЯШ
a Ще mm ет
mf

599

600 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

harmonics, and employed the instrument in other unconventional ways.
Tiger (Ex. 255) illustrates Cowell's piano technique admirably, and the
bars of 5 against 4 show another of the composer's musical pre-
occupations:

Ex. 255 x

Allegro feroce

HENRY COWELL 601

In 1927, Cowell founded the New Music Society in San Francisco, for
the promotion of avant-garde music, and edited the New Music
Quarterly, which published works of Ives and other American and
European composers at a time when no other outlet was available to
them. Cowell devoted a great deal of his inexhaustible energy to the
cause of contemporary music itself, and did much to make American
music aware of its own strength.

Cowell had an extraordinary childhood, and was largely self-taught
until he attracted the attention of Charles Seeger (b. 1886), a remarkable
composer and musicologist who taught at the University of California.
Cowell later went to Germany where he studied comparative musicology
under Hornbostel and attended Schoenberg’s lectures. Webern per-
formed Cowell’s Sinfonietta in his concerts in Vienna, one of the first
American works of the period to be heard in Europe. Cowell in turn
helped introduce music of Schoenberg and Webern, as well as Bartok,
to avant-garde audiences in America. His interest in oriental music,
stimulated by his study with Hornbostel, led him to further explora-
tions, and to an attempt at the reconciliation of music of the East and
West which became a life-long pre-occupation. Cowell was essentially
an eclectic composer, taking material where and how he found it, and
using it without inhibition in compositions of all types. His work
demonstrates his extraordinary interest in all musical phenomena, of
any time and place, and the amount of music he left is as huge as it is
varied.

As early as 1914, Cowell had hit on the idea of the serialization of
rhythm, and had experimented with aleatory music, and with novel
instruments, including an electronic sound-producer invented by Lev
Theremin (b. 1896). With Joseph Schillinger he had experimented with
a ‘Rhythmicon’ as an aid in construction with cross-rhythms of great
complexity. In later years, Cowell explored American popular
hymnology, folk music of all types, and ‘exotic’ material of widely
varying kinds. There is, over the years, no single Cowell style, and this
has puzzled and annoyed critics and historians who feel a compul-
sion to classify. Copland once said of Cowell that he was more of an
inventor than a composer, but this is a judgement that time may not

602 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

bear out. Cowell composed with natural enthusiasm and facility and
much of his work is both original and well-realized. His later works,
including most of his nineteen symphonies, are on the whole more
conservative than the earlier ones, yet the entire body of work has a
kind of consistency that a highly personal view of phenomena can
bring to a variety of materials and idioms. Cowell's experiments, and
his musical interests and aims, have had considerable influence both
direct and indirect on many of his contemporaries and juniors, notably
John Cage and Lou Harrison.

VIRGIL THOMSON AND OTHERS

Virgil Thomson (b. 1896) went from Harvard to Paris, where he
studied with Nadia Boulanger and where he remained almost un-
interruptedly until 1940. Thomson found the attitudes and aesthetic of
Satie and ‘Les Six’ sympathetic, and became the outstanding American
exponent of their spirit. But Thomson was an artistic personality of
great originality and sophistication in his own right, and the deceptive
simplicity of his usually diatonic and triadic idiom was as representative
of a new spirit in music as the complex constructions of many of his
contemporaries. Thomson abandoned the neo-classic style of his
Sonata da Chiesa (1926), in which he introduced a tongue-in-cheek
tango, and among his early works of distinct individuality his Symphony
on a Hymn Tune (1928) stands as one of the first after Ives to utilize
this type of American material. The work that established Thomson's
reputation was the opera Four Saints in Three Acts, composed to a
libretto of Gertrude Stein (1928). Its production in America in 1934
was a memorable event. Thomson's second opera with Miss Stein, The
Mother of Us All (1947), remains, with the earlier work, a classic of the
American theatre. Both works are inimitably original; the music is
witty, imaginative, subtle, and daring in its innocence (which is only
apparent) It makes delicate allusions to a variety of sources, from
modal melodies to folk hymns and ballads and the mock-heroic style,
but in a way that no one has done before or since. The delicious pseudo-
simplicity characteristic of Thomson's music is illustrated in this
quotation from his Four Saints in Three Acts:

603

VIRGIL THOMSON AND OTHERS

di- nar- y

Ex. 256

| Е. ІШ 5 ШШШ A
ERU E FS
| 2 и 9 “ГЕ QB |
Е 8 Wy S du
„с а E А
4 | 5 | я || "
5 5 e | Æ
© lh © № о
S Des XD YS |
Р | 44 Па. «ГА -2
„а HT. ВИЕ а
Е [|| E | 5
a a Е иң
e es © "T
| gi om
ла o a Ф 2
E || ва
Р ша :
а d n d | ci
3 ie “А.а ә а 7
: а |45
с. 9 = ә 44
са S S
1 | Б | Е Е
> ы ы ы
П t Г Е Г il =£ Е „в
ы ы A P т TF АН мыш ш e
8 8 а Lg LE LS SI
П 1 її | at] A Il
a) ос) о в LE c ч
© ^s] > z М а
! П So ee ш = - К. А
ы = 2 < 5 E < 2 АДА
E 2 2 е ges иа ( Ф "m |
E Bie а HST Pat a a
c ОЕ € E [|
Во NW IB "et D d E ТУІ TINI
ld UN | КЫ
CX 45 AD) AO A
isa Въ: ГЕЙ [NT a

1918-1960

AMERICAN MUSIC:

604

or-di-nar-y set-ting which is as

Sa
Е-е
ting which is as

=:
ai
На

-y Set-

=
H =
1- паг

=
ен ай
ма“ |
or - di-

aa
de—————— — — —31
Soon

or-di-nar-y set-ting which is as

soon

and noon.

soon which is as soon

and noon.

soon which is assoon

VIRGIL THOMSON AND OTHERS 605

These same qualities are apparent in much of Thomson's work in other
media, and are especially notable in his scores for the motion pictures
The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), The River (1937) and Louisiana
Story (1948). Thomson has occasionally written in a more dissonant
chromatic style, and has even explored aspects of twelve-note technique;
but the essential quality of his writing remains a subtle simplicity that
can take materials ranging from the commonplace to the recondite and
transform them into a sophisticated personal idiom. Thomson's hand-
ling of prosody, as demonstrated in his operas, his miscellaneous vocal
music and his Mass (1959), is masterly. From 1940 to 1954 Thomson
served as music critic of the New York Herald-Tribune, his work mark-
ing a high point in American musical journalism.

Thomson is one of the true ‘originals’ in American music, or, for
that matter, in international music of the twentieth century. He does
not appear to be interested in striking out on new paths, or in the
complications of technique that characterize most contemporary music.
Yet it is obvious that his path is a new one, and that he is well aware
of every technical procedure that is current. The music he writes is the
product of a serious and refined intelligence brought to bear on an
immediate problem or need for making music. He is not afraid of being
banal, or of not being 'significant'. One of the mechanisms that makes
his music effective is his manner of making alarming juxtapositions;
one could say that he makes Paris and Kansas City realize what they
have in common, by the fact of his having reconciled them. This is
beyond mere wit and cleverness. Thomson is one of the few contempor-
ary artists in any field with a true sense of high comedy. Lesser artists
use parody, satire, farce, or irony; but the appearance of comedy is
indeed rare.

While jazz and the more interesting varieties of novel or experimental
music were attracting by far the greatest amount of attention, a number
of American composers were quietly and solidly writing music that
made its way more slowly. Walter Piston (b. 1894), Quincy Porter
(1897-1966), Randall Thompson (b. 1899), Bernard Rogers (1893-1968),
Wallingford Riegger (1885-1961), Douglas Moore (1893-1969), Leo
Sowerby (1895-1968), Roger Sessions (b. 1896), and Otto Luening (b.
1900), were names not on everyone's tongues before 1930. No one of
them burst on the scene with the impact of Copland or Gershwin, or
aroused the kind of violence that met Varèse or Antheil or Cowell. Nor
were they acclaimed as extravagantly as Roy Harris was to be only a
few years later. The music of these composers represents a wide varia-
tion in style and temper, from the moderately academic conservatism of

Sowerby, Thompson, and Porter to the more ruggedly dissonant and
40

606 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

involved style of Sessions and the more.or less atonal style of Riegger.
Of the composers born before 1901, these were the ones whose work
remained of greatest interest at mid-century. There were of course many
others whose work attracted attention, and the names of Arthur
Shepherd (1880-1958), John J. Becker (1886-1961) and Frederick Jacobi
(1891—1953) deserve mention.

Thompson, Moore, Rogers, Antheil, Porter, and Sessions all were
at one time pupils of Ernest Bloch (1880-1959), whose importance in
American music requires no further emphasis. Bloch himself wrote
some of his most important works in the United States, including the
Suite for Viola and Piano (1919), the Piano Quintet (1924), Ше “еріс
rhapsody’ America (1925), the fine neo-classic Concerto Grosso (1925),
said to have been written as a model for his pupils, the Sacred Service
(1933), perhaps his most significant work, and the Violin Concerto
(1937). With Bloch one is faced squarely with the problem of defining
just who is an American composer, for although Bloch spent more than
half his life in the United States, it is difficult to think of this remark-
able man as anything but a musician belonging to a world in which
nationality is meaningless. Bloch can perhaps best be classed with
Dvorak, Schoenberg, Milhaud, Hindemith, Křenek, Stravinsky,
Bartok, Toch, and Wolpe, as visitors from another world who lived in
America for shorter or longer periods (many of them becoming
American citizens), and who had great influence as teachers and com-
posers on several generations of American musicians. .

Bloch’s influence is not easy to discern in most of the composers who
studied under him, but there is an almost unanimous testimony as to its
importance. Bloch should be ranked with Boulanger (whose students
included Copland, Thomson, Piston, Harris, Carter, and a long list of
younger composers) as one of the two musicians who did most to shape
American music in the first half of the twentieth century. And many of
their pupils, notably Sessions, Porter, Rogers, Piston, Moore, Copland,
Thomson, became in turn important teachers of a succeeding genera-
tion.

Douglas Moore, after his studies with both Bloch and Boulanger,
joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1926, where he eventually
succeeded to the Professorship endowed in memory of Edward Mac-
Dowell. His music is conservative and showed from the start a rejection
of both contemporary French and German styles. Moore developed a
simple personal idiom, the originality of which was not perceived at
once; it was based on a deep understanding of American vernacular
music and an ability to translate this into an uncomplicated musical
language that was both sentimental and sophisticated. Moore firmly

INTERNATIONAL STYLES 607

believed in musical Americanism, in much the same sense as Ives, but
he wrote without Ives's complexities. Moore's was a traditional
Americanism, not a cosmopolitan one. His first orchestral work to
attract attention was The Pageant of P. T. Barnum (1924). This was
followed by Moby Dick (1928), Overture on an American Tune (1931)
and other works clearly reflecting a commitment to American themes.
With The Devil and Daniel Webster (1938), a one-act opera based on a
story of Stephen Vincent Benét, Moore showed that vocal writing and
the musical theatre were his natural media. This unpretentious but
original work enjoyed great success and has held the stage as a minor
classic in American music. Moore's greatest accomplishment, and the
work that finally brought general recognition of his unique talent, was
the opera The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956), based on a true story of the
American West, with libretto by John LaTouche. With this work, late
in life, Moore achieved an American opera with greater success than
any of his contemporaries or juniors had hitherto succeeded in producing.

INTERNATIONAL STYLES— WALLINGFORD RIEGGER,
ROGER SESSIONS, WALTER PISTON

Piston, Sessions, and Riegger are, each in his way, composers in
international styles. Each has gained in reputation since first attracting
notice in the 1920s. By the middle of the century no critic or historian
could have done other than place them as among the most interesting
and significant American composers of their time. Riegger, the oldest
of the three, was the last to gain recognition. His career was curiously
chequered. He began as a thorough conservative, a student of
Goetschius in New York and later of Bruch and of the American Edgar
Stillman Kelley (1857-1944) in Germany. After winning several prizes
for his early works, Riegger decided to rest and to reconsider for a
period of three years. At the end of this time, he produced his Study in
Sonority (1927) for ten violins, a work of extremely dissonant tension,
using two mixed and extremely acid harmonic complexes as arbitrary
tonic and dominant, and, as the title suggests, exploring string timbres
in an unusual way. In his Dichotomy (1932) for chamber orchestra
Riegger utilized two ‘note-rows’, and the music remains consistently
within the rather general definition of 'atonality'. This was at a time
when Riegger was entirely unfamiliar with the work or theories of
Schoenberg. Riegger's style progressed from the orthodox to the radical
as he grew older, although in general he adhered to classic forms, which
he handled with the assurance of an expert craftsman. Yet Riegger
remained for many years a rather neglected composer, and despite a
volume of interesting work (much of it composed for dance companies)

AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960
Sy Le 88—96)

608
Ex. 257

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INTERNATIONAL STYLES

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610 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

he was relatively unknown to the American public until his Third
Symphony (1948). His use of twelve-note techniques is demonstrated іп
this work, and also in his First String Quartet (1938). Riegger employed
row construction in a personal and free manner, and combined it with
traditional structure. He was not a purist, but a composer who
took materials as he needed them, and employed them with assurance.
His Second String Quartet (1948) and his Music for Brass Choir (1949)
show other aspects of his highly personal and sharply dissonant style,
his strong rhythmic drive, and brilliant sense of instrumental sonority.
Music for Brass Choir (Ex. 257) has been described as “һе apotheosis of
the tone cluster'. The effect of these massed sounds on the brass instru-
ments, and the imaginative handling of line and mass throughout this
work are indeed original and impressive.

The career and reputation of Riegger illuminate one aspect of
American musical life by underlining the importance of prizes, festivals,
and energetic seeking of public notice. Riegger had been known to
musicians for many years as a composer of considerable importance,
and had, in fact, been an active associate of Ives, Varése, Ruggles, and
Cowell in the Pan American Association of Composers during the
1920s. But public recognition came to him only after his Third Sym-
phony, written when he was 62 years of age, had received an award
from New York's music critics. Fortunately, the impression made by
this work (which was, incidentally, the first major commission Riegger
had ever received) resulted in performances of Riegger's other music
and brought him further commissions for new works. For the last
decade of his life, Riegger enjoyed some of the recognition and in-
fluence he clearly deserved, and was at last able to hear his music
performed by major orchestras and other performing groups. His
works after 1948 included his Fourth Symphony (1957), much chamber
and choral music, and two fine sets of variations, for Piano and
Orchestra (1953) and for Violin and Orchestra (1959). Like Schoenberg,
Riegger occasionally returned to tonal writing throughout his career, as
in the Canon and Fugue for Strings (1941) and the Suite for Younger
Orchestras (1954).

Basically, Riegger's music, despite its wealth of invention and the
depth of its technical vocabulary, is uncomplicated. Riegger strove for
clarity and logic, and felt that the enlargement of the tonal vocabulary
in the twentieth century was not a licence to greater freedom for the
composer, but on the contrary imposed on him an ever greater need for
control and discipline. Riegger's influence on younger composers
became more evident during the later years of his career, as the original
nature of his contribution became more generally appreciated.

INTERNATIONAL STYLES 611

Roger Sessions, like Riegger, is a composer of marked individuality
who has also been influenced by twelve-note methods without becoming
a doctrinaire adherent of the school. Again like Riegger, his musical
thought gravitated towards serial techniques at a middle stage of his
career as a composer, although in the case of Sessions this evolution
was gradual. Sessions's early works, of which the most representative
is the suite extracted from his music for Andreyev's play The Black
Maskers (1923), show an inclination towards the richness and com-
plexity of Central European styles, and reflect the influences of Bloch,
Mahler, and Strauss. The complexity and richness of texture remain
through most of Sessions's later work, which from the beginning has
had a strong appeal to musicians but has never commanded a wide
public following. The tonal works of Sessions's early period, including
the First Symphony (1927) and First Piano Sonata (1930), show a
solidity of technique and sense of musical logic that are very striking,
and in their straining at the bounds of tonality foreshadow later
developments in Sessions's music. The key work and turning point in
Sessions's composition is the Second Symphony (1946), in which the
impulsion towards a completely chromaticized style reaches the thre-
shold of atonality. It is after this work that Sessions began to adopt
twelve-note serial techniques, using them never in the sense of a system,
but, again like Riegger, deriving thematic material and relationships
freely and flexibly. Sessions's music is much more inward and intense
than Riegger's, and is essentially more involved and elusive. At the
same time, it often has a brooding and disquieting lyricism, perhaps
at its most evocative in the Second String Quartet (1951). Sessions's
chamber music is always impressive and satisfying. The Quintet for
Strings (1958) shows his style at its least opaque and most accessible,
and also illustrates his very personal use of twelve-note themes.

In addition to the Third and Fourth Symphonies (1957 and 1958),
Sessions's major production includes a Violin Concerto (1935), a Piano
Concerto (1956), a Mass (1958), and a setting of an Idyll of Theocritus
for soprano and orchestra (1954). Sessions is not a prolific or casual
composer. Ап intellectual and spiritual affinity to Schoenberg is
evident in all of his work, although in none of it is there any rigid
application of Schoenberg's theory or practice; the affinity is entirely
one of attitude and mentality. The essentially inward temperament
perhaps is the reason that Sessions seems less happy and successful in
works for the stage, such as the one-act opera, The Trial of Lucullus
(1947), after Brecht.

Sessions was at mid-century a figure of the greatest importance on
the American musical scene, not only as a composer highly respected

AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

612

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INTERNATIONAL STYLES

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614 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

by all, but also as a teacher and as a direct and indirect influence on an
entire generation of younger composers. Many of his students, including
Ross Lee Finney, Hugo Weisgall, Leon Kirchner, Milton Babbitt, and
indeed a host of others, have achieved prominence not only as com-
posers, but also, in turn, as teachers.

Piston, too, has had great influence as a teacher. While Sessionstaught
at California and at Princeton, Piston was at Harvard from 1926 to
1961. Both Piston and Sessions have written books on harmony that
have been widely used in American schools and conservatories. But
while Sessions's music reminds one in texture and aesthetic of Central
Europe, Piston's music is that of a neo-classicist. His early works, such
as his First String Quartet (1933), impressed his contemporaries by their
elegance, control, and craftsmanship. This impression was confirmed
by the composer's later work, all of which exhibited a polish and mastery
of medium that was as refreshing as it was rare. Piston's symphonies
(his Seventh was completed in 1961) constitute the central portion of
his work, although he has written in all conventional forms of chamber
music as well.

Unlike Sessions or Riegger, Piston has had a fairly wide public
success. His music is accessible and fluent, in an idiom that is recogniz-
ably of the twentieth century, but it is not ‘advanced’ or radical or
apparently complicated by theoretical problems or considerations. It is
essentially related to early and middle Stravinsky, with occasional over-
tones of Hindemithian counterpoint. Basically it is conservative and
even academic, and, in an entirely non-pejorative sense, it may be said
that Piston represents the legitimate continuation of the ‘Boston School’
of Paine, Chadwick, and Parker.

ROY HARRIS

If Piston's music is characterized by its sureness and craftsmanship,
the opposite must be said of the music of Roy Harris (b. 1898). Harris's
arrival on the American musical scene can only be described as explo-
sive; as with so many explosions, however, the aftermath is less exciting
to describe. Harris was for some time a major force in American music,
and suffered the unfortunate fate of becoming almost a legend at a time
when American music was searching for something resembling a hero
sprung directly from the soil. Harris did emerge from the West, appro-
priately enough from a log cabin; he did not decide to be a composer
until he was twenty-four, when he studied briefly with Farwell, who
launched him with considerable effectiveness. An Andante for Orchestra
was performed by Howard Hanson in 1926, and gained Harris the
immediate interest of his colleagues. He then went to Paris, on Copland's

ROY HARRIS 615

advice, to study with Boulanger; and his Sextet for Clarinet, Piano, and
Strings (1927) and his first Piano Sonata (1928) are among the best works
of this period. Indeed they must still be counted among the best Harris
has written. His First Symphony (1933) aroused the enthusiasm of
Kussevitsky, the Russian-born conductor of the Boston Symphony
who almost alone among the conductors of major orchestras en-
couraged and performed the larger works of American composers a

this time. Harris's Third Symphony (1939) (see Ex. 259) seems in retro-
spect to mark the high point of his achievement. Hailed immediately
as an American masterpiece, it exerted a powerful influence on musical
thought for many years, and must be counted among the half-dozen
most important American works of the century. Its interest and appeal
are difficult to analyse, yet its intensity and novelty made themselves felt
immediately among musicians and laymen alike. The Symphony
appeared to be an expression of all that was vast, aspiring and nostalgic
in American life; it was all things to all people, yet it appealed as being
ресшапу and unmistakably American in each of its aspects. The
material ranges from the home-spun (the hymn-tune, as in Ives, Cop-
land and Thomson) to the epic-heroic: chorale-like brass passages and
fanfares. Harris's style, as exhibited in this Third Symphony, found
immediate imitators, and its technical and emotional mannerisms have
had many echoes in American music.

Harris's music usually has a long line, more often modal or diatonic
than chromatic. He is fond of canon and fugue (or of canonic and fugal
devices); his phrase-structure and rhythm are often irregular and
shifting. He is fond of triads in non-functional relationship, as sonorities
in their own right, but often uses a polyharmonic texture, producing an
overlay of dissonance in an essentially simple tonal context. Cyclical
structure occurs in many of his larger works. Harris reasons and writes
about his music, but it remains the music of an instinctive rather than
of an intellectually disciplined composer, and a lack of a self-critical
faculty is often evident. In later works Harris proclaimed his mission as
an American composer through a more obvious and naive use of folk
and patriotic materials and motives.

As early as 1941, Aaron Copland (like Cowell and Thomson a most
perceptive critic of new music) pointed out the qualities and deficiencies
of Harris's music in a summation that has not since been surpassed for
acuteness and balance. Copland, after noting the sweep and breadth,
the power and emotional depth, of Harris's best pages, and noting too
the indefinably ‘American’ quality of his tunes and rhythms, pointed
out that Harris often seemed not to know what to make of his materials.
Formal deficiencies in the music, Copland pointed out, are so obvious

1960

1918-

AMERICAN MUSIC:

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as to make it evident that Harris’s ‘insecure critical faculty’ handicapped
him seriously. Many of his pieces lack a sense of direction, and also fail
to correspond to the copious ‘spiritual’ explanations that Harris so often
provided. Yet, in the end, Copland concluded that ‘Whatever one may
think, it is useless to wish Harris otherwise than he is. One may show
how much better his work might have been . .-. But there is no gain-
saying that, such as it is, with all its faults and qualities, it is enormously
important to us in the immediate scene. Plenty of Americans have
learned how to compose properly, and it has done us little good. Here
is a man who, perhaps, may not be said to compose properly but who
will do us lots of good. We can let posterity concern itself with the
eternal aspect of Harris’s music, if any. The important thing is that it
has something for us here and now.'!

Harris's influence on the music of the late 1930s and 1940s has not
been, on the whole, justly estimated. Its positive qualities are best seen
in the work of his pupil, William Schuman (b. 1910), and in aspects
of the work of such composers as Vincent Persichetti (b. 1915) and
Peter Mennin (b. 1923). But its weaknesses, too, have been reflected
in a great deal of pseudo-Americana and nationalistic bombast, and
in a tendency towards the formation of a right-wing school of com-
position based on nostalgia. With the emergence of Harris as a
major influence on American music, one is aware that the mood of a
period has changed, and that ‘modernism’ is no longer a primary
concern. А music for the people became the preoccupation of many
composers; Harris himself felt strongly the need to communicate on a
wide scale, and his Fourth Symphony (1941), based on folk-songs, and
his Sixth (1944), based on Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, were evidence
not only of what Harris believed, but also of what the results might be
in terms of musical content and style. It was at about this time that
Copland first produced his folk-style ballet scores, in a much more
transparent and easily assimilable manner than his early works, and
that Cowell abandoned radical experiment for an innocently folklorish
manner. The urge towards creating a people's music was felt also in the
work of a consciously ‘proletarian’ school, of which the most important
productions were the stage works of Marc Blitzstein (1905-64). Among
these, The Cradle Will Rock (1936) made a great impression by its
directness and force, and helped to create a public for a native opera not
based on the conventions of the Italian or German grand style.

Many factors, both musical and social, contributed to the establish-
ment of new tendencies in American music during the 1930s. The
financial crisis of 1929 and the depression that followed brought a

1 Ош New Music, p. 175.

THE 1930s—THE IMPACT OF EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS 619

number of changes to American life and thinking, and these affected
the American artist directly and indirectly. The relief programmes of
public works instituted during the Roosevelt administration included
projects designed to provide both opportunity and sustenance to
writers, painters and composers. The Works Progress Administration
(WPA), under which musicians were given employment, instituted
concerts, ‘forums’ and a variety of projects including the collection of
folk-songs. The WPA orchestras provided more opportunities than had
previously been available for the performance of new American works,
and were in general a vitally stimulating influence. Was it a coincidence
that the number of composers seemed to increase vastly? Certainly the
WPA provided an encouragement that has since come to be expected
by American artists, and which has, in fact, been perpetuated through
the extraordinary abundance since World War II of grants, fellowships,
awards, and commissions, which appear to fall to the talented and the
untalented in about equal proportions. During the period of the depres-
sion, American composers acquired a new sense of their position and
function in society, and became increasingly aware of the possibility
of effective collective action not only towards economic improvement,
but also towards the establishment of an awareness of composers as a
body politic.

THE 19305--ТНЕ IMPACT OF EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS

A further major influence on the development of music in America
was the arrival as permanent residents in the United States of some of
the most eminent composers of Europe. Arnold Schoenberg came to
the United States in 1933, and after a brief residence in Boston moved
to California, where he remained until his death in 1951. Ernst Toch
arrived in 1934, Kurt Weill in 1935, Hindemith in 1937, Kfenek and
Wolpe in 1938, Stravinsky, Milhaud, and Vittorio Rieti in 1940,
Martinů and Bartok in 1941. All of these composers, except Stravinsky
and Weill, made their presences felt in the most direct manner, by
teaching; but it is evident that the immediate impact of their personalities
and the performances of their music were also of great importance.
Nearly all of these distinguished emigrés became members of the music
faculties of American colleges and universities: Schoenberg at the
University of Southern California, Krenek at Vassarand Hamline(St. Paul,
Minnesota), Hindemith at Yale, Milhaud at Mills, Toch also at the
University of Southern California, Martini at Princeton, Bartok at
Columbia. The importance and prestige of the teaching of composition
at American universities, begun by Paine and Parker, was greatly
emphasized by the presence of these acknowledged masters. Even

620 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

Stravinsky, who never wished to be officially a teacher of composi-
tion, gave the series of lectures at Harvard University later published
as Poétique musicale, a document of major interest in twentieth-century
aesthetic.

Of the very great number of composers active in the United States in
the 1930s, a few began to emerge as well-defined musical personalities
towards the end of the decade. They represent, for the most part, a
generation trained in America and directly profiting by the work, both
musical and propagandistic, of their immediate elders. Among the
composers achieving prominence around 1940, and maintaining their
positions during the following twenty years, were Samuel Barber (b.
1910), Ross Lee Finney (b. 1906), Paul Creston (b. 1906), William
Schuman, Norman Dello Joio (b. 1913), Morton Gould (b. 1913),
David Diamond (b. 1915), Vincent Persichetti and Gian Carlo Menotti
(b. Italy, 1911). Others, equally prominent in the years following World
War II, had not yet attracted comparable attention.

The music of these men reflects the customary American diversity of
style, temperament, and training, but on the whole it is consistently
conservative and eclectic. It reflects an acceptance and mastery of the
less adventurous techniques of twentieth-century European masters, but
with the exception of Finney's later music (after 1950) demonstrates
no influence of the Schoenbergian disciplines and little desire to enlarge
musical boundaries. On the other hand, it contains ample evidence of
the already strong influences of Copland and Harris, added to those of
the neo-classic Stravinsky, of Hindemith, and to a much smaller extent,
of Prokofiev. The musical idioms range from the rather sober elegance
of Barber, through the boisterous vehemence of Schuman, to the
popular-music style of Gould and the theatricality of Menotti.

Barber provides an excellent illustration of the internationally-
oriented traditionalist in American music. His music was readily
accepted by conservative audiences, and he was the first American
composer to be performed by Arturo Toscanini (Essay for Orchestra,
1937, and Adagio for Strings, 1936). Barber's music has often been de-
scribed as ‘neo-romantic’, a vague word used to suggest the fact that the
music flows smoothly, is not excessively dissonant, is traditional in form,
and gives the impression of both warmth and refinement. Barber has,
however, written in the ‘neo-classic’ style (Capricorn Concerto, 1944)
and there are elements of greater dissonance and freer concepts of
tonality in his Second Essay for Orchestra (1942), the Medea Suite
(1947), and the Piano Sonata (1949). Barber's work after 1950 shows a
tendency to become more complex, but without losing its mastery of
line, form, and mood. His opera Vanessa (1958), with libretto by

THE 1930s— THE IMPACT OF EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS 621

Menotti, and his Antony and Cleopatra (1966), are among the few by
American composers to have been produced by the Metropolitan Opera
in New York.

Menotti himself has proved to be much more a composer (and
author) for the theatre than most of his American-born contemporaries,
and his success in an idiom remarkably his own has helped to interest
the American public in new works for the operatic stage. He first
attracted widespread attention with his one-act opera buffa, Amelia
Goes to the Ball (1937), produced at the Metropolitan in 1938. Menotti
came to the United States in 1928 and was trained, like Barber, at the
Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Although fundamentally Italianate as
a composer, Menotti is identified with the American musical scene, and
has been without question an important factor in the development of
an American musical theatre. Тле Medium (1946) and The Consul (1950),
both serious, if rather melodramatic, works, enjoyed unprecedented
success in the commercial theatre, and have been performed frequently
throughout the United States and Europe. The chamber opera Amal
and the Night Visitors (1951) was commissioned by the National
Broadcasting Company (a private enterprise) especially for television,
and has been presented annually on Christmas Eve. The unqualified
success of Menotti's work with even the very broadest public has been
valuable to other American musicians, creating an awareness of opera
as a still effective art form and as a potential medium for communicating
with audiences larger than those available for symphonic music. The
appeal of Menotti's work, continued with The Saint of Bleecker Street
(1954), lies in his unerring dramatic flair and directness. The musical
material is conventional, but treated imaginatively, and the vocal line
is always handled with mastery.

William Schuman and Norman dello Joio were among the best known
and most widely performed American composers during the 1940s and
1950s. Dello Joio's music poses no problems; it is expertly made and
quite conservative in style. Dello Joio's principal teacher was Hinde-
mith, and his music reflects the influence of that master. If dello Joio's
music is less angular and has more obvious warmth than his master's, that
is perhaps a reflection of an Italian heritage. Dello Joio has frequently
used modal melodic material, including Gregorian chant, in a mildly
dissonant texture. His use of contrapuntal techniques is skilful. Dello
Joio is an accomplished pianist and organist and is one of the few
American composers (Persichetti is another) who has written interesting
music for the keyboard. Among dello Joio's orchestral works, his
Variations, Chaconne and Finale (1948) has been often performed by
American orchestras.

622 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

The chief distinguishing character of Schuman's music is the quality
of its motor energy. It derives both in spirit and in technique from
Harris, but goes beyond Harris in achievement. Like Harris, Schuman
is often concerned with being an American composer; he is, however,
essentially an urban American, and his music seems a reflection of the
drive, the buoyancy and the tension of American life. The orchestral
piece that first brought him notice was an American Festival Overture
(1939), a brilliantly orchestrated work of great liveliness. His Third
Symphony (1941) established him securely among American composers
of his generation, and his work has continued to be performed more and
more widely. Schuman's work in the 1940s and 1950s includes seven
symphonies, two concertos, various other orchestral pieces, four string
quartets, and the music for several dance productions, notably Under-
tow (1945), Night Journey (1947) and Judith (1949). Schuman has
writtens ongs, piano music, and choral works as well, and one opera,
The Mighty Casey (1953), based on a celebrated mock-epic of base-
ball. With many other American composers (Cowell, Luening and
Finney among them) Schuman rediscovered the work of one of
America's authentic ‘primitives’, the New England composer William
Billings (1746-1800), whose name is associated with sturdy hymns,
patriotic anthems and what he himself termed 'fuguing tunes'. Schuman
based his New England Tryptych (1956) on music by Billings, and this
example of musical Americana has been one of his most popular works.
Schuman's music is basically tonal, although at times extremely dis-
sonant. He is fond of major-minor triads and is not afraid of harsh
conflicts. Like Harris, he often employs a long melodic line and makes
frequent use of canonic and fugal techniques. The flow of Schuman's
music is often punctuated by brittle rhythmic passages. It is the drive
and restlessness of the rhythms, and the brilliance of the orchestration,
that first attract attention to Schuman's music. A passage from his
Sixth Symphony (Ex. 260) shows the long string line opposed to the
noisy rhythmic punctuation of the entire brass section.

THE SITUATION IN 1950—THE DECADE 1950—60

At the mid-point of the century the American musical scene was one
of tremendous activity. Among the ‘established’ composers, the most
important appeared to be Copland, Barber, Piston, Schuman, Dello
Joio, Thomson, Sessions and Riegger; and Ives’s reputation was rising.
But new developments were under way, and other young and middle-
aged composers were coming to the fore. Almost all the composers
named above, with the exceptions of Ives and Sessions and possibly of

THE SITUATION IN 1950—THE DECADE 1950-60 623

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THE SITUATION IN 1950—THE DECADE 1950-60 625

Riegger, were well received in polite musical circles and regarded as
conservative by a younger generation. Most of the newer composers
were interested neither in simplicity nor in Americanism. The influence
of Schoenberg and Webern was beginning for the first time to be
strongly felt and reflected by American composers, and Stravinsky's
conversion to serialism prompted a further movement towards the
international avant-garde style. Prominent among the composers work-
ing in serial techniques were Milton Babbitt (b. 1916), Ben Weber
(b. 1916), George Perle (b. 1915), and George Rochberg (b. 1918).
Many others followed, and the influence of the post-Webernists con-
tinued to become more marked. Copland and Thomson themselves
experimented with note-row construction, and a number of more or less
neo-classical composers, such as Arthur Berger (b. 1912), followed the
new Stravinsky line of the 1950s. At the same time, new composers also
emerged on the right wing and in a middle group. Some of the most
interesting figures, among them Elliott Carter (b. 1908), Hugo Weisgall
(b. Bohemia, 1912) and Leon Kirchner (b. 1919) could be described
as left of centre without being committed to serialism or to any other
easily identifiable school. The original and controversial work of John
Cage (b. 1912) also attracted attention during the fifties, and the equally
original work of Harry Partch (b. 1901) began to interest the musically
curious, without, however, reaching a large public or exerting much
influence on musical thought or practice.

The range of interest and of musical style continued to widen during
the decade 1950-60, so that composers of one extreme tendency seemed
hardly to exist in the same world as those at the other extreme. This was
merely a reflection in America of the international situation in music;
but the important difference for American music lay in the fact that it
had finally reached a point of development at which it was abreast of
European currents, instead of being anywhere from ten to fifty years
behind them. Increased facility of communication was of course a
primary factor, but it was the achievement of several generations of
American composers that provided the technical and artistic basis for
this new relation to the musical art of the world. In the 1950s, the work
of new European composers such as Boulez and Stockhausen made
an immediate impact in America, and for the first time a few American
composers, notably Carter, Cage, and Babbitt, produced music other
than jazz that was of some influence on musicians of Europe. American
music had finally become part of the international scene rather than a
provincial echo.

It is obviously impossible, in a brief essay, to mention all of the many
dozens of composers whose works commanded some attention during

626 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

the decade 1950-1960, nor is it possible to pretend to any degree of
historical perspective in evaluating an enormous volume and variety of
production that is still so recent. But among the many composers
occupying the broad middle ground of musical style at mid-century, one
should cite some of those who attracted attention and achieved some
prominence. In such a list one would find the names of Peter Mennin
and Vincent Persichetti (already mentioned), as well as those of Lukas
Foss (b. Germany, 1922), Leonard Bernstein (b. 1918), Robert Palmer
(b. 1915), Ingolf Dahl (b. Germany, 1912-1970), Irving Fine (1914—
1962), Alexei Haieff (b. Russia, 1914), Elie Siegmeister (b. 1909), Robert
Ward (b. 1917), William Bergsma (b. 1921), Andrew Imbrie (b. 1921),
and Alan Hovhaness (b. 1911). To cite these names and to omit others
is not to make either a critical or an historical judgement. Nor should
it be assumed that these composers constitute a group in any sense; they
represent a variety of personalities and musical orientations, and have
in common only the fact that all were active and respected in their time
and place, and that their music was performed and known. At so short
a remove in time, one cannot know if a Charles Ives remains un-
discovered, or if an Edward MacDowell enjoys a fame beyond his
deserts.

Of these composers, brief accounts must suffice. Mennin's style, best
seen in his symphonies, is broad and singing, rhythmically alive, and
shows an impressive command of large contrapuntal forms. Ward,
like Mennin a student of Hanson and Bernard Rogers, has written in
an easy and recognizably American style in his overture, Jubilation
(1946), and has progressed to an effective dramatic music in his very
successful opera Тйе Crucible (1960). Palmer and Dahl write for the
most part in a vein of Hindemithian neo-classicism, while Fine and
Haieff represent a neo-classicism deriving from Stravinsky. Bergsma's
music is generally classical and conservative, but has great sensitivity
and elegance. Imbrie, a pupil of Sessions, has some of his teacher's
intensity and drive, and his music represents the Sessions influence
at its best. Persichetti's style is one in which influences of Copland,
Harris and Schuman seem to be fused. Foss continued to evolve
an expression of his own after arriving in the United States at the
age of fifteen. Influenced strongly by Hindemith, later by Stravinsky and
eventually by Copland, Foss later turned to serialism in his Time Cycle
(1960) for soprano and orchestra, and to experiment with improvisatory
techniques. Hovhaness, of Armenian descent, has attempted in his
prolific output of composition to reconcile music of the East and West,
and has succeeded in producing work of quite distinct profile. Bernstein,
like Foss a gifted pianist and conductor, is a Protean composer, whose

THE SITUATION IN 1950—THE DECADE 1950-60 627

serious symphonic works derive from Stravinsky and Copland (with
occasional overtones of German nineteenth-century composers), but
whose most convincing accomplishments so far are in the popular
musical theatre, as West Side Story (1957).

The techniques and mannerisms of electronic music, aleatory and
improvisational music, totally serialized music and other manifestations
of contemporary musical thought or exploration commanded attention
in the United States as they did in Europe. Among the first to experiment
with music composed on electronic tape were Otto Luening and his
colleague at Columbia University, Vladimir Ussachevsky (b. Man-
churia, 1911). A first concert of their compositions for tape recorder was
given in New York in 1952. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in
1959 established a laboratory for electronic music at Columbia, where
further experiment is carried on under the direction of Luening and
Ussachevsky, with Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions of Princeton.
Sessions himself has not composed electronic music; Babbitt, on the
other hand, has been among the most active in this field, and his work,
both in theory and in application, has been extremely influential.
Coincidental with the rise of electronic music, as a phenomenon of
major interest, was the reappearance, after a silence of many years, of
Varése. Varése had in many ways anticipated the aesthetic of elec-
tronic music, and the evolution of its techniques, by a singular poetic
justice, re-emphasized the daring and originality of the music he
had written in the 1920s. Deserts (1954), his first new work in almost
twenty years, was composed for conventional instruments (including
much percussion) with interludes of ‘organized sound’ recorded on
tape. With this remarkable piece, Varése once again proved himself to
be a composer of imagination, power, and vitality.

Among the independent explorers of new musical styles, none was
more prominent during the fifties than John Cage. Cage first attracted
attention with his music for ‘prepared’ piano in the 1940s, taking up a
line of development first indicated by Cowell. Cage has been influenced
also by Varése, by oriental music, by Anton von Webern, and by a
variety of philosophical or speculative ideas. He was perhaps the first
to use chance as a basic element in musical construction; and his work
antedates by some years the aleatory music fashionable in Europe late
in the fifties. His /maginary Landscape, for twelve radios, was performed
in 1951 at what proved to be the final concert of the New Music Society.
This work, the principle of which is that it can never repeat itself,
depends entirely on the chance of what will be on the air at the time of
performance. ‘Form’ is indicated, but the essence of ‘content’ is absolute
randomness. The spirit of Cage’s work is reminiscent of Parisian Dada;

628 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

if its absolute value is difficult to estimate, its influence on many of
Cage's contemporaries cannot be denied.

Among other composers of an experimental and non-conformist
tendency, Lou Harrison (b. 1917), a pupil of Cowell, and Henry Brant
(b. Canada, 1913) deserve mention. Harrison, in addition to some highly
sensitive, though eclectic, works for conventional instruments and
voices, has composed a number of works for percussion orchestra,
including such unorthodox sound-producers as brake-drums, iron pipes,
and packing boxes, and these are often of a surprising gentleness and
astonishing effectiveness. Brant, whose teachers included Antheil,
Copland, and Riegger, among others, but who was also very strongly
influenced by Ives and Cowell, was a juvenile prodigy whose early
works showed a bewildering exuberance and cleverness. He has worked
as a professional arranger for radio and other commercial media, and
after repudiating many of his early compositions, has turned his
attention to experiments in multi-planed music, using separated and
independent groups of players. The groups are often of unusual con-
stitution. Typical of Brant's work is his Grand Universal Circus (1956), a
theatre-piece in three ‘acts’ which embodies Brant's ideas of stereo-
phonic distribution and polyphonic tempi. Of Brant's music, Henry
Cowell commented that ‘it constitutes audaciousness іп the grand
manner . . . and [is] deserving of a place in Ives' idea of a Universal
Symphony, to which all composers with doughty ears and strong-
sounding music are invited by Ives to contribute. . . ^

Considerably less controversial, and with no elements either of Dada
or of ‘scientific’ objectivity or abstraction, is the music of Carter,
Kirchner and Weisgall, who achieved recognition in the fifties as
composers of impressive stature. Kirchner studied with both Schoen-
berg and Sessions, and his music has a complexity and intensity
reminiscent of these composers. But Kirchner's music also shows
affinities with the music of Berg and Bartók. Kirchner first attracted
attention with a rhapsodic Duo for Violin and Piano (1947) and fol-
lowed this with a Piano Sonata (1948) and a String Quartet (1949):

629

THE SITUATION IN 1950—THE DECADE 1950-60

Ex. 261

Violin I

Violin II

ЕЕ

dinario

юг

(они оС

col legno,

col legno (battuto)

lacur d

ще

630 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

His Concerto for Piano (1953) is representative of his mature work in
large forms. There is great force, even violence, in Kirchner's music,
which at all times remains highly personal and indifferent to theoretical
positions. Kirchner succeeded Piston as professor of composition at
Harvard, after many years at Mills College in California.

Hugo Weisgall also studied with Sessions, and writes in a highly dis-
sonant atonal style that recalls the expressionist manner of Central
Europe. Weisgall's forte is vocal music, and his setting of English is
extraordinarily effective. His principal work is in the field of opera; he is
almost the only American composer of the fifties to write opera in a
dissonant, powerfully dramatic style. Ех. 262 from his Athaliah illus-
trates also the restless semiquaver notation characteristic of Weisgall's
music. The Tenor (1950) and The Stronger (1952), based on Wedekind
and Strindberg respectively, made Weisgall known as among the most
interesting new American composers for the serious musical theatre.
Six Characters in Search of an Author (1956), after the Pirandello play,
and Purgatory (1958), after Yeats, established the composer firmly as
one of the most forceful on the American scene.

Elliott Carter was among the most respected composers in America
at the end of the decade. Carter studied with Piston and Boulanger, and
his early compositions were of a neo-classical trend, with echoes of
Stravinsky and Copland. Not until 1948 did Carter find an expression
that was entirely his own, and one that he has developed with increasing
originality and authority with each succeeding work. In the Sonata for
Cello and Piano of 1948, he joined the ranks of Ше ‘experimental’
composers, but his distinction in this category is that such experiment

631

THE SITUATION IN 1950—THE DECADE 1950-60

Ex. 262

end of Рат: Опе

| |

632 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

as the work represented was subordinate to a remarkable musical
realization. In this work Carter for Ше first time utilized his invented
principle of ‘metrical modulation’, a technique for controlling and
changing the absolute speeds of musical time units. This alone would
demand attention, but the Sonata also exhibited an expressive power of
the highest degree and a command of spacing and sonority already fore-
shadowed in the Piano Sonata of 1946. Carter's work during the follow-
ing years, the Eight Etudes and a Fantasy for woodwind quartet (1950),
the String Quartet (1951), the Variations for Orchestra (1955) and the
Second String Quartet (1960), all impressed as being of major impor-
tance. Carter's works may be described as intellectual machines in
which an unusually forceful musical impulse supplies the momentum.
His ideas in the fields of form and organization, his successful creation
of a music evolving on several simultaneous planes, had already
exercised wide influence by 1960. In some respects Carter solved some
of the problems in polyrhythm and multi-planed music that Ives had
posed many years before. Ex. 263, from the 1951 String Quartet, is
typical of his music in this respect:

Ex. 263
Уют 42-60

espr. ———
Violin II (d = 135 E

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| E Ду p | Еш Гес 1 I/—& T - «e ТГ rnm
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633

THE SITUATION IN 1950—THE DECADE 1950-60

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634 AMERICAN MUSIC: 1918-1960

Carter's music is always rigidly disciplined, but it is without formula.
Its texture is generally dense and its colour dark. The calculation of
sonorities and balances is extremely delicate, and each new work has
seemed to indicate further progress into still unexplored areas of musical
thought.

It is impossible to foresee how the music of the 1950s will appear in
even the very near future. Judgement becomes increasingly difficult not
only because of the great diversity of styles and techniques—and the
consequent possibility that the mid-century on the whole represents a
point of transition and synthesis—but also because of the enormous
numbers of composers at work, and the unprecedented rapidity with
which musical fashions continue to evolve, and in many cases to dis-
appear. АП these phenomena are characteristic of the twentieth century
everywhere, and in every field, but they seem to take on peculiarly
exaggerated forms in America. One is safe only in assuming that
American music at the beginning of the second half of the century
possessed both the environment and the tradition to keep abreast of the
remainder of the world.

635

(ii) Music in Latin America

By GERARD BÉHAGUE

NATIONALISM

DURING the first half of the twentieth century Latin-American art
music was largely dominated by the nationalist trend, with notable
exceptions. Composers sought in the various folk-music traditions of
their countries the substance of their works. The large majority of the
considerable music production for all media at this time reveals varying
degrees of national concern, from the direct use of folk and popular
sources to a more subjective assimilation of folk material. Through their
nationalistic works Latin-American composers were able to win un-
precedented international recognition, and only in the late 1950s and
the 1960s did musical nationalism suffer an obvious decline.

The major exponents of Latin-American art music during the period
under consideration include Heitor Villa-Lobos, Carlos Chávez, Domin-
go Santa Cruz, and Alberto Ginastera, respectively from Brazil, Mexico,
Chile, and Argentina. They and their contemporaries, however, were not
exclusively nationalist. Frequently they have attempted to incorporate
twentieth-century European styles and techniques into certain national
idioms. In many cases they have also followed such trends as impres-
sionism, neo-classicism or serialism, in which no trace of nationality can
be detected.

In Brazil, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) dominated the local scene
throughout his career. Extremely prolific and imaginative, he wrote
about a thousand works (including various arrangements of many
pieces) in all possible genres and media. By 1913 he had written some
fifty-five compositions, among which the Suite dos cántigos sertanejos
(Folk-song suite) (1910) indicates his first elaboration of thematic
material derived from folk sources. Further involvement with typical
national subjects is evidenced in his tone poems and ballets of the late
1910s, such as (Лғариғи and Amazonas, introducing concurrently
characteristic harmonic and rhythmic elements of popular music as
well as children's song-tunes in his piano pieces, such as А prole do bébé
(Baby's family) по. / (1918) and Lenda do caboclo (Tale of a peasant)
(1920). During the 1920s Villa-Lobos travelled to Paris where he
succeeded in establishing himself as a composer and conductor. This
period had a particular significance for him because he then completed
the series of the СЙдғов, considered together with the Bachianas
brasileiras his best contribution to modern music. Inspired by the native

636 MUSIC IN LATIN AMERICA

background of the chéros (popular strolling ensembles of serenaders іп
Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the century), he wrote sixteen compositions
bearing this title. Not in chronological order, they are intended for the
most varied media, from solo guitar (Chóros no. 1) to full orchestra with
mixed chorus (Chóros no. 10). The only common stylistic traits result
from a highly subjective recreation of various popular and primitive
musical traditions. Chóros по. 10 quoting the popular song ‘Rasga o
согасйо” reveals the assimilation of advanced techniques: predominance
of rhythm and percussion instruments, polytonality, and atonality with
tone-clusters. The 1920s were also the years of his piano masterpieces
including the Cirandas (Rounds) (1926), sixteen pieces of high virtuosity
based on children's songs, and Rudepoema (Rude poem) (1921-26),
dedicated to Arthur Rubinstein. The Bachianas brasileiras, the last seven
symphonies, and the last thirteen quartets dominated Villa-Lobos's
production during the last twenty-seven years of his life. According to
the composer himself the Bachianas were inspired by the atmosphere
of J. S. Bach's work, considered by him as a universal source of music.
Consisting of nine pieces they are written as dance suites preceded
generally by a prelude and ending with a fugue-like or toccata-like
movement. The use of baroque composition processes is in fact small,
although fugue as a formal principle could be construed as a 'neo-
baroque' device, demanding a clarity of horizontal movement and
the presence of systematic imitation. Ostinato figures and long pedal
notes also indicate neo-classic devices. This series was meant as a free
adaptation of such *baroque' devices applied to Brazilian folk music.

Among Villa-Lobos's Brazilian contemporaries, Oscar Lorenzo Fer-
nández, Luciano Gallet, and Francisco Mignone represent the folk-
music orientation of their time. The best known composers of the next
generation include Camargo Guarnieri, Luiz Cosme, Radamés Gnatalli,
and José Siqueira.

The 1910 revolution had an extraordinary impact on Mexico's artistic
life. As a result of patriotic fervour musicians adhered to musical
nationalism whose sources of expression were sought in either Indian or
mestizo cultures. Manuel M. Ponce (1882-1948), considered the pioneer
of nationalism in Mexico, drew on all types of mestizo folk music
incorporated into a neo-Romantic style. The post-revolutionary period
saw the emergence of the so-called Aztec Renaissance and the con-
sequent indianista movement in the arts. Carlos Chávez (b. 1899),
the most influential Mexican composer of the twentieth century has
been particularly successful in evoking subjectively the remote past,
character, and cultural setting of the pre-conquest Indian. His works of
clear Indian inspiration comprise the ballet Los cuatro soles (The Four

NATIONALISM 637

Ages), Sinfonia India, Xochipilli-Macuilxéchitl (An Imagined Aztec
Music’), a Piano Concerto, and the well known Toccata for percussion,
rearranged as a ballet and titled Тохса!. In his most abstract composi-
tions such as his Sinfonia de Antígona, La hija de Cólquide (The daughter
of Colchis), his Violin Concerto, and numerous piano pieces, Chávez's
highly personal style and Mexican sense appear so intimately connected
that his music has been characterized as ‘profoundly non-European’.
As а conductor he has also had a brilliant career. He founded the
Orquesta Sinfónica de México in 1928 and directed it for over eighteen
years. Chávez's contemporary, Silvestre Revueltas (1899—1940), became
internationally known especially through his works Осһо por Radio and
Sensemayd.

Outstanding Cuban composers associated with nationalism were
Amadeo Roldán (1900-39) and Alejandro García Caturla (1906-40)
who found in Afro-Cuban music the most suitable source of national
expression. José Ardévol (b. 1911) assumed a position of leadership in
Cuba as a composer and teacher from the 1930s to the middle 1950s,
founding in Havana the Grupo Renovación Musical (1943) which pro-
moted contemporary music and rejected nationalism.

Musical nationalism in Chile is represented mainly by Pedro Hum-
berto Allende (1885-1959), who utilized native elements within an
impressionist style, Carlos Lavín (1883-1961), and Próspero Bisquertt
(1881-1959). The best known Chilean composers, however, are Domin-
go Santa Cruz (b. 1899) and Juan Orrego-Salas (b. 1919), both of neo-
classic rather than nationalist tendencies. Santa Cruz has laid the
foundation of professional musical life in his country through the
promotion of music education and the creation of music and concert
societies. His large production as a composer includes mostly abstract
works for symphony orchestra, chamber and choral works. Orrego-
Salas's output comprises a large number of chamber works, such as his
Sonata a quattro, Op. 55 (1964), three symphonies, ballets, choral pieces,
and an opera.

Nationalistic tendencies emerged in Argentina in the works of Alberto
Williams (1862-1952), the most prolific and influential composer of his
generation, and of Arturo Berutti (1862-1938), who treated national
themes in his operas (Pampa, Yupanki). Alberto Ginastera (b. 1916),
one of the leading creative personalities in contemporary Latin-
American music, has evolved from a nationalistic orientation in the
1930s and 1940s (in such works as Impresiones de la Puna, the ballets
Panambi and Estancia, the series of Pampeanas) to a neo-classical current
in the 1950s (a Piano Sonata, Variaciones concertantes, and others). In
the 1960s he turned to an effective manipulation of atonal and serial

638 MUSIC IN LATIN AMERICA

techniques, mixed with a meticulous preoccupation with timbres
(Cantata para América Mágica, a Piano Concerto, a Violin Concerto, the
operas Don Rodrigo, Bomarzo, and Beatrix Cenci). In some works, such
as Estudios sinfónicos, Op. 35 (1967), he combined serial and microtonal
textures with fixed and aleatory structures.

MODERNISM AND THE AVANT-GARDE

In opposition to theprevailing nationalist current, a number of Latin-
American composers active in the 1940s and 1950s practised an abstract
style through neo-classic, dodecaphonic, and post-Webernian serialist
idioms. In Argentina Juan Carlos Paz (b. 1897), one of the founders of
the Grupo Renovación and the Agrupación Nueva Musica, favoured the
expressionistic aesthetic and became already in 1930 a strong supporter
and follower of twelve-note techniques. In Chile Carlos Isamitt (b.
1887), though interested in Indian materials did not neglect serial
techniques; and Gustavo Becerra (b. 1925) cultivated expressionist
atonality and serialism before engaging himself actively in experimental
music.

In Brazil Schoenberg's theories were first introduced by the German-
born composer Hans-Joachim Koellreutter (b. 1915) and followed in
the 1940s by such composers as Claudio Santoro (b. 1919) and César
Guerra-Peixe (b. 1914). Among the younger generation Edino Krieger
(b. 1928) has found some interesting compromises within a modernistic
neo-classic style, as shown by his first string quartet of 1956. The
Argentineans Roberto García Morillo (b. 1911) and Roberto Саатайо
(b. 1925) represent the same tendency. The Colombian Luis Antonio
Escobar (b. 1925) has alternated his style from a neo-classic trend to a
post-Webern serialism. In Peru an internationalist current appears with
composers such as Enrique Iturriaga (b. 1918), Celso Garrido Lecca
(b. 1926), Enrique Pinilla (b. 1927), and others, while in Uruguay the
most advanced techniques of composition have been used by León
Biriotti (b. 1929) and Sergio Cervetti (b. 1940).

Avant-garde tendencies have emerged especially in Argentina, Chile,
Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, and Mexico. In spite of the limited means of the
Latin-American scene for experiments in new music, numerous young
composers (several of them active in Europe or the U.S.A.) have
advocated and used electronic musical resources, aleatory techniques,
and indeterminacy, thus breaking definitely with musical nationalism.

Vill

МБС АРЕНЕ SOVIEL UNION

By GERALD ABRAHAM

THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND

FEW events in political history have produced such fundamental
cultural consequences as the October 1917 Revolution in Russia. But
the consequences followed only by very slow degrees, except in so far
as individual composers were concerned. Stravinsky was abroad and
decided to stay there; Rakhmaninov went into self-imposed exile in
December and was followed the next year by Prokofyev (though not
before he had conducted the first performance of his Classical Symphony
in April 1918). These departures, like the deaths during 1914-18 of
Lyadov, Skryabin, Taneyev and Cui, impoverished Russian musical
life and seemed to draw a line under the end of an epoch; but a great
deal in the new Russia was for some time very much like the old so far
as music was concerned. Glazunov (1865-1936) remained at the head
of the Petrograd Conservatoire, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859-1935)
became president of the Society of Writers and Composers in 1922 and
remained director of the Moscow Conservatoire until 1924, when he
returned to Tiflis to organize musical life in the Georgian Republic;
Reinhold Glier (1875-1956) was director of the Kiev Conservatoire
until his transfer to Moscow in 1920. АП three were Rimsky-Korsakov
pupils. A fourth, Nikolay Myaskovsky (1881-1950) was still in the
Army and not demobilized until 1921. Rimsky-Korsakov’s son-in-law,
Maximilian Steinberg (1883-1946) was the principal composition
professor at Petrograd and became Director of the (by this time
Leningrad) Conservatoire in 1934. From the very first the cultural
policy of the new régime was directed by Lunacharsky, who was no
enemy of ‘bourgeois culture’, and when the Commissariat of Education
formed a music section in July 1918 its first head was Arthur Lourié
(1892-1966), a disciple of Debussy, Skryabin, and Schoenberg. The pre-
Revolutionary academics and the pre-Revolutionary avant-garde might
have been supposed to have no enemies but each other. Even the
earliest experiment in ‘proletarian culture’, the movement known as
Proletkult (1918—23), largely directed to the training of workers and

640 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

peasants in writing and the practice of the arts in naive ‘leftist’ direc-
tions, was tempered by the common sense of some of its leaders; these
included Aleksandr Kastalsky (1856-1926), an authority on choral
music and folk-song, whose choral folk-song arrangements were
deservedly popular during the nineteen-twenties. So long as the Civil
War and Polish War lasted, that is, until 1921; composers were more
concerned with the production of music of this kind, and *mass-songs'
for or about the Red Army or the workers, than with symphony or
opera. The mass-songs of this period not only served as models for the
later ones of Aleksandr Aleksandrov (1883-1946) (who in 1940 was to
compose the ‘Hymn of the Soviet Union’) and other composers, but
often left their broad, undistinguished, diatonic stamp on Soviet sym-
phony and opera when these appeared.

The end of the fighting brought a period of relative relaxation, stock-
taking, and policy-formulating. Lenin had said that

Art belongs to the people. It must penetrate with its deepest roots into the
very thick of the broad working masses. It must be understandable by these
masses and loved by them. It must unite the feeling, thought and will of these
masses, inspire them. It must awaken in them artists and develop them.!

These are admirable sentiments, which many eminent Russians, from
Chernishevsky and Mussorgsky to Stasov and Tolstoy, would have
endorsed; but, like so many utterances of politicians, they are capable
of various interpretations. In one sense it was easy to see what should
be done—and, so far as music was concerned, it was done with a
thoroughness that put the rest of the world to cultural shame. Musical
education in the widest sense was put within the reach of all and pro-
fessional musical education raised to the highest imaginable level.
“Тһе masses’ were brought into opera-house and concert-hall, and not
only choirs and orchestras of popular instruments but symphony
orchestras and string quartets were sent to factories and barracks. But
the questions *What music is to be understood and loved by the masses?
What should be the nature of the music of our Brave New World?
remained unanswered. Lenin himself knew there were no quick
answers, and in 1921 he gave a public warning that ‘cultural problems
cannot be decided as quickly as political and military problems"? but
there were two bodies who were confident they knew the answers: the
[later: Rossiyskaya] Assotsiatsiya proletarskikh muzikantov (Association
of Proletarian Musicians: known as APM or RAPM) founded in 1923,
and the Assotsiatsiya sovremennoy muziki (Association for Con-
temporary Music: ASM) founded in 1924, the year when Western

1 О literature i iskusstve (Moscow, 1957), p. 583.
2 Sochineniya, xxxiii (Moscow, 1950), p. 55.

THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND 641

musicians began to visit the Soviet Union and full cultural contacts
with the outside world were made. APM was the successor to, and in
some respects the negation of, Proletkult. Proletkult had believed in
bringing the workman and the peasant to art, including contemporary
art; RAPM not only detested contemporary music but denounced the
classics as ‘bourgeois’ and had little use even for national folk-art; to
them ‘Soviet music’ was music immediately comprehensible to the
simple workman or peasant. ASM stood for the ‘contemporary’ in the
international sense and became closely associated with the International
Society for Contemporary Music. It held that ‘music is not ideology’
and defended the autonomy of the creative musician. Naturally each
body suffered internal dissensions and secessions—ASM, for instance,
had a more conservative wing in which Myaskovsky, Yury Shaporin
(1887-1966), and Vissarion Shebalin (1902-63) were prominent—and
some of the older composers (Glazunov, Glier, Ippolitov-Ivanov) and
their followers kept aloof from both, preserving 'active neutrality'. But
broadly speaking these two bodies polarized the main opposing
tendencies throughout the nineteen-twenties and early nineteen-thirties.
Thanks to the greater influence of ASM, particularly in Leningrad,
Soviet Russia was able during 1925-8, the period of maximum artistic
freedom, to hear such operas as Schreker's Der ferne Klang, Prokofyev's
Love for Three Oranges, Kienek’s Der Sprung über den Schatten,
Wozzeck, Le roi David, Mavra and Oedipus Rex, Jonny spielt auf and
the Dreigroschenoper. ‘Persimfans, the conductorless Moscow
orchestra which flourished for ten years or so from 1922, played not
only the classics but Bartók, Skryabin, Stravinsky, Honegger, Ravel,
Falla, and Prokofyev.

The ‘modernist’ wing of ASM included Skryabin’s old champion, the
critic Leonid Sabaneyev, and Lev Knipper (b. 1898), Nikolay Roslavets
(1881-1944), Alexander Mosolov (b. 1900), Leonid Polovinkin (1894-
1949), and Gavriil Popov (b. 1904) among the composers. The real
founder of ASM, Boris Asafyev (‘Igor Glebov’) (1884—1949), the doyen
of Soviet musical criticism, played an ambiguous róle: conservative and
uninspired as a composer, he was at first the critical champion of
advanced Western modernism but as early as 1924! he began to sound
warnings about the dangers of subjective composition and holding
aloof from the masses, and by the mid-nineteen-thirties he had become
one of the severest critics of everything ASM had stood for. RAPM
was at first insignificant both numerically and in the nature of its
membership; its only distinguished original member, Kastalsky, died

1 ‘Krizis lichnovo tvorchestva’, Sovremennaya muzika (1924) no. 4, p. 98, апа
*Kompozitori, pospeshite', ibid., no. 6, p. 146.

642 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

іп 1926. It was only іп 1929, when it was reinforced by the Prokoll,! a
group of young graduates from the Moscow Conservatoire—including
Alexander Davidenko (1899-1934), Boris Shekhter (1900-61), Viktor
Bely (b. 1904), Dmitry Kabalevsky (b. 1904), and Marian Koval
(1907-1971)—that it began to carry much professional weight,? though
its ideals naturally appealed to a much bigger public than those of
ASM. Тһе battle was already going badly for the ‘contemporaries’; their
organ Sovremennaya muzika, founded in 1924, ceased publication in
1929, and in 1931—weakened Бу the secession of Myaskovsky and
Shebalin—ASM finally collapsed. But the triumph of RAPM was short-
lived; it was intolerant, dictatorial, and many of its members were
technically incompetent. Under the ‘proletarian’ régime, standards at
the Moscow Conservatoire fell so low that composition-students needed
to offer only two or three mass-songs as their leaving exercise.?

Parallel struggles had been going on in literature and the other arts
and on 23 April 1932 the Central Committee of the All-Union Com-
munist Party stepped in. In 1925, while expressing pious hopes for the
future ‘hegemony’ of proletarian writers, it had resolved that ‘the Party
cannot connect itself in any way with any tendency in the domain of
literary form. ... A style corresponding to the epoch will be created but
it will be created by other methods; the solution of the problem is not
yet in sight. .. . The Party must declare for the free rivalry of different
groups and tendencies. . . . The Party cannot allow a monopoly by any
group whatever, even to that which is proletarian in ideology: this would
lead in the first place to the ruin of proletarian literature’.* Now it took
Soviet culture firmly in hand and put an end to both crude proletarian
art and sophisticated contemporary ‘formalism’ (art for art’s sake).
Before long Soviet artists and writers were given a phrase of Gorky’s as
their slogan: ‘Socialist realism’. Soviet art must be understandable and
loved by the masses, but it must be worthy of its ancestry in classic
Russian and world art; and by its strength and optimism it must help to
build socialism. The artistic debate was henceforth not between creeds
but about the correct interpretation of the only true creed. RAPM was
dissolved and the Union of Soviet Composers was established in order to
safeguard ‘socialist realism’ in Soviet music.

1 Portmanteau form of ‘Proizvodstvenny kollektiv studentov-kompozitorov Moskovskoy
konservatorii’ (Production group of the student-composers of the Moscow Conservatoire),
founded іп 1926: see Sergey Ryauzov, ‘Vospominaniya o “РгоКоПе” °’, Sovetskaya muzika,
(1949), no. 7, p. 54.

2 The RAPM programme at this moment of triumph is translated by Nicolas Slonimsky,
Music since 1900 (3rd edition, New York, 1949), p. 655.

3 See the collective work, Istoriya russkoy sovetskoy muziki, i (Moscow, 1956), р. 58.

* Resolution of 18 March 1925.

THE BEGINNINGS OF SOVIET OPERA AND BALLET 643

THE BEGINNINGS OF SOVIET OPERA AND BALLET

During its first decade Soviet opera! had practically only one theme,
revolution, and its dramaturgy was hardly more sophisticated than that
of the ‘Western’ film. One of the aberrations of the early nineteen-
twenties was the performance of operatic classics with new, 'revolu-
tionary' libretti; thus 7osca was produced at Leningrad in 1924 as
Borba za Kommunu (The Fight for the Commune). Similarly Les
Huguenots, which under Nicholas I had had to be disguised as J Guelfi
e i Ghibellini, now appeared as Dekabristi (The Decembrists). The
centenary in 1925 of the Decembrist rising, however, also suggested two
new operas, Vasily Zolotarev's Dekabristi which was produced in that
year and Shaporin's Pauline Goebel, of which only a few scenes were
produced at the time. (It had to wait till 1938 before even the first
version was nearly completed under the title Dekabristi.)? 1925 was
the true birth-year of Soviet opera, for it saw not only the ‘Decembrist’
works but Andrey Pashchenko's Orliny bunt (The Eagles’ Revolt),
Peter Triodin's Stepan Razin, and Za Krasny Petrograd (For Red
Petrograd) by Arseny Gladkovsky and E. V. Prussak. These were
not actually the first new operas after the Revolution; but Triodin's
Knyaz Serebryany, based on А. К. Tolstoy's historical novel (1923), and
Yurasovsky's Trilby (1924)? neither belonged to the new age nor
possessed the breath of life. Pashchenko's opera on the Pugachev
rising, Triodin's second opera, and the Gladkovsky-Prussak picture
of the defenders of Petrograd against the White army under Yudenich
also failed to survive, but the last has at least historic interest as the
earliest opera on a Soviet theme. The score was mainly the work
of Gladkovsky (1894—1945), a competent conventional composer,
while his collaborator Prussak contributed some grotesque, satirical
music for the Whites; their fighting heroine, Dasha, is characterized
by music suggesting revolutionary workers songs and her com-
rades by quotations from the Internationale and ‘Yablochko’ (The
little apple), the enemy by ‘Vzveytes, sokoli, orlami’ (Soar, hawks,
like eagles), a song popular in the White armies. However, after
thirteen performances, the opera succumbed to protests from both
modernists and Proletkult. Gladkovsky's later version of it, Front i til
(Front and Rear) (1930) ‘does not contain one single Soviet man who

is given individual characterization'.* Pashchenko (b. 1885) was more

1 On early Soviet operas see the chapter by I. Rizhkin and S. Levit in /storiya russkoy
sovetskoy muziki, i, p. 155, and M. Iordansky, P. Kozlov, and V. Taranushchenko,
‘K probleme sovetskoy opere’, Sovetskaya muzika (1933), no. 1, p. 19.

? See p. 688.

3 In this chapter the dates of operas are those of the first production; for all other works
the dates are those of composition.

4 Rizhkin, op. cit., p. 187.

644 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

successful with his Pugachev opera,! not so much with the individual
characters as with the broad folk-songish crowd-scenes; it was per-
formed all over Russia and held the stage for ten years or so. His Civil
War opera, Cherny yar (The Black Crag) (1931) was a failure.
Zolotarev's Dekabristi also survived at least into the mid-nineteen-
thirties. A minor pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, Zolotarev (1873-1934) had
a real, if unoriginal vein of lyrical-elegiac melody which enabled him to
make the Decembrist poet Rileyev, the real hero of the opera, a live and
sympathetic character. Inability to create character in musical terms
was the general failing of the Soviet opera-composers of this period.
Even when given strong literary characters, such as Ivan Shishov
(1888-1947) found for his Tupeyny khudozhnik (The Toupee Artist)
(1929) in Leskov's terrible story of the love of a serf-hairdresser for a
serf-actress, they are apt to be musically lost against their social back-
ground, though Shishov comes near to success in a quintet for the
fugitive lovers Lyuba and Arkady, the wretched priest and his wife who
have betrayed their hiding-place, and the enraged Count:

Ex. 264
LYUBA

Akh! ti. . do-lyush-ka pod-ne-vol - па - ya,
Же =

ри ы ы ЗУ! О - slush-ni - ki!
COUNT
Pro -u - chu,
ARKADY Go - re gor-ko - e.

r 220 ==
E = = he =т=

Priest Оу! О - slush-ni- ki!

1 See Asafyev's article in Zhizn iskusstva, 1925, no. 46, reprinted in his Izbrannie trudi, v
(Moscow, 1957), p. 113.

THE BEGINNINGS OF SOVIET OPERA AND BALLET 645

Go- - -re gor-ko-e.

Lyuba: Oh, the lot of the
un-free, bitter woe.

Priest and Wife: Disobedi-
ent! Rebels!

Count: ГЇЇ teach them.

Arkady: Bitter woe. Oh, the
lot of the un-free.)

- u-chu ya ikh

do - lyush - ka
rm ES

Yet another work in a similar old-fashioned nationalist idiom and with
a little life, at least in the heroine, was Proriv (The Break-Through, i.e.
of Mamontov’s cavalry, raiding far in the rear of the Red Army in 1919)
(1930) by Sergey Pototsky (b. 1883). Tupeyny khudozhnik at least
brought a refreshing change from the themes of revolt and civil war.
Aleksandr Krein (1883-1951) and Sergey Vasilenko (1872-1956) sought
variety by transposing the themes into other lands—in Krein’s opera
Zagmuk (1929), into a far distant age as well: the revolt of Babylonian
slaves against their Assyrian oppressors. In Sin solntsa (Son of the Sun,
also 1929) Vasilenko turned to the China of the Boxer Rising, with a
tragic love-affair between a Boxer hero and Aurora Walter, daughter of
the American General Hamilton; ten years later he produced a parallel
piece, Buran, about the struggle of the Uzbeks with the ‘Tsarist
colonizers’.

The settings of Krein’s and Vasilenko’s operas also allowed alter-
natives to Russian musical idioms; Vasilenko’s Boxers were pre-
dominantly pentatonic. Throughout the nineteen-twenties the basic
language of Soviet opera was not unnaturally that of the quarter-
century before the Revolution, which in turn had been on the whole a
period of conservatism and epigonism. The only new elements were the
militant mass-songs, the ‘leftist’? pop-art modernism of Proletkult, and
‘contemporary Western’ modernism; and these new elements were
generally associated with Bolsheviks and their supporters. Opera-
production tended to be ‘modernistic’, sometimes incongruously at
variance with the music, particularly in Leningrad. The least con-
ventional works, no doubt inspired conceptually if not musically by
Stravinsky's Histoire d'un soldat, were Klimenty Korchmarev's Zvan-
soldat (1927) and Pashchenko's Tsar Maximilian (1929), satirical essays

646 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

in musical folk-theatre, with clowning and popular song. The impact in
1930 of Dmitry Shostakovich's Nos (The Nose) (after Gogol's story)
and Knipper's Severny veter (North Wind), the one grotesquely comic
and with no political content, the other tragic— based on the never
forgotten or forgiven shooting of the Baku commissars—but both
genuinely contemporary in musical idiom, must-have been severe. Their
jagged, nearly atonal melodic lines, motor-rhythms and dissonant
harmony come from the world of Hindemith and Prokofyev, Кїепек
and Stravinsky's Mavra; even the diatonic banalities of The Nose are
more likely to have their roots in Křenek than in Proletkult. Ex. 265
shows the hotchpotch of styles in which the only common factor is
anti-romanticism: (i) parody coloratura à [а Mavra and Hindemithian
counterpoint; (ii) from the galop interlude preceding the solemn sounds
of the scene in the Kazan Cathedral where the Nose sings (1).

Ex. 265 (1)
ба v

(What do you mean? Explain.)

THE BEGINNINGS OF SOVIET OPERA AND BALLET 647
(ii)

Molto allegro (d = 106)

It must, however, be remembered that caricature by means of parody
and the grotesque was by no means always inspired from the West; it
was constantly employed—for instance, in Za Krasny Petrograd as we
have seen—against the past and present enemies of the Revolution by
composers who were anything but modernists.

Soviet ballet can claim a longer history than Soviet opera, for
Asafyev, who had composed four ballets in pre-Revolutionary days,
wrote a Carmagnole during the first winter of the new régime and pro-
duced it with piano—played by himself—in a Petrograd workers' club
on the first anniversary of the October Revolution. After that, Asafyev
contented himself for a long time with the compilation of ballet-scores
from the music of better composers (Grieg, Tchaikovsky) and returned
to original composition only in 1932 with Plamya Parizha (The Flames
of Paris), after which came Bakhchisaraysky fontan (The Fountain of
Bakhchisaray, after Pushkin) (1934)? and a series of works which all
failed to achieve lasting success. Vasilenko and Korchmarev also tried
their hands at ballet. Vasilenko's second effort, Josif prekrasny (based
on the Old Testament story of Joseph), was the first new ballet to

1 On the early Soviet ballets, see M. Rittikh in Istoriya, i, p. 202.

2 Asafyev's own accounts of these works are reprinted in Jzbrannie trudi, v (Moscow,
1957), pp. 138 and 141.

648 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

be staged at the Bolshoy in Moscow after the Revolution (March
1925); and Korchmarev's Krepostnaya balerina (Тһе Serf Ballerina)
(1927), another glorification of the Pugachev rising, won success
through its beautiful, folk-songish score. But by far the most suc-
cessful Soviet ballet of this period was Glier's Krasny mak (The Red
Poppy) (1927; revised version, 1949), set in contemporary China, with
wicked imperialists and reactionaries and splendid Soviet sailors; part
of its success was no doubt due to the ballerina Ekaterina Geltser, who
danced the Chinese heroine; but Glier's score included numbers such
as the ‘Dance of the Soviet Sailors’ (variations on the popular song
*Yablochko") which became popular on their own account.

EARLY SOVIET ORCHESTRAL MUSIC!

The earliest, and for thirty years the senior, Soviet composer of
symphonies was Myaskovsky.? He may not cut a very impressive figure
when seen in world-perspective but, compared with most of the com-
posers whose operas and ballets have just been enumerated, he was
outstanding: a master of his craft, fertile in invention, mildly original
in thought, a genuine supporter of the Revolution, though far from
being a revolutionary in music. His pre-war compositions had been
subjective, rather pessimistic in tone, and couched in a late-romantic
idiom influenced by middle-period Skryabin. Of the two symphonies,
Nos. 4 and 5, which he wrote at Revel in the first half of 1918, No. 5
in D—bright and idyllic, with humour and suggestions of folk-music—
suggests a new departure and has been seen as 'the beginning of Soviet
symphonism'; but the idea of “а quiet symphony (E, С, D?) in four
movements; Andante mysterious, with chief theme of lullaby character
had come to him in April 1914,3 The Sixth Symphony, completed in
1923, was a different matter. There are still subjective elements; the
two middle movements were written under the direct impression of the
deaths of two persons very dear to the composer; the middle section of
the second suggests a mysticism akin to Holst's:

!See particularly ‘Glebov’, ‘Russkaya simfonicheskaya muzika za 10 let’, Muzika i
revolyutsiya (1927), no. 11; Viktor Belyaev, ‘10 let russkoy simfonicheskoy muziki',
Sovremennaya muzika (1927), no. 24.

? The chief source of information about Myaskovsky is N. Y. Myaskovsky: stati, pisma,
vospominaniya, edited by S. Shlifshteyn, two vols. (Moscow, 1959 and 1960). There is a
good short survey of his work by Kabalevsky in Sovetskaya muzika (1951), no. 4, p. 18,
reprinted in M. A. Grinberg (ed.), Sovetskaya simfonicheskaya muzika (Moscow, 1955),
р. 36. On the first twelve symphonies see particularly Tamara Livanova in Istoriya, i.
p. 233; on the later symphonies see ibid. ii, p. 384, iii, p. 359, and iv (2), p. 235. Studies in
periodicals are very numerous.

з Shlifshteyn, op. cit. ii, p. 394.

EARLY SOVIET ORCHESTRAL MUSIC 649
Ex. 266

,Andante moderato (J. — 66)
Vns. I, div. a3, con sord. (4- Celesta)

and the main theme of the third:

Ex. 267
SE 3.
() tm т — LR „шм E
Е ЕЕ
SS ш ——
P dolce |
()
fet 43 S :
П ат

Strings.
Lm
м = г! М
Ht = qe я
Dit UE Eu Em
Eee A ass

(senza D.B.)

650 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

which returns at the end of the finale, is Skryabinesque. The finale,
written under the influence of Verhaeren's play of the French Revolu-
tion, Les Aubes, introduces “Са ira’ and ‘La Carmagnole’ (which
Myaskovsky had once heard sung ‘аз the Paris workers sing them’),
but the ‘Dies irae’ and a Russian folk-song, taken up near the end by a
chorus, which sings of the soul being parted from the body and going
before the judgement of God, seem to triumph over the revolutionary
songs. On the other hand, the Symphony is undeniably ‘monumental’
in scale and conception; it contains a great deal of lyrical diatonic music;
the end can be construed as an apotheosis of those who gave their lives
for the Revolution. Modelled on Berlioz rather than Mahler, whose
music Myaskovsky knew but considered ‘rather banal’,? it is the
recognized forerunner of the various ‘monumental’ Soviet symphonies
that have come since. Livanova compares it with Blok’s poem “The
Twelve’ ‘not only in the analogous treatment of the theme, but for its
place in the history of Soviet art’ ;? both are documents of a period when
a portion of the intelligentsiya were still preoccupied with a ‘sacrificial’
conception of the Revolution.

Myaskovsky’s later symphonies were not all so acceptable. No. 8
(1925), based largely on appropriate folk-songs, reflects—like the con-
temporary operas of Pashchenko and Triodin—the current interest in
historical peasant-risings, in this case Stepan Razin’s. But the one-
movement No. 10 (1927), inspired by the crazy hero of Pushkin’s
‘Bronze Horseman’, was regarded as a deviation in the direction of
‘false modernism’, and No. 11 (1932) was (as he admitted) ‘subjective’.

1 Shlifshteyn, op. cit. і, р. 198, and ii, p. 15. The author of the thematic analysis of the
Sixth Symphony in the ASM organ, Sovremennaya muzika (1924), no. 3, p. 86, failed to
recognize either tune. See also M. Tarakanov, ‘Shestaya simfoniya N. Y. Myaskovskovo’,
Sovetskaya muzika (1956), no. 7, p. 11.

? Shlifshteyn, op. cit. i, p. 211. 3 Livanova, ор. cit., p. 245.

EARLY SOVIET ORCHESTRAL MUSIC 651

He made amends in the lyrical No. 12 (1932), conceived as a ‘Collective
Farm' Symphony and dedicated “То the Fifteenth Anniversary of the
October Revolution'.

Throughout the nineteen-twenties Soviet orchestral music maintained
a more ‘modernistic’ line than opera. The ‘proletarians’ were not
interested in the symphony and the symphonists felt no strong com-
pulsion to indulge in musical ideology. Beside Myaskovsky among the
more conservative members of ASM stood his talented pupil Shebalin,
who produced two very Myaskovskian symphonies (1925 and 1929)—
Myaskovskian in their leaping, energetic allegro themes, their plastic,
long-drawn lyrical ones, their chromatic harmony, and their slightly
incongruous folk-elements—and a much older man, Aleksandr Gedike
(1877-1957), organist and Bach scholar, whose Third Symphony (1922)
and Concerto for organ and strings (1926) are solid, academic works.
But there were orchestral essays in more modern idiom, such as
Knipper's Skazki gipsovovo Buddi (Tales of the Plaster Buddha) (1924)
and D minor Symphony (1929), Mikhail Gnesin's Simfonichesky
monument: 1905-1917 (with chorus singing a poem by Esenin) (1925),
Krein's First Symphony (1925) and Traurnaya oda (Funeral Ode—for
Lenin) (1926), Polovinkin's Teleskopi I, II, and ИП (1926-8), and
Shebalin's earlier symphonies (1926 and 1928). Modernistic in a more
vulgar sense, betraying the influence of Proletkult—which gladly
accepted *modernistic constructivism’, the ‘neo-classicism’ of the West,
as an alternative to ‘individualistic subjectivism’ (bourgeous roman-
ticism)—was Mosolov’s ballet suite Stal (Steel) (1926), perhaps an
attempt to emulate Prokofyev's Pas d'acier; the first movement of this
suite the noisy, realistic *Zavod' (Foundry), achieved a notoriety, even
outside the Soviet Union, far beyond its deserts.

However, the outstanding orchestral work of the nineteen-twenties,
the only one to win world recognition and establish a permanent place
in the repertory, was the First Symphony (1925) of Steinberg's young
pupil Shostakovich (b. 1906).2 The Е minor Symphony was his ‘diploma
work' on leaving the Petrograd Conservatoire and some of the material
is nearly identical with that of still earlier works, such as the Piano Trio,
Op. 8 (1923). It is eclectic in the sense that the music of any young com-
poser is eclectic: one easily detects the shades of this or that older
Russian composer or of Prokofyev. But, whereas in the later Nose the

1*For me a telescope is a symbol for gazing into the distance or at great manifestations—
often the same thing’, the composer explained: ‘К moemu avtorskomu kontsertu',
Sovremennaya muzika (1928), no. 30, p. 140.

? On Shostakovich's symphonies, see particularly Genrikh Orlov, Simfonii Shostakovicha
(Leningrad, 1961) which has an excellent bibliography, and (on the first six only) M. D.
Sabinina, Simfonizm Shostakovicha: put К zrelosti (Moscow, 1965).

652 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

influences are heterogeneous, in the Symphony they are homogeneous
and have been so far absorbed that a clear and new musical personality
is revealed. The symphony is ‘pure’—or, as a Soviet critic would say,
'formalistic'—music, marked as Asafyev pointed out! by ‘the rare
quality of laconicism’ and the ability to ‘seize upon the characteristic
quality of a thought and reveal it plastically'; it was only years later that
Soviet critics began to discover its “һегоіс-ігаріс” nature and the 'festively
monumental style’ of its conclusion.

Shostakovich’s next two symphonies were by no means ‘pure’ music.
The Second (‘October’) Symphony (1927)—the first and only edition
(Moscow, 1927) is entitled “То October: symphonic dedication’, with
no claim that it is a “symphony’—and the Third (‘First of May’) (1929)
are both single-movement works, each with a final chorus. Each is
marked by a good deal of brass declamation against bustling, washed-in
backgrounds; each has a curious little quasi-concertino episode for solo
instruments unaccompanied (in the Second, violin, clarinet, and
bassoon; in the Third, piccolo, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon). But there
are also considerable differences. The Second opens Largo, with a
remarkable built-up sound of muted strings, ppp, against which a solo
trumpet begins to declaim an angular theme. The main Allegro, indicated
only by а new metronome mark ( = 152), begins in the manner of the
First Symphony, but the concertino episode develops in pure counter-
point:

xo E pE

sounds) |^

P tutti

в
Ist Vis. ГЕ ЕЕ SS =

pizz.

1 ‘Glebov’, ‘Russkaya simfonicheskaya muzika’,

EARLY SOVIET ORCHESTRAL MUSIC 653

which soon reaches eleven independent parts. A great climax is reached
and then a transition effected for the entrance of the chorus, which sings
a typical Proletkult slogan-poem by Bezimensky. The final words,

There is the banner, the name of the living generations:
October,

The Commune

and Lenin

are shouted, not sung. The music of this section, of which Ex. 269 (from
near the end)—'October! Herald of Ше wished-for sun'—gives a fair
idea:

MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

654

Ex. 269

Moderato

Cymbals

soln - tsa
3

E - to

E-to soln- tsa zhe -

Chorus

Ok - tyabr!
РА

peat

ЕЕ х= ==

әй

vest - nik, ОК ~ tyabr!

- lan - по-уо

3p
- lan - no-vo

vest

--------------............-....-....-.-.-..-.-..-...-.-.----..-..-..-

аа

DER

P »

EARLY SOVIET ORCHESTRAL MUSIC 655

is purely diatonic, in the strongest contrast to what has gone before.
Whatever the composer may have intended, the effect is that of an ASM
orchestral piece with RAPM finale, and the work was at first actually
accepted—with reservations—by both parties. The Third Symphony is
a more successful attempt to integrate Shostakovich's earlier style with
a proletarian one. The idiom is essentially, if somewhat eccentrically,
diatonic throughout. Some features, such as the opening clarinet call,
suggest the impact of Mahler, whose symphonies had been performed
several times in Leningrad during 1925-7: the already known Fifth
once (1925), the Fourth once (1927), and the Second three times (1926).
The purely instrumental part of Shostakovich's Third is merely a string
of episodes, which forecast—they were not (as some Soviet critics
have claimed) influenced by—his successful activity as a composer of
film- and theatre-music. But they are not, at any rate in intention,
formalistic; one can guess their meaning. The unaccompanied duet for
two clarinets, following the solo call, obviously evokes the breath of
spring:

Ех. 270

Bruce EI J pi
ЖЕСІ ==

A trumpet calls, inevitably, and keeps on calling; human excitement
grows. А march for brass and side-drum suggests the gathering for a
meeting; the twittering quasi-concertino that interrupts it perhaps
represents young Pioneers, but it leads not to anything like Ex. 268 but
to a quiet episode slightly reminiscent of the second subject of the First
Symphony. The climax of the instrumental part seems intended to
suggest the excitement of a vast May Day meeting, the entire orchestra
in octaves against an fff roll on side-drum and kettle-drum (high G)
declaiming rhetorical, quasi-recitative phrases punctuated by the fff
cannon-shots of a bass-drum:

656 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

Bass drum

The chorus then sings Kirsanov's May Day poem in block harmonies
or unison.

The Third Symphony was unlucky in that its first performance was
delayed till November 1931, only five months before the proclamation
of the ideal of ‘socialist realism’. On 15 February 1932 Shostakovich
announced in Sovetskoe iskusstvo that he had begun ‘a great sym-
phonic poem with orchestra, chorus and solo vocal numbers. Its
theme is “From Karl Marx to our own days” '. The words had been
written by a Proletkult poet, Nikolay Aseyev, and the first of the five
parts was already composed; the work was intended to last an entire
evening. But Proletkult was not socialist realism. How much, if any, of
the music survives in other compositions, we can only conjecture.

EARLY SOVIET MUSIC IN OTHER FIELDS 657

EARLY SOVIET MUSIC IN OTHER FIELDS

Chamber music, piano music and solo song were cultivated only by
the conservative academics and the modernist formalists. These kinds
of music were for the few, the already cultured; they tended to express
individual ideas and subjective emotion, and the proletarians were
actively hostile to them. Recitals were given mainly under the aegis of
ASM, but the predominant idiom was that of fastidious late-romantic
lyricism.

One of the earliest post-Revolutionary string quartets must have been
the veteran Glazunov's Sixth (1921). (His Seventh and last, was written
in 1930 after his emigration.) Like Glier's Third (1928), it is a return to a
medium abandoned a quarter of a century earlier. And quite a
number of ‘Soviet’ chamber-compositions were really refurbishings of
works written or at least sketched before the Revolution: Aleksandrov's
Quartet, Op. 7, Lyapunov's Piano Sextet, the third and fourth of the
quartets Myaskovsky brought out as Op. 33. (And Op. 33, nos. 1 and 2,
composed about 1930, are inferior inhabitants of the same world.)
Myaskovskian, too, are the Op. 2 quartet (1923) and the String Trio,
Op. 4 (1924) of Shebalin, and Kabalevsky's First Quartet (1928): works
of promise rather than achievement. Only in Shebalin is there a whiff of
Prokofyev's brand of anti-romanticism, with tougher modernism repre-
sented by the quartets, trios, and violin sonatas of Roslavets and by
Popov's Sextet.

The piano music of the period is similar in spirit but technically more
accomplished. The sonatas of Myaskovsky, Anatoly Aleksandrov
(b. 1888), and Samuil Feinberg (1890-1962) belong to the aesthetic
worlds of Skryabin, Medtner, or Rakhmaninov. It is music for the
recital-platform; later they had to learn to write in a more intimate
style and for humbler performers. Nothing could be in sharper contrast
with this refined if rather etiolated art than the early piano works of
Shostakovich, the Fantastic Dances, First Sonata and Aforizmi (1922-7),
which emulate by turns Prokofyev, Stravinsky, and Hindemith.! The
two wings of ASM piano music may be illustrated by (1) the opening of
Feinberg's Prelude, op. 8, No. 1, (ii) the opening of the slow move-
ment of Shostakovich's First Sonata:

1 For a ‘socialist-realist’ judgement on these works and their immediate successors, see
Mikhail Druskin, ‘О fortepiannom tvorchestve D. Shostakovicha’, Sovetskaya muzika
(1935), no. 11, p. 52.

MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

658

Ex. 272

sempre marcato e cantando

dolce

та marcato

659

EARLY SOVIET MUSIC IN OTHER FIELDS

UN
zi
| [|

16 ШЫ" ҮН,

660 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION Е

Both were written in 1926; both were objectionable to the proletarians.
Equally objectionable was another piano-piece of the same year: the
‘coarsely naturalistic’ railway noises of Re/si (The Rails), by the Prolet-
kult composer Vladimir Deshevov (1889-1955). Polovinkin, always
more original in his titles (for instance, his Elektrifikat for piano) than
in his music, having composed four sonatas during 1924-6, marked the
‘crisis іп the Soviet piano sonata’ by naming No. 5 (1928) Poslednyaya
sonata (Last Sonata).

АП these piano composers, with one exception, composed also for
voice and piano. (The exception was Shostakovich, whose solo songs
of the nineteen-twenties—settings of two Krilov fables (1921-2), which
already show his gift for satire, and of Japanese poems (1928)—have
orchestral accompaniment.) To them we must add one too-little known
composer, Vasily Nechaev (1895-1956), a true song-writer who is at his
best in his Blok and Esenin settings of 1926-8. Their choice of poets was
symptomatic; instead of the young Soviet poets, they generally preferred
translations from the Japanese or of Sappho, the Russian classics and
(above all) the Symbolists and *Perfectionists'—Balmont, Blok, Gippius,
Akhmatova. The music is essentially a continuation of the polished
Russian art-song of the pre-Revolution period. There is no social or
political awareness; even composers, such as Myaskovsky, who had
shown it in their orchestral works, naturally felt free here to retreat into
a private world of personal dreams and emotions. Only the egregious
Mosolov set to music a collection of Gazetnie obyavleniya (Newspaper
advertisements) (1926). An art like theirs could hardly be expected to
flourish under the triumphant proletarianism of 1929—31 or even in the
freer air of early ‘socialist realism’.

SOCIALIST REALISM IN OPERA

Given the Marxian postulates, reinforced by the nineteenth-century
Russian view of the function of art, the Party had to lay down a new
and firm literary-artistic policy in 1932; and, granted those premises,
the policy was not so arbitrary as it may seem to the non-Russian.
ASM had been hopelessly out of touch with ‘the people’; on the other
hand RAPM had not only lowered standards but had been so intolerant
that, by comparison, early ‘socialist realism’ was liberal. The Party was
at this point legislating for a situation, though, as usual with benevolent
paternalism, it made no allowances for the eccentricities of exceptionally
gifted children.

The composers and other creative artists even had a year or two to
work out in the new Union of Soviet Composers and parallel bodies
their own interpretation of ‘socialist realism’. This was naturally more

SOCIALIST REALISM IN OPERA 661

difficult in music than in literature, though least difficult in opera. As
always at these policy changes there was trouble with works in progress.
At the beginning of the nineteen-thirties two composers had been
working independently on operas dealing with the serf-rising against
Shuysky led by Ivan Bolotnikov in 1606: Nechaev and Valery Zhelo-
binsky (1913-46). Nechaev had shown very mild leanings to ‘modernism’
and his Ivan Bolotnikov, though accepted for production in 1932 by
Stanislavsky, never reached the stage even in its second version of
1936-7. Zhelobinsky's Kamarinsky muzhik' was produced in 1933.
His model was clearly Boris—there is even a Polish scene, with
mazurka, and a Polish seductress; the hero was meant to be simply
a symbol of the oppressed people; the idiom is predominantly vocal,
folk-songish melody or melodic recitative. But, apart from the fact
that Zhelobinsky was no Mussorgsky, his characters are lay-figures
and he was criticized both for his failure to show Bolotnikov’s con-
nexion with the people and for his ‘grotesque’, ‘ironical’ treatment of
the boyars. The comic quartet for the bass princes in scene 4, accom-
panied only by the orchestral basses, certainly recalls Puccini’s Ping,
Pang, and Pong:

Ex, 273 .

DMITRY SHUYSKY

vi - shli wvpo- le,

be- = = те ( =

Руа dnya ne е - li

1 See М. Glukh, ‘Kamarinsky muzhik—opera У. Zhelobinskovo', Sovetskaya muzika
(1934), по. 8, р. 3, and S. Levit in Zstoriya russkoy sovetskoy muziki, i (Moscow, 1959),
pp. 176 ff.

662 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

GOLITSIN
Ya vi-shel sle- va,

ее em ee ры
KURAKIN $ниузку Ya vi -shel sbo-ku,
Е ee ЕЕ ЕЕ ЕЕ
Ya vi-shel sle-va, Ya vi-shel sbo-ku
р 2—00 Бр р " Е : i E bg [4 н га eo
Orch | ESX: Se я
ве 2. 22 we)
А EE на.
Ё ro É * um =
а АА егт”.

(We went out in the fields. It was scarcely daylight. For two days we didn't drink.
For two days we didn't eat. I went left. I went sideways.)

The chorus of serfs in the last scene is typical of Zhelobinsky's folk-
songish melodic style and flaccid harmony—and also of a great deal of
other Soviet opera:

Ex. 274

Pti - tsa si-ni-tsa vtem-ni

(The tomtit languishes in prison; it neither eats nor drinks nor sings.)

PLATE IX

(£99 `d 225) YEGI

‘LOIN

A^02SO|A ш uonjnpoJd [ешо 3y} шолу 9ua5s v

LSIG MSNAHSLIN

AHL AO НИЗЯОРИ AQV'I

ЯНА SHOIAOV.LSOHS

SOCIALIST REALISM IN OPERA 663

Indeed Kamarinsky muzhik is in subject and musical style typical of a
whole genre of Soviet operas, from Pashchenko's Orliny bunt onward,
while his Jmenini (The Name-day) (1935), based on a nineteenth-
century story of a serf-musician's tragedy, is an obvious attempt to
emulate Shishov's Tupeyny khudozhnik.

These second-rate works are completely overshadowed by an opera
which, whatever its faults and however adventitious its fame, is the
only Soviet opera to make its way all over the world: Shostakovich's
Lady Macbeth Mtsenskovo uezda (The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk
District) or, to give its alternative title, Katerina Izmaylova. Although
not produced until 22 January 1934, it had been composed during
1930-2 and is marked, like the Third Symphony, by a mixture of in-
compatible styles. Side by side with beautiful or powerful invention, as
in the passacaglia entr'acte in Act II, and Act IV as a whole—its tragic
key-note sounded by the old convict's song at the beginning:

Ex. 215

- mi - tel- ny | гпоу,

(Mile after mile the long file trudges, burned by wearying heat.)
1 See pl. IX.

664 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

there is a great deal of parodic and burlesque music, associated not
only with the old Izmaylov (where ‘it ‘is defensible and even admir-
able) but with the anti-hero Sergey and the policemen of Act III.
And Leskov’s sombre realistic story is falsified not only by this con-
version into a satire on the nineteenth-century provincial merchant-
class but by the attempt to make the triple -murderess Katerina a
sympathetic figure. The dramatic incongruity is as marked as the
musical. Yet there are master-strokes, such as the subtle recall of
Katerina’s song of melancholy boredom (a nice parody of the senti-
mental Russian ‘romance’ of the eighteen-forties) in the third scene of
the First Act (1) when she thinks of the ‘deep black lake in the forest?
near the end of the last (ii):

Ex. 276
(i) Adagio

QE EHI EE

Ya vo - kosh - ko od- nazh-di u- vi - de-

ЕЕ

est pod kri-she-yu gnez- dish- ko;

(Once from the window I saw a little nest under the eaves;)

Gi) Adagio

Peor

So-vsem krug-lo- e, о-сһеп gl - bo-ko-e,__
- davnem cher-na - ya, kak mo -
- ya so-vest, cher- na- ya.

(quite round, very deep, and its water black—like my conscience, black.)

SOCIALIST REALISM IN OPERA 665

and it is not difficult to see why, amid the operatic mediocrity of the
time, it was hailed as “а most significant landmark on the road of the
creative development of Soviet musical art’, a genre sui generis—
*tragic satire'.! Nevertheless when the Party in 1936 decided that com-
posers were interpreting the directive of 1932 altogether too loosely, it
was specifically at Тле Lady Macbeth and Shostakovich's recent col-
lective-farm ballet Svetly ruchey (Clear Stream) that the official
thunderbolts were directed. On 28 January 1936 Pravda printed its now
historic article ‘Sumbur vmesto muziki (Confusion instead of music)?
asserting that ‘from the first minute the listener to The Lady Macbeth is
dumbfounded by a deliberately discordant, confused stream of sounds';
the music was ‘modernist formalism’ of the worst kind. The defining of
*socialist realism" was too serious a matter to be left to musicians; it was
taken over by a government Committee for Artistic Affairs. The
notorious modernist-formalist Mosolov, who made a public protest in a
Moscow restaurant on 31 January, was unanimously expelled from the
Union of Soviet Composers for drunken brawling, withdrew to Buryat-
Mongolia, and reappeared as a composer of simple, conservative
music only in 1939.

The opera publicly approved by Stalin and Molotov as a model
Soviet opera, eleven days before the Pravda condemnation of The Lady
Macbeth, was Tikhy Don (The Quiet Don) by Ivan Dzerzhinsky
(b. 1909).3 Based on Sholokhov's novel of Don Cossack life during the
1914 War and the Revolution, Tikhy Don was first produced in 1935 as
a result, ironically, of the help and encouragement of Shostakovich to
whom it is dedicated. Unlike earlier Soviet operas on similar subjects,
It is concerned with genuine characters who are typical of the masses
without being mere types; unhappily the simple lyrical score never
brings them to musical life. A few bars from the episode of the soldier
half-crazy from shellshock in Act III (Ex. 277) will not at all unfairly
illustrate the naive technique and dramatic impotence of the entire opera.

Apart from its wealth of rather undistinguished melody in a diluted
folk-song idiom, the merits of Tikhy Don are mostly negative; there is
no trace of any influence more modern than early Debussy; even

1A. Ostretsov, ‘Lady Macbeth Mtsenskovo uezda: opera Dmitriya Shostakovicha’,
Sovetskaya muzika (1933), no. 6, p. 9. For a much later Russian study of the opera, see
Iosif Rizhkin in Istoriya russkoy sovetskoy muziki, ii (Moscow, 1959), рр. 196 ff.

? Reprinted in Sovetskaya muzika (1936), по. 2, p. 4, the second article, ‘Baletnaya
falsh’, ibid. p. 6; translated excerpts from both in Gerald Abraham, Eight Soviet
Composers (London, 1943), pp. 25-26; longer excerpt from the first, Slonimsky, op. cit.,
p. 402.

3 On Tikhy Don and Dzerzhinsky's views on Soviet opera, see Abraham, op. cit., pp.
81 f., A. Budyakovsky, ‘Tikhy Don’ I. Dzerzhinskovo', Sovetskaya muzika (1935), no.
p. 11, 38, and Rizhkin, op. cit., ii, pp. 215 ff.

666 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

Ех. 277 |
[Slowly, march-like]

х= сшкш Е ВЕЕ- БН

slez-mi gor-Ki- mi ob-mo- yu.

no-zhen-

ki,

(Oh, have pity, I want to live, don’t destroy me, give me a hand, food, stretch out
your feet and ГЇЇ wash them with bitter tears.)

the reactionary Listnitskys, father and son, are not caricatured in
grotesque music. Dzerzhinsky also composed an opera on the sequel to
Sholokhov's novel, Podnyataya tselina (Virgin soil upturned) (1937)!
but neither this nor Dzerzhinsky’s later operas achieved success com-
parable with that of Tikhy Don.

The way pointed by Tikhy Don was followed by Oles Chishko

1See Budyakovsky, ‘Ivan Dzerzhinsky i evo opera Podnyataya tselina’, Sovetskaya
muzika (1937), no. 10-11, p. 44, and Rizhkin, op. cit., ii, pp. 227 ff.

SOCIALIST REALISM IN OPERA 667

(b. 1895) in Bronenosets Potemkin (The Battleship Potyomkin) (1937),!
Zhelobinsky in Mat (The Mother, after Gorky) (1938),? Leon Khodzha-
Eynatov (1904-54) in Myatezh (The Revolt, on a story by the “рго-
letarian’ Dmitry Furmanov) (1939) and Semya (The Family, based—
like Chishko's opera—on a film) (1940), and Tikhon Khrennikov
(b. 1913) in V buryu (In the Storm, based on Nikolay Virta's notable
novel Odinochestvo) (1939). Aesthetically similar to these, but re-
freshingly set in sixteenth-century Burgundy, is Kabalevsky's Master
iz Klamsi (The Master of Clamecy, based on Romain Rolland's
Colas Breugnon—by which name the opera has become generally
known) (1938),* a lyrical, if not very original, score with at least one
rounded, musically living character, Colas himself. But a greater
musician than any of these had been waiting for seven or eight years in
the wings; in 1940 he stepped on to the Soviet stage with a ballet and
an opera.

Prokofyev had always been the idol of ASM. In 1927, when he paid
his first visit to Russia after the Revolution, he was greeted as composer
and soloist with wild enthusiasm; and late in 1932, when the RAPM
reaction seemed to have been crushed, he decided to return permanently
and settle in Moscow. But at first he wrote relatively little:? mostly
incidental music or film-music—notably for Poruchik Kizhe (Lieutenant
Kizhe) (1933) and Aleksandr Nevsky (1938)—and, although he had
finished the ballet Romeo and Juliet in 1936, only concert suites from it
were performed. Now in January 1940 Romeo and Juliet was at last
produced and on 23 June his first Soviet opera Semen Kotko. It
aroused an immediate storm and was contrasted with Khrennikov's
V buryu very much as The Lady Macbeth had been with Tikhy Don.

V buryu has a great deal in common with Tikhy Don: the folk-song
idiom, relieved here and there by watered-down Tchaikovsky (in
scene 4), and the general weakness of characterization. But it is a better
Tikhy Don, less helpless technically and with little tonal twists that
relieve the melodic insipidity, as in Aksinya's song in scene 2:

1 бее Rizhkin, op. cit, ii, pp. 237 ff. and A. Steinberg, ‘Opera о “Втопеповізе
Potemkine" °’, Sovetskaya muzika (1937), no. 10-11, p. 55.

? See M. A. Grinberg, ‘Opera Mat V. Zhelobinskovo,’ Sovetskaya muzika (1939), по. 5,
p. 9, and Levit, op. cit., ii, pp. 241 ff.

3See Ivan Martinov, ‘Bratya—opera T. Khrennikova' (Bratya—Brothers—was the
original title), Sovetskaya muzika (1937), no. 10-11, p. 64, and ‘V buryu—T. Khrennikova’,
ibid. (1939), no. 11, p. 55, and Rizhkin, op. cit., ii, pp. 249 ff. On Virta's novel, see Gleb
Struve, 25 Years of Soviet Russian Literature (2nd ed., London, 1944), p. 281.

4 бее Abraham, op. cit, рр. 73 ff., L. Danilevich, ‘Master iz Klamsi’, Sovetskaya
muzika (1937), no. 12, p. 35, and Levit, op. cit., pp. 289 ff.

5 See infra, pp. 672. As early as 1934 he courageously drew attention to the danger of
Soviet music becoming ‘provincial’,

668 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

Ex. 278
Andante sostenuto
(The voice doubles the highest punt и
Raz-le-ta-lis so- ko - li vraz-ni - е sto-ro-nush-

(The falcons flew away to different lands, left and forgot the native nest.)

The action is laid in and around a Tambov village in 1921, with most of
the peasants at first uncertain whether to side with the Bolsheviks or
with Antonov's counter-revolutionaries. The drama of decision is
decided in the minds of the heroine Natasha (a passive character like
so many heroines in Russian opera), her lover (whose brother is already
a convinced Bolshevik) and her father, and has an emotional parallel in
the love-affair; but Khrennikov has no power to convey deep emotion.
An artificial high-light introduced in the version produced in 1939—it
does not occur in the unperformed original version of 1937—15 the visit
which Natasha's father and Listat, the Bolshevik brother, pay to Lenin
in Moscow (scene 5); this was Lenin's first appearance on the opera-
stage, but he was not allowed to sing; when he speaks the music stops.

Semen Kotko is a different matter. As early as 1933 Prokofyev had
expressed the wish to write an opera on a Soviet theme, ‘heroic and
constructive',! and he at last found this theme in a story by Valentin
Kataev. Like V buryu, it is a peasant drama of the Civil War, played out

1 Prokofyev, ‘Zametki’, Sovetskaya musika (1933), по. 3, p. 99.

SOCIALIST REALISM IN OPERA 669

in 1918 when the Communists in the Ukraine still had to contend with
German troops as well as the counter-revolutionaries. The characters
are not unlike those of Khrennikov's opera, but Prokofyev was far more
gifted and much better equipped. Instead of relying almost exclusively
on a song-based idiom, he commanded one compounded of melodic
and declamatory elements which enabled him to convey shades of
feeling and draw character with a subtlety, power and flexibility quite
beyond the range of his younger colleagues. Consider Remenyuk's
farewell to the bodies of his murdered comrades:

-se - Ју mat - ros . s Cherno- mor-sko-vo flo-ta. .

(My friend, Vasya Tsarev, merry sailor from the Black Sea Fleet—)

or compare the heart-rending lament of Tsarev's sweetheart, Lyubka,
out of her mind at his death, with Dzerzhinsky's half-mad soldier
(Еж, 2/7);

Ех. 280

EJS S К
КҤҮУВҮАГ@ Z-3)—.1—9.—D —42
[Wap —.9—— — 2,

670 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

Khiv ~ гуа, smi-luy-sya i za-stu - pi - суа!

(Lyubka: Doll without movement. .. Khivrya: May the holy martyr Khivrya
pardon and intercede!)

(The older woman, Khivrya, meanwhile comments in her own accents.)
There is plenty of strong, long-breathed diatonic melody, especially in
connexion with the hero Semyon Kotko; it is employed romantically in
the manner of Rimsky-Korsakov to set the mood of the summer night
and the three pairs of lovers at the beginning of Act III ;! here much of it
is related to Ukrainian folk-song, such as the *Rano ranenko' (Early
in the morning) melody heard as the second subject of the overture, the
wedding chorus in Act П, and sung by Semyon and his sweetheart,
Sofya, at the end of the opera. There is humour, as when Semyon
instructs the young partisans in manning a field-gun in Act IV, and in
the love affair of his young sister. The Germans are not caricatured but
characterized, as they had already been in Aleksandr Nevsky, by
viciously dissonant harmony. АП these qualities were widely recognized
at the time but they failed to save the opera: it quickly disappeared from
the repertory and was revived—in concert form—only іп 1958.?

SOCIALIST REALISM IN THE CONCERT HALL

The achievement of true socialist realism proved still more difficult
in symphonic music. Even Myaskovsky, who produced no fewer
than nine symphonies, Nos. 13 to 21, as well as a Violin Concerto,
during the period 1933-40, found it difficult to maintain the right
note. Nos. 14, 16, and 21 were considered the most satisfactory

! Quoted by Nestyev, Prokofyev (Moscow, 1957): English edition (London, 1960), p. 316.

2 The prolonged controversy about Kotko filled the Soviet musical press for some time
and is discussed in all the literature on Prokofyev. On this, and the work generally, see
particularly M. Sabinina, ‘Semen Kotko’ i problemi opernoy dramaturgii Prokofyeva
(Moscow, 1963).

SOCIALIST REALISM IN THE CONCERT HALL 671

but in his autobiography! he confessed to various backslidings into
subjectivism. But his ‘monumental’ Sixth was matched in 1932 by a
work of irreproachable orthodoxy by Shaporin.? As always with
Shaporin, the musical language is conservative yet he contrives to say
fresh things in it. The Symphony employs chorus, brass band, and piano
in addition to a large orchestra and is planned in four movements:
(1) introducing themes suggesting Russia's remote heroic past, in the
manner of Borodin, and recalling the heroic days of the more recent
past (Yablochko?); (2) a dance-scherzo; (3) a dark-coloured lullaby for
female chorus, which leads into (4) ‘Campaign’, a broad, powerful
movement that does indeed suggest ‘the movement of colossal human
masses’.® Six years later, in a much finer 'symphony-cantata' Shaporin
crystallized similar ideas and emotions around a cycle of poems by
Blok: Na pole Kulikovom (On the field of Kulikovo).* Here, as in the
symphonic cantata which at about the same time Prokofyev developed
from his Aleksandr Nevsky film music? and in the ‘oratorio’ Emelyan
Pugachev by Marian Koval (1907-71), heroes from Russia's past were
glorified, in two cases princely and patriotic, not revolutionary, heroes
who distinguished themselves against foreign invaders. The increasing
threat of Nazi Germany led to official encouragement of patriotic art.
Kulikovo and Aleksandr Nevsky are outstanding in a genre hitherto rare
in Russia: large-scale secular choral composition. In both works, as in
Koval’s, the choral scoring is very dull by Western standards; the choirs
sing almost entirely in solid harmony or unison, without contrapuntal
interest; the half-dozen bars of imitative writing in the ‘Lullaby’ of
Kulikovo are quite exceptional but the massive effects in the fourth and
last movements of Nevsky, and the first and third movements and
Epilogue of Kulikovo are splendid. There is a certain parallel between
the works as wholes; in each the fifth movement is a battle-scene and is
followed by a beautiful soprano solo, in one case a lament over the
Russian dead, in the other the reassuring lullaby of a Russian mother.

Symphonies and other orchestral works glorifying the Red Army or
more peaceful activities of the Soviet Union had already appeared:
Knipper's Symphonies, Nos. 3 (‘Far Eastern’) (1932), 4 (‘Poem of the

1*Avtobiograficheskie zametki о tvorcheskom рші, Sovetskaya muzika (1936), no. 6,
р. 3; reprinted in M. A. Grinberg (ed.), Sovetskaya simfonicheskaya muzika (Moscow,
1955), p. 20.

2 See Abraham, ор. cit., pp. 90 ff. On Shaporin generally, see Levit, Yury Aleksandrovich
Shaporin (Moscow, 1964).

ЗА. Ostretsov, 'Sovetskoe simfonicheskoe tvorchestvo', Sovetskaya muzika (1935), no. 4,
p. 19.

а See S. Skrebkov and V. Protopopov in Istoriya, ii, pp. 169 ff., and Abraham, op. cit.,
pp. 94 ff.

5 Skrebkov and Protopopov, ibid., pp. 163 ff., and Abraham, ibid., pp. 38 ff.

672 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

Fighting Komsomols’) (1934), 6 (dedicated to the Red Cavalry but ‘dry,
abstract and formalistic’) (1936) and 7 (‘Military’) (1938),! Polovinkin’s
Fourth Symphony (‘Red Army’) (1933), Steinberg’s Fourth (‘Turksib’)
(1933), Shebalin’s Fourth (‘Perekop’) (1935), Vasilenko's Red Army
Rhapsody (1938). Another group of works manifested the interest of
Russian composers in the native music of the non-Slavonic republics of
the U.S.S.R.,? which they were officially encouraged to visit—both to
study folk-lore and to stimulate the development of native art. As early
as 1927 Glier’s Azerbaydzhanian opera Shakh-Senem had been pro-
duced at Baku,? and about 1931-3 Knipper composed a series of
orchestral works on Tadzhik themes,* notably the suite Vanch,
Shekhter a Turkmenia suite, and the veteran Ippolitov-Ivanov various
Uzbek and Turkmenian ‘pictures’ and ‘fragments’ for orchestra. And
before long a native Armenian, Aram Khachaturyan (b. 1903), was to
appear with a Trio for piano, violin and clarinet (1932), a First
Symphony (1934), a First Piano Concerto (1936), a Violin Concerto
(1940),5 essentially Russian but coloured by the folk-music of Armenia
and Uzbekistan.

‘Pure’ orchestral music became rare after 1932. Kabalevsky’s First
Symphony (1932) was inspired by Gusev’s poem ‘The Year 1917’,
though his attractive Second—in three movements with a scherzo-finale
(1934)—and Khrennikov’s First (1936) are abstract works and so,
despite their conservative idiom, aroused little enthusiasm. As for
Popov’s First Symphony, not performed till 1935, it had been conceived
as early as 1927—in the high noon of sovremennost (‘contemporariness’)
—and was now condemned out of hand. Prokofyev, after devastating
adverse criticism of his Simfonicheskaya pesn (Symphonic Song)
(1933), his first composition after his return to his homeland, wrote a
Second Violin Concerto, in G minor (1935), but refrained at this period
from venturing on a symphony. Shostakovich was bolder but ran into
trouble. After a deliberately vulgar Piano Concerto (1933), in which a
solo trumpet plays a scarcely less important part than the piano, he
had made an almost wholly serious essay in pure instrumental music, a
Cello Sonata (1934), and followed this in 1936 with a Fourth Sym-

1 On these symphonies by Knipper, see Abraham, op. cit., pp. 55-60.

2 See infra, pp. 699—700.

з Оп Shakh-Senem see Ostretsov, ‘Shakh-Senem’, Sovetskaya muzika (1938), no. 2,
p. 45, and Rizhkin, Istoriya, i, pp. 165 ff.

*See Viktor Belyaev, ‘Tadzhikskie narodnie temi v syuite Vanch Г. Knippera’,
Sovetskaya muzika (1937), no. 4, p. 49.

5 On these works, see Abraham, op. cit., pp. 45 #., Georgy Khubov, Sovetskaya muzika
(1939), по. 9-10, p. 18, Martinov, ibid. (1938), no. 5, р. 26, and Tumanina, Istoriya, ii,
pp. 450 ff.

SOCIALIST REALISM IN THE CONCERT HALL 673

phony.! Like so much of Shostakovich's music, it is a mixture of styles—
to which, as will be apparent from the openings of the second move-
ment and slow introduction to the third (the finale):

Ex. 281
(i)

Moderato con moto

that of Mahler was now added. The concertino element of the Second
and Third Symphonies reappears in the first movement but there is little
of their revolutionary rhetoric. As with Mahler himself, an un-
mistakably personal utterance emerges from the heterogeneous musical
fabric. And the work ends with a faint question mark: against the very
long-held C minor triad of the strings and celesta, the solo trumpet
takes 18 bars to resolve its F sharp on G. The Fourth Symphony was on

1 See Г. Danilevich, Nash sovremennik: Tvorchestvo Shostakovicha (Moscow, 1965),
pp. 127 ff.

674 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

the eve of performance when the storm over The Lady Macbeth broke.
Shostakovich decided that it did not exemplify socialist realism in the
symphony and withdrew it; it was first heard in December 1962. Its
successor (1938) was described by Shostakovich himself as “а Soviet
artist's practical creative reply to just criticism’.+

The theme of my symphony is the stabilization of a personality. In the centre
of this composition—conceived lyrically from beginning to end—I saw a
man with all his experiences. The finale resolves the tragically tense impulses
of the earlier movements into optimism and joy of living.

Lyricism and the optimistic D major of the finale cancelled out the
subjective elements of the earlier movements. But the socialist realism
of the Sixth Symphony (1939) was more doubtful:? the slow first move-
ment was found too elegiac, the remaining two movements too noisy,
empty, and formalistic.

From this period also date two notable chamber-works by Shosta-
kovich, the Piano Quintet (1940) and the first (1938) of his series of
string quartets. Chamber music and solo piano music had flourished
briefly in the early days of socialist realism, though the piano music—
for instance, Shostakovich's Twenty-four Preludes (1932-3), Khacha-
turyan's Тосса а (1932), and Kabalevsky's Sonatinas, op. 13 (1930)--
tended to be technically less demanding, as if written for domestic use
rather than the concert-platform. In the field of solo song composers
conscious of the dangers of subjective expression turned to arrange-
ments of folk-song but no longer limited themselves exclusively to
Russia or the sister-republics: in 1933 both Anatoly Aleksandrov and
Feinberg published sets of ‘songs of the Western peoples’ (including a
number of Hebridean, Lowland Scottish, and English examples). Koval,
on the other hand, searched the Russian classics for socially significant
poems and published sets of Pushkin and Nekrasov songs: his
Pushkiniana (1934)? is a cycle of ten rather declamatory songs, inter-
spersed with readings from Pushkin's diaries and note-books. Koval was
a former ‘proletarian’ composer and one of his most lyrical Pushkin
songs may be instructively compared with one from the same period by
a former ‘contemporary’, Mosolov:

1 On Ше Fifth Symphony see particularly Khubov, ‘Pyataya simfoniya D. Shostakovicha’,
Sovetskaya muzika (1938), no. 3, p. 14, and Orlov, op. cit., pp. 62 ff.

2 Orlov as usual quotes and summarizes the contemporary criticisms, op. cit., рр. 102 ff.

3 See Shlifsteyn, ‘Pushkiniana M. Kovalya', Sovetskaya muzika (1937), no. 2, p. 42.

SOCIALIST REALISM IN THE CONCERT HALL 675

0) KOVAL

ие | Sh eS SS Е]

(Useless gift, chance gift; life, why art thou given me?)

MOSOLOV
Moderato
Dp

Vtvo - уш svet - li- tsu, drug moy nezh

676 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

(Into your little room, my tender friend, I come for the last time.)

The Pushkin centenary was also marked by the appearance of a
number of finely wrought settings of his more lyrical verse by Shaporin,
Aleksandrov and Feynberg. In particular Shaporin's five Pushkin songs,
op. 10 (1935), with his Dalekaya yunost (Far-off Youth) (1935-40)
and his Elegii, op. 18 (1945), despite the conservatism of their idiom,
entitle him by their poetic sensitivity and beautiful craftsmanship to a
place beside all but the greatest of Russian song-composers.

PROKOFYEV'S ‘WAR AND PEACE’

The outbreak of the ‘Great War for the Fatherland’ evoked a great
upsurge of patriotic feeling which found the most varied outlets of
musical expression: in great symphonic works, opera, and even ballet.
(Khachaturyan, for instance, drastically recast his first ballet, Schastye
(Happiness) (1939), with a fresh, bellicose scenario as Gayane (1942).)
Opera-composers drew inspiration first from national heroes of the past
--УавПепКо in Suvorov, Koval in Emelyan Pugachev (to whom he had
already dedicated an oratorio), Boris Mokrousov (b. 1909) in Chapaev
(all three produced in 1942)—later from heroic events in the German
war itself: Dzerzhinsky’s Krov naroda (The Blood of the People) (1942)
and Nadezhda Svetlova (1943), Kabalevsky’s Pod Moskvoy (Near
Moscow: also known as V ogne, In the Fire) (1943), Koval’s Sevas-
topoltsi (The Defenders of Sevastopol) (1946). Now and again, a com-
poser would be content to turn to a literary classic, as Viktor Trambitsky
did to Ostrovsky's Groza (The Storm) (1942) and Anatoly Aleksandrov
to Lermontov in Bela (produced 1946, but completed several years
earlier), but such operas were exceptional. Some of the war operas
proved hardly more than ephemeral; all were overshadowed by

PROKOFYEV'S 'WAR AND РЕАСЕ” 671

Prokofyev's Voyna i mir (War and Peace) (original version, 1943;
produced 1946).1

Tolstoy's novel seems an impossible opera-subject; its vast field of
vision, the multitude of fully conceived characters, above all that sense
of time passing and a whole generation of youth achieving maturity—
all this is beyond theatre, and music could add nothing to it. What
Prokofyev did was to extract on the one hand the principal characters,
and the personal tragedy of Andrey's love for Natasha and her seduction
by Kuragin, on the other the great set-pieces of 1812: the Battle of
Borodino, the council of war at Fili (one of the new scenes of the second
version), the burning of Moscow, and the French retreat. Indeed the
opera divides naturally into two parts. The first seven scenes are all
personal drama; at the end of the seventh, when Pierre has put Kuragin
to shame and flight, Denisov enters with the news that *Napoleon has
advanced his troops to our border’. After that, only in the wonderful
twelfth scene where Natasha comes to the dying Prince Andrey (and
Prokofyev gives a choral embodiment to ‘the soft, whispering voice’ of
his heart—Andrey did not know whether it was delusion or reality—
‘incessantly and rhythmically repeating ‘‘i-piti-piti-piti” °):

Ex. 283

Lento (J = 60)

Altos

1 The original version consisted of 11 scenes; only eight scenes were produced in 1946.
Prokofyev later made cuts but also substantial additions, including two completely new
scenes; 11 scenes of this version were crowded into one night in 1955, the complete 13-scene
form was produced only in 1957. On War and Peace, see particularly A. Khokhlovkina,
*Voyna i mir Sergeya Prokofyeva', Sovetskaya muzika (1946), no. 8-9, p. 15, Nestyev,
op. cit. (English ed.), pp. 445 ff. and Rizhkin, Istoriya, iii, pp. 211 ff.

678 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

г
:
Ш
3
j м
|
|
|
|
Li

(Why is it white by the door?)

PROKOFYEV’S ‘WAR AND PEACE’ 679

do we return to the personal drama. We see Pierre at the redoubt at
Borodino, arrested in captured Moscow, talking to the peasant
Karataev, rescued (not by Cossacks as in the book but by partizani),
but we do not apprehend what is going on in his heart and mind. The
hero is now the Russian people and Kutuzov, the embodiment of its
immanent will. Like other great Russian operas—Boris itself —Var and
Peace is a masterpiece not because of its wholeness but because of the
greatness of its parts.

The music is worthy of the subject. In this score, better than in any
other, Prokofyev showed how a great creative artist, denied total free-
dom of musical speech, may yet achieve unmistakably individual utter-
ance. Even his earlier works, written in the West, had shown a vein of
strong diatonic melody; he found this an ever valuable resource after his
return to Russia; and in War and Peace, as in Romeo and Juliet, he
achieves a cool classic beauty that is rare in Russian music. It is heard
straight away in the very first scene, as Andrey sits by the open window
at Otradnoe in the May moonlight, when the flute plays the melody—
borrowed from incidental music to a stage version of Eugene Onegin
(1936)—that is to be associated throughout with Natasha:

Ex. 284

Andante assai (4 = 66)

680 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

(Bright spring sky, is not this perhaps an illusion?)

At times the diatonic idiom is handled artlessly, as in Kutuzov's noble
but too Borodin-like monologue on Ше abandonment of ‘white-stoned
mother Moscow' after the council of war. Much more typical are the
harmonic twists and rhythmic energy that stamp Andrey's assurance to
Pierre before Borodino: “Вш I tell you: be that as it may, we shall win
this battle'. Even the big war scenes, spectacular as in Meyerbeer or
Wagner, remind one more of Mussorgsky than of ‘grand’ opera—in
many more details than the reading of the proclamation and the
appearance of the madmen in captured Moscow. Nothing even in
Mussorgsky is more moving than the scene of Andrey’s dying.

The first version of War and Peace was produced on 12 June 1946;
less than five months later (3 November) came another Prokofyev opera,
one that had been on the point of production five years before, when war
broke out: Obruchenie v monastire (Betrothal in a Priory: after
Sheridan’s Duenna).*In spite of his declared intention, Prokofyev allowed
the comic side, with its brilliantly subtle declamation and characteriza-
tion, to outweigh the lyrical music of the two pairs of lovers; the boozing
friars in scene 8 might have come from The Three Oranges. But the
lyrical vein is as unmistakably Prokofyev's here as in War and Peace;

good examples are the quartet at the end of scene 5 and Clara's aria in

1 For Prokofyev's own account of the inception of the work, see S. I. Shlifshteyn, S. S.
Prokofyev: materiali, dokumenti, vospominaniya (Moscow, 1956), p. 112; English version,
Moscow, n.d., р. 122). On the opera generally, see Nestyev, ор. cit., pp. 389 ff., and
Rizhkin, Istoriya, iv (1) (Moscow, 1963), pp. 408 ff.

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC, 1941-7 681

scene 7, and when Louisa is plotting with the Duenna in scene 2
Prokofyev contrives to write a purely diatonic love-theme in D flat
(Yes, I love so much that more I cannot love’) which yet avoids the
almost inevitable lusciousness associated with the key. Here again Ше
melody is cool and classic.

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC, 1941-7

Orchestral music no less than opera reflected the patriotic mood of the
war-period, sometimes directly, often by emphasis on the national
music of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union. (The wholesale
evacuation of composers first to Nalchik in the northern Caucacus, then
to Tbilisi (Tiflis), naturally heightened their interest in the national
musics. Thus Myaskovsky's Twenty-second Symphony (1941) was
styled 'Symphony-ballad of the Great War for the Fatherland’, the first
of its three connected movements depicting ‘peaceful life into which
breaks а menace’, while the other two were conceived as ‘Apprehending
the horrors of war’ and ‘And the enemy faltered’ (a reference to
Taneyev’s song, Op. 26, no. 8), while his Twenty-third (also 1941) was,
like Prokofyev’s Second String Quartet, based on Kabardinian themes.
Indeed one or two are common to both works and the contrasts in
treatment are striking:
Ex, 285
) _ MyasKovsxy

Piü appassionato (d = 72)
W.W. Vns. I, Celli -3
LS GE

(ii) PROKOFYEV
Allegro (J = 152) J

682 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

Prokofyev's other compositions of the war and immediate post-war
period included the ballet Zolushka (Cinderella) (produced 1945), the
Fifth and Sixth Symphonies (1944 and 1947), and his last three piano
sonatas. The symphonies and sonatas all belong more or less to the
musical world of War and Peace. This is particularly true of the ‘heroic’
Fifth Symphony, the opening of which might well be part of the
characterization of Andrey, while the second movement might have
served for the caricaturing of Napoleon and the D flat *Russian' theme
in the finale for the glorification of Kutuzov. Equally, the middle
movement of the Eighth Sonata (also 1944) would not be out of place in
the ball-scene. Neither the Fifth nor the Sixth Symphony has a pro-
gramme, but both were written under the impression of the war, present
or in retrospect.

The same is certainly true of the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies of
Shostakovich (1941 and 1943), while his Ninth (1945) presumably
reflects the high spirits of victory. Only the first movement of the
Seventh, the so-called Leningrad, is actually programmatic, the develop-
ment section being replaced by a long-drawn orchestral crescendo in the
manner of Ravel's Bolero—the major part of the movement—suggesting
the inexorable advance of the invading armies, while the recapitulation
brings back the material of the ‘peaceful’ exposition partly in the minor
and in mournful distortion; the beginning of the recapitulation is
marked by fff octave declamation by practically the entire orchestra in
the oratorical manner of the Third Symphony. But although the com-
poser had originally intended to give titles to all four movements—
‘War’, ‘Remembrance’, “The Wide Spaces of ош Land’, ‘Victory’+—he
suppressed them and later gave no more detailed clues than that the
second movement, with its echoes of Mahlers Ldndler? in the
‘humorous’ middle section, is “ап intermezzo, very lyrical, gentle—no
sort of programme, fewer “concrete facts" than in the first movement’,
and the third, ‘a pathetic adagio with a dramatic middle section’. In the
finale his intention was to compose ‘an Ode sounding from all the ends
of the earth and triumphantly growing’, a statement which has a more
Mahlerian ring than the music itself. Whatever the extra-musical ideas
underlying the Eighth Symphony, there can be no doubt of its relation-
ship to the Seventh, even though the relationship seems to be anti-
thetical. There are even thematic relationships; the very first entry of the
first violins broodingly takes up the opening of the ‘invasion’ theme of
the Seventh; the third movement is again concerned with cruel, in-

1 Shostakovich, ‘О podlinoy i mnimoy programmnosti’, Sovetskaya muzika (1951),
no. 5, p. 76.

2 Orlov, op. cit., p. 168, sees a relationship between the first part of the movement and
an episode in the finale of Das Lied von der Erde.

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC, 1941-7 683

human automata. But there is now no triumphant conclusion. The
Eighth Symphony is a tragic monument, one of Shostakovich's most
powerful and individual scores, but so pessimistic and couched in such
pungent harmonic terms that in 1948 it was, with Prokofyev's Sixth,
denounced as 'formalistic and both works disappeared from the
repertory for nearly ten years.

By comparison with these symphonic giants, Shostakovich's Ninth,
thrown off in a few weeks in August 1945, is a lightweight: short, scored
for a smaller orchestra, humorous but not without serious passages (for
instance, the obviously programmatic introduction to the finale). It is a
counterpart to Prokofiev's Classical and, like that work, may be
expected to outlive the Second Symphonies of Khachaturyan, Khren-
nikov and Popov (all 1943) or Muradeli's, *dedicated to the victory of
the Soviet people over Fascism' (1945).

Another significant stage in Shostakovich's career was now marked by
increasing preoccupation with chamber music. Before the war, he had—
after some juvenilia—produced only a decidedly eclectic Cello Sonata
(1934), a rather naive String Quartet, said to be based on memories of
childhood and youth (1938), and a fine, if suite-like Piano Quintet
(1940, but published only in 1956). The year 1944 brought a Piano
Trio and a Second Quartet, which is also rather naive and suite-like,
consisting of overture, recitative and romance, valse,! and theme with
variations. But with the Third Quartet (1946) Shostakovich first showed
his mastery of the medium and embarked on that series of compositions
which established him not only as the finest Soviet quartet-composer
but as also the most prolific.? (The ever-fertile Myaskovsky produced
six more quartets, nos. 7-12, during the period 1941-7.) Two other
Soviet string quartets of this period stand out: Kabalevsky's Second
(1945) and Shebalin's Fifth (1942). Kabalevsky's Quartet, like his
Second Piano Sonata (written in the same year), is dramatic and
thematically related to his operas V ogne and Semya Tarasa (Taras's
family). Shebalin's, the Slavonic, is based on Russian and Ukrainian
folk-themes in its first and fifth movements, Polish, Slovak and
Serbian tunes in the middle ones. (The Serbian theme of the fourth
movement is that on which Tchaikovsky based his S/avonic March.)
Shebalin further exploited the Russian folk-song vein with fine crafts-
manship in his Seventh Quartet (1948) and the variation-finale of
his Piano Trio (1949). Beside these established masters, a newcomer
appeared in this field: Shostakovich's pupil Yury Sviridov (b. 1915).

1 Recorded іп The History of Music in Sound, x.
? See L. Raaben, Sovetskaya kamerno-instrumentalnaya muzika (Moscow, 1963) and
Colin Mason, ‘Form in Shostakovich's Quartets’, Musical Times, сш (1962), p. 531,

684 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

Sviridov's two quartets, his Piano Quintet, and his Piano Trio all date
from 1945-6, although the Trio and Quintet were thoroughly revised
ten years later; as one might expect, they show the influence of his
teacher's Trio and Third Quartet—in more ways than their suite-like
structure—but also individual traits, indeed more of the latter than in
some of Sviridov's later, more highly praised works.

VOCAL MUSIC, 1941-7

The solo song was cultivated during these years more than might have
been anticipated. Naturally heroic, declamatory elements are prominent,
as in Anatoly Aleksandrov's cycle Tri kubka (Three goblets) (1942) and
Nechaev's O doblestyakh, o podvigakh, o slave (Of heroism, great deeds,
and fame) (1943). The nineteenth-century form of the narrative ballad
was also revived in art-song as well as mass-song; for instance, the
heroism of the airman Gastello was celebrated by both Viktor Bely
(‘Ballada o kapitane Gastello’) and Khachaturyan (‘Kapitan Gastello’).
The wartime alliance also evoked not only a great many arrangements
of English and Scottish folk-songs but also numerous original settings
of English and Scottish verse. Shostakovich led the way with his six
bass songs, op. 62 (1942), to translations of Shakespeare, Walter
Raleigh, and Burns, originally with piano, later with orchestral accom-
paniment; his attempt at Sonnet 66 must be one of the worst Shakes-
peare settings in existence, but he was more successful with Burns.
Indeed Burns (in Marshak's generally good translations) became a
favourite with other composers, including Khrennikov. But the Russian
classic lyric poets—Pushkin, Fet, Tyutchev—were not neglected, and
Shebalin composed a Heine cycle.

Yet the most remarkable solo vocal composition of the war years was
wordless: the Concerto for voice (coloratura soprano) and orchestra
(1943) by the veteran Glier. It is in two movements, a lyrical Andante and
a brilliant final valse or jota. The idiom is that of half a century earlier
but it is a true concerto, highly effective, and it has easily maintained a
place in the Russian concert repertoire.

Of the larger works for chorus and orchestra, the patriotic cantatas
and so-called oratorios, Kabalevsky's Rodina velikaya (The great
motherland) (1942), Myaskovsky's Kirov s nami (Kirov is with us)
(1943) and Shaporin's Skazanie o bitve za Russkuyu zemlyu (Story of the
fight for the Russian land) (1944)! are perhaps the best. They are
rhythmically square-cut, diatonic, with a preponderance of block
common chords: official art carried out with the technical competence

1 On these and other similar works, see Tumanina in Istoriya, iii, pp. 137 ff.

POLITICAL BACKGROUND AFTER 1947 685

and occasional flashes of real invention one expects of these composers,
but even Shaporin's Skazanie is far inferior to The Field of Kulikovo.

POLITICAL BACKGROUND AFTER 1947

While the works just mentioned, and many others, conformed
absolutely to the strictest demands of socialist realism, there were
some which did not. During the war the Soviet Government and the
Central Committee of the Communist Party had not been paying close
attention to literary and artistic orthodoxy and, with control thus
relaxed, writers and artists had insensibly begun to take liberties; the
old evils of ‘formalism’ and 'subjectivism' were creeping back. As early
as August 1946 the Central Committee had begun to worry about
literature and journalism, about the theatrical repertory, and about
films; and writers were sharply reminded that ‘there are not and cannot
be other interests than the interests of the people, of the state... . Hence
all preaching of that which has no idea-content, of the apolitical, of
*art for art's sake", is foreign to Soviet literature, harmful to the
interests of the Soviet people and state, and must have no place in our
journals’. Writers of the rank of Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were
coarsely abused in public speeches by the Committee's spokesman,
Andrey Zhdanov, and the Union of Composers did not fail to notice
the danger-signals.! But more than a year passed before the Committee
turned its attention to music. Just as in 1936, the immediate occasion
was a specific opera: this time Velikaya druzhba (The great friendship)
by the Georgian-born Vano Muradeli (1908-70), produced in Moscow
on 7 November 1947, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolu-
tion. The highest members of the Government and Party were present
and reacted precisely as they had done to The Lady Macbeth. Little
more than a month later (25 December) the performance of Prokofyev's
Sixth Symphony in Moscow made matters much worse. (It had been
acclaimed in Leningrad in October.) In January Zhdanov sternly
addressed a three-day conference of musicians in Moscow, from which
Myaskovsky absented himself? and on 10 February the Central Com-
mittee published its ordinance “Оп the opera ТЛе Great Friendship by
V. Muradeli',? which not only denounced Muradeli's work in terms
practically identical with those applied (with much less injustice) to The

1 See the unsigned article, "Problemi sovetskovo muzikalnovo tvorchestva’, Sovetskaya
muzika (1946), no. 8-9, p. 3, and the account of the week-long plenary meeting of the
organizing committee of the Union of Soviet Composers, ibid., no. 10, p. 3.

2 For a copious, though not quite complete, report of the conference, see Alexander
Werth, Musical Uproar in Moscow (London, 1949), pp. 47 ff.

3 Full translation of the resolution, Zhdanov's speech, and various statements by com-
posers in Slonimsky, op. cit., pp. 684 ff.; long excerpts, with commentary, in Werth,
Op. сії., pp. 28 ff.

686 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

Lady Macbeth and Clear Stream twelve years before but also attacked as
‘anti-national formalists’ the far more important composers Shostako-
vich, Prokofyev, Khachaturyan, Shebalin, Popov, and Myaskovsky.
From the composers' side, the official view was endorsed most en-
thusiastically by Khrennikov; some—notably Shebalin— defended
themselves with spirit or remained silent; the majority, including
Muradeli and Shostakovich, abased themselves and confessed their
errors.

The so-called ‘Zhdanov period’ lasted in its full rigour until the death
of Stalin—on the same day as Prokofyev—in March 1953. A slow ‘thaw’
then set in, officially acknowledged in 1956, though it was not until
18 May 1958 that the Central Committee published another resolution
‘correcting errors of evaluation’ in the ordinance of 1948, for which
‘J. V. Stalin’s subjective approach to works of art’ was blamed. Never-
theless this was no charter of liberty; those who had misread it in that
sense were put right by Khrushchev in March 1963.

OPERA: 1948-60

Muradeli’s The Great Friendship is a weak opera! and the accusations
of lack of memorable melody or true local colour were justified, but the
charges of ‘chaos’ and ‘continuous discord’ against so innocuous a
score were ludicrous. It contains no harmony more pungent than such
passages as this:

Ex. 286
Moderato

THE
COMMISSAR [— —Zi

1 See Rizhkin, Jstoriya, iv (1), pp. 327 ff.

OPERA: 1948-60 687

Ко slu-zhitdnyom i no - chyu,

SSS АЕ таш 2 | Ы,

^ PLN Г\ ^
[fe [uet pem Шш Dp шамы с 1

(the ploughman who bends over the plough, and the shepherd who works day
and night, the miner who all day follows his dark road underground,)

and a very great deal that is less. Perhaps the music was really considered
less objectionable than the libretto, which purported to show the
reconciling by a Political Commissar of (allegedly non-existent) enmity
between the Russians and Lesgians in the Northern Caucasus but con-
centrated instead on a romantic-melodramatic plot which would serve
equally well for a ‘Western’ film. It is historically important only for the
deathly hush that followed its condemnation. Prokofyev completed his

688 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

Povest o nastoyashchem cheloveke (The story of a real man) but it had
only one private concert performance in December 1948; it was not
produced till 1960, seven years after his death. Even the Semya Tarasa
of the more conservative and ‘correct’ Kabalevsky, which had been
tried out in Moscow in November 1947, was drastically rewritten
and produced in its revised form in 1950.! (Both these operas are
on war-subjects; Kabalevsky's depicting the patriotism of a worker's
family in a part of the Ukraine overrun by the Germans, Prokofyev's
the heroic will-power of an airman who overcomes the loss of his feet.)
In the operatic silence were heard only such small, quiet voices as that of
the Odessa-born Antonio Spadavecchia (Ъ. 1907), а former composition-
pupil of Shebalin and Prokofyev, with his Khozyayka gostinitsi (The
Hostess at the Inn) (based on Goldoni’s Locandiera) (1949), and Ше
official one of Khrennikov with his uninspired comedy Frol Skobeyev
(1950).

By far the most notable opera of the nineteen-fifties was Shaporin's
Dekabristi (The Decembrists), produced on 23 June 1953 after more
than a quarter of a century of gestation. The original conception had
been the personal drama of the young nobleman Annenkov, who has
brought back from the West liberal ideas and a French shopgirl,
Pauline, whom he is determined to marry—-despite his mother's violent
opposition. He is drawn into the Decembrist conspiracy and sentenced
to exile; at a masked ball Pauline was to plead in vain with the Tsar for
her husband's pardon and resolve to accompany him to Siberia. The
political events provided no more than a background except in two
scenes, the equivalents of the definitive fourth and sixth: the meeting on
the eve of the rising (a scene in which Annenkov's part was insignificant)
and the great spectacular scene in the Senate Square when the rising
collapsed. In this form the opera was nearly completed in 1938, with
only the Senate Square scene and the ball scene unwritten.? In the final
version Annenkov was supplanted by Shchepin-Rostovsky and Pauline
by Elena Orlova, the daughter of an impoverished neighbouring land-
owner. The personal drama remained the same, though the lovers lost
some beautiful music, but it was now pushed into the background of the
historical events. (Spadavecchia's Khozhdenie po mukam (1954), based
on А. М. Tolstoy's well-known novel of the Revolution, translated
under the title Darkness and Dawn, underwent a precisely similar
change.) The hero of the final version is no longer Annenkov/Shchepin
but the Decembrists collectively and, while it would be quite untrue to

! Tbid., pp. 283 ff.
2 See the account, with lengthy musical examples, by А. Lepin, ‘Dekabristi—opera Y.
Shaporina’, Sovetskaya muzika (1938), no. 7, p. 20.

OPERA: 1948-60 68

say that the Decembrist leaders are not differentiated, they are certainly
more important as a group than as individuals. Instead of a lyrical-
dramatic opera, Тре Decembrists thus became a series of historic
tableaux in the tradition of Prince Igor. (One would say ‘of Boris
Godunov’, if only there were one central character, hero or villain,
studied in depth, but neither Rileyev nor Pestel, nor Nicholas I, is so
studied.) Elena and Shchepin become hardly more important than
Musorgsky's Marina and Pretender-as-lover. Yet, granted this
dramatic weakness and the conservative nature of Shaporin's musical
idiom, the score contains far too many memorable things to be dis-
missed as mere epigonism: the beautiful folk-song chorus that opens the
first and last scenes, the arioso in which Shchepin tells his mother of
his love (Russian romantic lyricism at its best), Bestuzhev's song of the
winter road that ends scene 2, the polyphony of folk-songs sung by
four choral groups in the fair-scene:

Ex. 287
Allegro ma non troppo

ЗБС ат ЕТ ат
(отпадне ОР ee [eee eee =

[= зе — — ov mcn]

Sra ad 2o aa
chorus of gypsies 553 а ЕА

[2
First chorus Б А6 oep
[pc Lae) ee), el -Б------і

Ohpedsants) гс т сс]

- ra ved - га. Ы
СШ. =”. пре
лена ЕЕ
Da, p - mi = n -~ di
аи e ту zr Fes
ЕЕ = 7 ята

MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

690

LT LN m ( йй HN | Ili

cM |
сі
ШЕН

sho, kho-ro -

- ka, chtob
= = а
== Е-е 0]
| — = м
[=== — = NNNM
I] [Г — T cmn
EE
Ee

%
ОШ?

lo - shad - -
= ara ee]
ae Sa. ae, БЕЗДЕР
нардан жән
Sa a ы Ой Лг
- ИЕ НЫ]
kho-ro -

Гос ae)
а ғын)
| ан м
SS иа)
Ep ER
p - vo

ее

mo уа.

ms (Th 1
Еее ак пат
plor Io Wa Дена

DUE ROEONGEGUE ERG қоза” зару 1
sung ical
vo tsa =

йы: Ч |

OPERA: 1948-60 691

jeu cH

Gl ЕШ

ges SSS

Oy, do-rozh - ka, ar moy dal-niy, ve

ЕЕ ЕЕ: (==

- sho! Vi-no lush-(che evo!)

о 3
б = SS Е-е
(jt лид. ди БЕЛ s SET С р iz ur elem
н ) =т= ==
Е Б zz ==
6)

(Girls: Fly, my horse, so the wind doesn't catch you! Stesha: Hoi, little road,
my distant мау... Chorus I: Hey, beer is good! Wine's better! Chorus II: Yes, they
mentioned in the pot-house!)

the broad, massive handling of the spectacular scene in the Senate
Square, the waltz (worthy of Tchaikovsky) to which the Emperor
pursues Elena at the ball. No other Soviet opera comes so near to
challenging War and Peace on its own ground.

The diatonic melody and harmony which came naturally to Shaporin
were cultivated deliberately, in conformity with the Party directive, but
with much less technical skill, by the younger men: Dzerzhinsky in
Daleko ot Moskvi (Far from Moscow) (1954) and Groza (Ostrovsky's
Storm) (1956), Kabalevsky in Nikita Vershinin (1955), Kirill Molchanov
(b. 1922) in Kamenniy tsvetok (The Stone Flower) (1954, and therefore
after the composition but before the production of Prokofyev's ballet on
the same subject), Zarya (The Dawn) (1956), and Ulitsa del Korno
(Del Corno Street) (1959), and Khrennikov in Mat (The Mother, after
Gorky) (1956), Even the best Soviet composers failed in the struggle for
unnatural simplicity. Shostakovich’s ‘musical comedy’ with spoken
dialogue, Moskva, Cheremushki (1958), is banal beyond belief, and
Prokofyev’s Story of a Real Man, when it was produced at last post-
humously in 1960, only showed that his avowed striving for ‘clear

692 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

melodies and the simplest harmonic language possible'! could some-
times be fatal in his case, too. Only. here and there for a few bars, as in
no. 14 when old Mikhaylo tells how the maimed Aleksey has dragged
himself along:

Ex. 288
Allegro Е

ЕЕЕ
| 4 Жет хасан

MIKHAYLO 08-456

B MU MEM
ka - tit- sya, go- vo-ryat re - bya - ta.

# SS ee 2
eo ЕЕ----
Sr й

(And so it goes, so it goes, as children say.)

is there any hint of the old Prokofyev. Indeed there is more of ‘the old
Prokofyev’ in Shebalin's often witty Ukroshchenie stroptivoy (The
Taming of the Shrew) (1957).

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC: 1948-60

The Party resolution of 1948 had similar effects in the field of instru-
mental music; works that might have incurred the charge of formalism
were laid aside and composers cultivated simple diatonic melody and
harmony. Major instrumental composition, so liable to formalistic
lapses, was indeed largely superseded for a time by the writing of
cantatas and ‘oratorios’ with ideologically irreproachable texts.

1 Quoted by Nestyev, op. cit., p. 403.

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC: 1948-60 693

Shostakovich temporarily suppressed his Violin Concerto (com-
posed in 1948 as Op. 77) and his Fourth Quartet (1949), and com-
posed a banal ‘oratorio’, Pesn o lesakh (Song of the Forests) (1949) and
Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues for piano (1950-1) in emulation of
Bach. Another field much cultivated during this period of enforced
innocence was that of music for children—not so much for children to
perform as for children to listen to: Kabalevsky's concertos for violin,
cello and piano, Opp. 48-50 (1948-9), Prokofyev's Zimniy koster
(Winter Bonfire) for readers, chorus of boys, and orchestra (1949), and
Shostakovich's Concertino for two pianos (1953). Even Prokofyev's
Seventh Symphony (1952), a lyrical and rather weak work, was originally
conceived as а ‘symphony for children’ and Shostakovich's Second
Piano Concerto (1957) were products of the same impulse. Not un-
naturally, the stronger creative talents show to less advantage within
such limitations than composers whose more modest powers needed
less restraint. Kabalevsky's Violin Concerto is a charming little work
with an andantino melody in the middle movement worthy of
Tchaikovsky himself:

Ex. 289

Andantino cantabile

whereas the corresponding theme in Shostakovich's Second Concerto
sounds like Baroque pastiche:

Ex. 290
Andante

1 See S. Skrebkov, ‘Prelyudii i fugi D. Shostakovicha’ Sovetskaya muzika (1953), по. 9, p.
18, and V. Protopopov, Istoriya, iv (2), (Moscow, 1963), pp. 190 ff.

694 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

The second subject of Kabalevsky's finale has an appropriate affinity
with the song of Nastya and the Komsomols in Act I of Semya Tarasa:

Ex. 291
Moderato

i 270
МАЅТҮА и БЕ

Sdru- zya-mi ras-sta- va - lis mi, bit mo- zhet na-vseg-

Vivace giocoso

VIOLIN
CONCERTO

- da. Pro-shchay-te, dru - zya, u- kho- dit po - ra!

-— ет.

(We part with friends, perhaps for ever. Farewell, friends, it's time to leave!)

Stalin was no sooner dead than Shostakovich embarked on a Tenth
Symphony, written during the summer of 1953 and performed in
December. Judged by purely musical criteria, it is arguably the finest of
all his symphonies, stamped from beginning to end with his creative
personality and free both from the cheaper forms of grotesque humour
which intrude so often in his best scores and from concessions to official
conservatism. Such a work was bound to attract the charge of ‘formal-
ism', and few new symphonies can have been debated so fiercely and
immediately by the composer's colleagues as this.! The Symphony
manifestly has no quasi-literary programme but it is equally certainly
not abstract music; it is not so much ‘formalistic’ as ‘subjective’ and
‘pessimistic’, which, from the Marxist point of view, is just as bad. That

! See Orlov, op. cit., pp. 249 ff., for particulars and references.

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC: 1948-60 695

much of the Symphony is in some sense tragic is hardly deniable; the
problems that agitated Shostakovich's colleagues were whether the
tragedy was personal or national (still the aftermath of the war) and
whether the tragedy might be regarded as ‘overcome’ in Ше end.! In the
perspective of ten years, the authors of the official History of Russian
Soviet Music? were able to sum up in 1963:

The tragic element in Shostakovich, particularly in his later works, is
optimistic in tendency. He seeks a way to overcome a tragic beginning. His
humanistic ideals as a Soviet artist, loving life and freedom, fighting for peace
and happiness, cannot fail to lead him to life-affirmation. It is possible to
argue about this or that degree of artistic conviction and about the forms in
which the tragic is overcome in Shostakovich's works—arguments which
still continue in musical criticism—but there can be no doubt of the general
effort to overcome tragedy.

‘Optimistic tragedy’ is a phrase commonly met with in Soviet criticism;
both Shaporin's Decembrists and Kabalevsky's Тагазз Family are
*optimistic tragedies'. But Shostakovich was taking no chances with his
next two symphonies, No. 11 (1957) and No. 12 (1961), which are both
programmatic—with programmes beyond political reproach—and,
particularly No. 12, written in a musical idiom comprehensible to mass-
audiences. Each is dedicated to a revolution. The four movements of
No. 11 (entitled The Year 1905) are headed “The Palace Square’ (i.e. in
Petersburg), ‘9 January’, ‘Eternal Memory’, and ‘Tocsin’, and
Shostakovich has based most of the score on revolutionary tunes of the
period,? not simply quoting and varying them, but sometimes even fus-
ing them into fresh entities. Thus the melodic line of the horns just
before fig. 107 in the third movement is derived partly from the song
‘Baykal’, partly from ‘Boldly, comrades, keep in step’. The funeral-
march third movement is based mainly on the song, ‘Vi zhertvoyu pali
(You fell as a sacrifice), which was solemnly sung by Lenin and his
companions in exile when they heard the news of ‘Bloody Sunday’,* and
the title of the finale almost certainly refers to his article ‘Revolution in
Russia’ in the émigré journal Vpered on 11 January 1905. Мо. 12 is a
companionpiece, The Year 1917, with movements entitled ‘Revolution-
ary Petrograd’, *Razliv (where Lenin lay low before the October
Revolution), *The Aurora' (the cruiser which dealt the decisive blow to
the Provisional Government), and “Тһе Dawn of Humanity. The

1 бее, for instance, Andrey Volkonsky, 'Optimisticheskaya tragediya’, Sovetskaya
muzika (1954), no. 4, p. 25.

2 Istoriya, iv (2), p. 145.

3See Orlov, op. cit, рр. 286 ff, and L. Lebedinsky, ‘Revolyutsionniy folklor v
Odinnadtsatoy simfonii D. Shostakovicha', Sovetskaya muzika (1958), no. 1, p. 42.

5 М. К. Krupskaya, Vospominaniya о Lenine (Moscow), 1957, p. 89 (quoted by Orlov,
ор. cit., р. 303).

696 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

Thirteenth Symphony (1962), on poems by Evtushenko, is less a
symphony than a cantata for baritone, male chorus and orchestra,
while the Fourteenth (1969), settings of Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire,
Küchelbecker and Rilke for soprano, bass and orchestra, is no more—
but no less—a symphony than Mahler's Lied von der Erde.

But the best of Shostakovich at this time was put, not into the
symphonies (with the exception of the Tenth) but into the Cello
Concerto (1959)—inspired, like Prokofyev's Sinfonia concertante for
cello and orchestra (1952, but a reworking of material from the Cello
Concerto of 1938), by the playing of Mstislav Rostropovich—and the
string quartets from: No. 4 onward. The Fourth Quartet itself was
written soon after the outstanding song-cycle From Hebrew Folk Poetry
(1948) and both are related, either thematically or emotionally, to the
Piano Trio of 1944, the finale of which is said to have been inspired by
the discovery of the Jewish death-camp at Majdanek. Rabinovich says!
that both the Fourth and Fifth Quartets were ‘composed in the same
atmosphere of thoughts and emotions in which the future Tenth
Symphony took form’ and ‘perhaps, either directly or indirectly, pre-
pared the way for it'. They are even related thematically, and stamped
as essentially ‘personal’ works, by the appearance іп all three, in various
permutations and transpositions, of the notes О-Ер-С-ВҢ representing
the composer's initials *D.Sch. (Sch being the German translitera-
tion of the single Russian letter which begins his surname) a motive
that was to appear again in the concertos for violin and cello, and in
other works. One can trace no similar connexion between the later
quartets and symphonies. The Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies are
public utterances; the quartets are intensely personal and subtle in
workmanship. This is particularly true of No. 8 (1960), with its
numerous references to the ‘D. Sch.’ theme, prominent from the very
beginning, and quotations from the composer's earlier works?—the
opening of the First Symphony near the very beginning, and the
second subject of the finale of the Piano Trio in the second movement
(p. 9 of the miniature score)—as well as the revolutionary song
‘Zamuchen tyazheloy nevoley' (‘Worn out by heavy slavery’) and а
passage from The Lady Macbeth in the middle of the fourth movement.

The other older composers continued to produce in their familiar
veins. Kabalevsky’s Fourth Symphony (1956), Shebalin’s Seventh,
Eighth and Ninth Quartets (1948, 1961 and 1963) and Fifth Symphony
(1962), Knipper’s Symphonies 10-14 (1946-54), Aleksandrov’s Piano
Sonatas 9-11 (1946-55) are all well-written works, with fine passages

! D, Rabinovich, Dmitry Shostakovich (London, 1959), p. 129.
? Keldish, “Ап Autobiographical Quartet’, Musical Times, cii (1961), p. 226.

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC: 1948-60 697

(e.g. the Andante of Shebalin's Seventh Quartet), which neverthe-
less add nothing essential to the composers' images. Khachaturyan's
colourful ballet Spartak (Spartacus) (1954; produced 1956) is no
more than a counterpart of Gayane. Nor can it be said that the
generation born just before or not long after the Revolution brought
forth anything startlingly new. There have been some very success-
ful works: Rodion Shchedrin's ballet Konek-Gorbunok (The little
humpbacked horse) (1955), the ‘oratorios’, Pamyati Sergeya Esenina
(In memory of Esenin) (1955) and Pateticheskaya oratoriya (Pathetic
Oratorio) (1959) by Sviridov, and Dvenadtsat (Blok's ‘The Twelve’)
(1957) by Vadim Salmanov (b. 1912). But neither in these nor in
the orchestral works of Andrey Eshpay (b. 1925) and Boris Chaykovsky
(b. 1925)—to name the best composers of their generation—is there
much, if anything, that could not have been written half-a-century,
even a century, earlier. Consider, for instance, the theme of the
storm-wind which not only opens Salmanov's The Twelve but plays an
important part throughout:

Chorus

Orch.

698 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

ре —— — —]

Ин ПЕН Е 7 ING ПЕСНЕЙ с е2

D. — — —— Iesum ES es cos
[ C я 00 Он

(Black evening, White snow.)

However, Salmanov has since been influenced by Bartók and his Third
String Quartet (1960) 15 “ап attempt to fit certain twelve-tone techniques
into а modal framework.! Another composer who showed dangerously
modern tendencies was Galina Ustvolskaya (b. 1919), a Shostakovich
pupil who has written a number of sonatas for piano and various
instruments.

1 Boris Schwarz, ‘Soviet Music since the Second World War’, Musical Quarterly, li (1965),
р. 277.

THE AVANT-GARDE 699
THE AVANT GARDE

А genuine avant-garde, employing twelve-note and aleatory tech-
niques, emerged when the composers born during the 1930s came to
maturity thirty years later. They even managed to get a respectful
hearing for some of their work. When Andrey Volkonsky (b. 1933)
first performed in public his twelve-note piano suite Musica Stricta
(1957) it was dismissed as ‘fashionable experiment and nothing тоге”!
but his later work won toleration though not official approval. Born
in Geneva of émigré parents, Volkonsky had studied as a child
with Nadia Boulanger; but he made his home in Russia and com-
pleted his studies in Moscow under Shaporin. He first attracted
attention with a setting of Paul Eluard's Poémes pour la paix for mezzo-
soprano, chorus, organ, and orchestra (1952) and a Piano Quintet
(1955). By 1962 he was writing a Game in Three for violin, flute, and
harpsichord, suggested by Stockhausen's Kreuzspiel. Aleatory works
by other composers followed: for instance, the Dialogi for wind quintet
(1964) by Sergey Slonimsky (b. 1932), which employ both aleatory and
serial techniques, and the Crescendo e diminuendo for twelve strings and
kettledrum (1965) of Edison Denisov (b. 1929). A more important
work of Denisov's is Soleil des Incas, a cantata for soprano and eleven
solo instruments on a text by Gabriela Mistral (1964). Other leading
composers of this avant-garde, whose works are publicly performed and
seriously discussed, are Boris Tishchenko, a pupil of Ustvolskaya,
Salmonov, and Shostakovich, Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937), and two
Estonians, Arvo Раагї (b. 1935) and Kuldar Sink (b. 1942). Sink has
experimented with both electronic music and musique concréte.

MUSIC IN THE NON-RUSSIAN REPUBLICS

The interest taken by Russian musicians such as Glier and Ippolitov-
Ivanov (in the nineteen-twenties) and Myaskovsky and Prokofyev
(during the War) in the music of the Caucasian peoples of the Soviet
Union has already been mentioned. Such interest was not in itself new,
of course; but it was of a different nature from the interest of nineteenth-
century tourists like Balakirev and Taneyev.? The Soviet Government
from the very early days attached great importance to the stimulation
of the native arts in the Asiatic republics of the Union, and Russian

musicians and musicologists were sent to study their folk-musics? and

1 Vaclav Kucera, Nové proudy v sovetské hudbé (Prague, 1967), p. 19.

? Taneyev’s study of Kabardinian folk-music, ‘О muzike gorskikh Tatar’, is printed in
V. Protopopov (ed.), Pamyati 5.1. Taneeva: 1856-1946 (Moscow, 1947), р. 195, with
Belyaev's commentary, ibid., p. 212.

3 The results have been published in such monographs as Viktor Uspensky and Viktor
Belyaev, Turkmenskaya muzika (Moscow, 1928), and Belyaev, Ocherki po istorii muziki
narodov SSSR, i and ii (Moscow, 1962 and 1963).

700 MUSIC IN THE SOVIET UNION

foster the development of more ambitious musical forms on the basis of
folk-art. Such works as Glier's operas Shakh-Senem (Baku, 1927),
Leyli i Medzhnun (Tashkent, 1940) and Gyulsara (Tashkent, 1949) —the
last two in collaboration with the Uzbek composer, Talib Sadikov
(b. 1907)—and Knipper's orchestral suites Vanch (on Tadzhik themes)
(1937), Turkmenskie eskizi (Turkmenian sketches) (1940), and Kurumkan
(on Buryat-Mongolian themes) (1948), are essentially different from
nineteenth-century Russian essays in orientalism; they are attempts to
provide models for authentic Caucasian or Central Asian art-music.
Conversely Caucasian composers—the Armenian Khachaturyan is the
outstanding example—have settled in Russia and, without sacrificing
their native accents, made notable contributions to Russian music.
Others, such as the Georgian, Andrey Balanchivadze (b. 1906), himself
the son of a composer (Meliton Balanchivadze, 1862-1937), the
Azerbaidzhanian Kara Karaev (b. 1918), a pupil of Shostakovich, the
Armenian Eduard Mirzoyan (b. 1921) and the Georgian Sulkhan
Tsintsadze (b. 1925), have preferred to stay in their native lands. The
piano concertos of Balanchivadze and the string quartets of Tsintsadze
have won popularity all over the U.S.S.R.

Even the Ukraine has produced composers who have followed
Mikola Lisenko (1842-1912) in refusing to allow themselves to be
swallowed by Great Russian culture—notably Boris Lyatoshinsky
(b. 1895), Mikhail Verikovsky (b. 1896), and Gleb Taranov (b. 1905).
But Ukrainian musical nationalism is perhaps a dying cause.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The bibliography for Chapters III and V is by John Arnn, and for Chapter VI by
Lewis Foreman

GENERAL

ABRAHAM, GERALD: 4 Hundred Years of Music (London, 3rd ed., 1964).

ADORNO, T. W.: Philosophie der Neuen Musik (Tübingen, 1949).

AUSTIN, W. W.: Music in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1966).

BAUER, MARIAN: Twentieth-Century Music (New York, 1933).

CALVOCOREZSSI, M. D.: Musicians’ Gallery (London, 1933).

CARNER, Mosco: A Study of Twentieth-Century Harmony (London, 1942).

COOPER, MARTIN: French Music (From the death of Berlioz to the death of Fauré)
(London, 1951).

Совтот, ALFRED: La Musique francaise de piano (Paris, three vols., 1930, 1932 and
1944).

DUNWELL, WILFRID: The Evolution of Twentieth-Century Harmony (London,
1960).

Dyson, GEORGE: The New Music (London, 1924).

HARTOG, EDWARD (ed.): European Music in the Twentieth Century (2nd ed., London,
1961).

Lissa, ZóriA: ‘Geschichtliche Vorform der Zwólftontechnik', Acta Musicologica,
vii (1935).

MELLERS, WILFRID: Caliban Reborn: Renewal in Twentieth-Century Music (London,
1968).

— Studies in Contemporary Music (London, 1947).

MERSMANN, Hans: Die moderne Musik seit der Romantik (Potsdam, 1931).

Musik der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1923).

MITCHELL, DONALD: The Language of Modern Music (London, 1963).

Myers, Кото: Modern French Music (Oxford, 1971).

—Twentieth-Century Music (2nd ed., London, 1968).

ROHOZINSKI, L. (ed.): Cinquante ans de musique francaise (Paris, 1925).

SCHOENBERG, ARNOLD: Style and Idea (New York, 1950).

SLONIMSKY, NICOLAS: Music since 1900 (New York, 4th ed., 1972).

SOUVTCHINSKY, PIERRE: Musique russe (Paris, 1953).

STEIN, ERWIN: Orpheus in New Guises (London, 1953).

STEPHAN, RUDOLF: Neue Musik (Gottingen, 1958).

STUCKENSCHMIDT, H. H.: Twentieth-Century Music (London, 1969).

Twentieth-Century Composers. In 5 vols.:

Vol. 1 American Composers since 1910. By Virgil Thompson.

—— Vol. 2 Germany and Central Europe. By Н. Н. Stuckenschmidt (1970).

WEBERN, ANTON: Wege zur neuen Musik (Vienna, 1960).

WELLESZ, Есом: Die neue Instrumentation (Berlin, two vols., 1928 and 1929).

WoOrNER, KARL H.: Musik der Gegenwart (Mainz, 1949).

— —Neue Musik in der Entscheidung (Mainz, 1954).
46

702 BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTERS I AND II

THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF ROMANTICISM and THE REACTION AGAINST
ROMANTICISM: 1890-1914

(1) General

Вовомі, Ferruccio: Von der Einheit der Musik (Berlin, 1922; English translation,
London, 1957).

LANDORMY, PAUL: La Musique française de Franck à Debussy (Paris, 1943).

LENORMAND, RENÉ: Etude sur l'harmonie moderne (Paris, 1913; English translation,
London, 1915).

ROLLAND, ROMAIN: Musiciens d'aujourd'hui (Paris, 1908).

(1) Individual Composers (books and articles dealing with their non-operatic works
of the period 1890—1914)

Bartok

‘Bartok’ numbers of Musikblatter des Anbruch (1921) and Tempo (1949-50).

Mason, Coun: *Bartók's Rhapsodies’, Music and Letters, xxx (1949).

—— — Bartók's Early Violin Concerto’, Tempo, 49 (1958).

—‘Bartok’s Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra’, Tempo, 65 (1963).

Мшл, EDWIN von DER: Béla Bartók: Ein Beitrag zur Morphologie der neuen
Musik (Halle, 1930).

STEVENS, HALSEY: The Life and Music of Béla Bartók (New York, 2nd ed., 1964).

— ‘Some “Unknown” Works of Bartók’, Musical Quarterly, lii (1966).

Uirarussv, 7075ЕЕ: Bartók (Budapest, 1965; English translation, Budapest, 1971).

Berg |

CHADWICK, NICHOLAS: *Berg's Unpublished Songs in the Ósterreichische National-
bibliothek’, Music and Letters, lii (1971).

LEIBOWITZ, RENÉ: ‘Alban Berg's Five Orchestral Songs, Ор. 4, Musical Quarterly,
xxxiv (1948).

REDLICH, HANs F.: Alban Berg: Versuch einer Würdigung (Vienna, 1957; English
condensation, London, 1957).

Reicu, Милл: Alban Berg (Vienna, 1937).

——Alban Berg: Leben und Werk (Zürich, 1963; English translation, London,
1965).

STUCKENSCHMIDT, Н. H.: ‘Debussy or Berg? The Mystery of a Chord Progression’,
Musical Quarterly, li (1965).

Busoni

‘Busoni’ numbers of Musikblatter des Anbruch (1921) and Rassegna musicale (1940).

DEBUSMANN, Еми.: Ferruccio Busoni (Wiesbaden, 1949).

DENT, EDWARD J.: Ferruccio Busoni: a Biography (Oxford, 1933).

LEICHTENTRITT, HuGo: ‘Ferruccio Busoni’, Music Review, vi (1945).

Зику, LARRY: ‘The Six Sonatinas for Piano of Ferruccio Busoni’, Studies in
Music (Perth, Western Australia), ii (1968).

STUCKENSCHMIDT, Н. H.: Ferruccio Busoni, Zeittafel eines Europäers (Zürich, 1967;
English translation, London, 1970).

VLAD, Roman: ‘Busoni’s Destiny’, Score, 7 (1952).

Chausson

BARRICELLI, PIERRE, and WEINSTEIN, LEO: Ernest Chausson: the Composer's Life and
Works (Norman, Oklahoma, 1955).

*Chausson' number of Revue musicale (1925).

BIBLIOGRAPHY 703

Debussy

D'ALMENDRA, JULIA: Les Modes grégoriens dans l'oeuvre de Claude Debussy (Paris,
1948).

BRAILOU, CONSTANTIN: ‘Pentatony in Debussy's Music’, Studia Memoriae Bélae
Bartók Sacra (3rd ed., London, 1959).

DAWES, FRANK: Debussy: Piano Music (London, 1969).

*Debussy' numbers of Revue musicale (1920, 1926, 1964).

FISCHER, KURT Мом: ‘Bemerkungen zu den zwei Ausgaben von Debussys Ariettes
oubliées’, Symbolae Historiae Musicae (Federhofer Festschrift), (Mainz, 1971).

GERVAIS, FRANÇOISE: Debussy et l'évolution de la musique au XXe siècle (Paris, 1965).

GRUBER, GERNOT: ‘Zur Funktion der “primären Klangformen" in der Musik
Debussys’, Symbolae Historiae Musicae (Mainz, 1971).

JAKOBIK, ALBERT: Die assoziative Harmonik in den Klavier-Werken Claude Debussys
(Würzburg, 1940).

JANKÉLÉVITCH, VLADIMIR: Debussy et le mystére (Neuchátel, 1949).

KOECHLIN, CHARLES: Debussy (Paris, 1927).

KorscH, Hans F.: Der Impressionismus bei Debussy (Düsseldorf, 1937).

1ле55, ANDREAS: Claude Debussy: das Werk im Zeitbild (Strasbourg, 1936).

———Claude Debussy und das deutsche Musikschaffen (Würzburg, 1939).

— —'L'harmonie dans les oeuvres de Claude Debussy’, Revue musicale (1931).

LOCKSPEISER, EDWARD: Debussy (revised edition, London, 1951).

— Debussy: his Life and Mind (two volumes, London, 1962 and 1965).

MELLERS, WILFRID: “Тһе Later Work of Claude Debussy’, in Studies in Contemporary
Music (London, 1947).

NicHoLs, ROGER: *Debussy's Two Settings of “Саш de lune
xl (1967).

PHILLIPS, C. HENRY: “Тһе Symbolists and Debussy’, Music and Letters, xiii (1932).

SCHAEFFNER, ANDRE: ‘Debussy et ses rapports avec la musique russe’, in Musique
russe, i (ed. P. Souvtchinsky) (Paris, 1953).

SCHMITZ, ROBERT: The Piano Works of Claude Debussy (New York, 1950).

Ѕтовв, ILSE: Untersuchungen zur Auflösung der funktionaler Harmonik in den
Klavierwerken von Claude Debussy (Cologne, 1967).

STUCKENSCHMIDT, H. H.: *Debussy or Berg? The Mystery of a Chord Progression',
Musical Quarterly, li (1965).

VALLAS, LEON: Claude Debussy et son temps (Paris, 1932; English translation,
London, 1933).

— — Les Idées de Claude Debussy, musicien français (Paris, 1927; English translation,
1929).

Delius

ABRAHAM, GERALD: 'Delius and his Literary Sources', in S/avonic and Romantic
Music (London, 1968).

BEECHAM, THOMAS: Frederick Delius (London, 1959).

Cooke, Оевуск: ‘Delius and Form: a Vindication’, Musical Times, сш (1962).

‘Delius’ number of Tempo (1952).

HESELTINE, PHILIP: Frederick Delius (revised ed., London, 1952).

HOLLAND, А. K.: The Songs of Delius (London, 1951).

HUTCHINGS, ARTHUR: Delius (London, 1948).

PALMER, CHRISTOPHER: ‘Delius and Poetic Realism’, Music and Letters, li (1970).

—— —'Delius, Vaughan Williams and Debussy’, Music and Letters, 1 (1969).

PAYNE, ANTHONY: ‘Delius’s Stylistic Development’, Tempo, 60 (1961).

Dukas
*Dukas' number of Revue musicale (1936).
FAVRE, GEORGES: Paul Dukas: sa vie — son oeuvre (Paris, 1948).

LEES

, Music and Letters,

704 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Elgar

DANN, Mary, G.: ‘Elgar’s Use of the Sequence’, Music and Letters, xix (1938).
*Elgar' number of Music and Letters (1935).

KENNEDY, MICHAEL: Elgar: Orchestral Music (London, 1970).

МСУЕАСН, Diana M.: Edward Elgar: his Life and Music (London, 1955).
Maine, Basi: Elgar: his Life and Work (London, 1933).

Falla -

MAYER-SERRA, OTTO: ‘Falla’s Musical Nationalism’, Musical Quarterly, xxix (1943).

РАНІЅЅА, JAIME: Vida y obra de Manuel de Falla (Buenos Aires, 1947; English
translation, 1954).

TREND, J. B.: Manuel de Falla and Spanish Music (London, 1930).

—— "Manuel de Falla in Arabia", Music and Letters, iii (1922).

Fauré

*Fauré' numbers of Revue musicale (1922) and Monthly Musical Record (1945).

Favre, Max: Gabriel Faurés Kammermusik (Zürich), 1948.

JANKÉLÉVITCH, VLADIMIR: Gabriel Fauré: ses mélodies — son esthétique (revised and
enlarged edition, Paris, 1951).

KOECHLIN, CHARLES: Gabriel Fauré (Paris, 1927; English translation, London,
1945).

MELLERS, WILFRID: “Тһе Later Work of Gabriel Fauré’ in Studies in Contemporary
Music (London, 1947).

SUCKLING, NoRMAN: Fauré (London, 1946).

Granados

COLLET, HENRI: Albeniz et Granados (Paris, 1926).

‘Granados’ number of Revista musical catalana (1916).

LIVERMORE, ANN: ‘Granados and the Nineteenth Century in Spain’, Music Review,
vii (1946).

Grieg

ABRAHAM, GERALD (ed.): Grieg: a Symposium (London, 1948).

FiscHER, Kurt VON: Griegs Harmonik und Фе nordlandische Folklore (Berne, 1938).
Horton, JOHN: ‘Grieg’s “ЗааНег” for Pianoforte’, Music and Letters, xxvi (1945).
SCHJELDERUP-EsBE, Dac: A Study of Grieg's Harmony (Oslo, 1953).

Holst
Horsr, IMOGEN: The Music of Gustav Holst (London, 1951).

d'Indy

*d'Indy' numbers of Revue musicale (1932, 1937).

SAINT-SAENS, CAMILLE: Les Idées de M. Vincent d’Indy (Paris, 1919).
SÉnIEYx, AUGUSTE: Vincent d'Indy (Paris, 1914).

VALLAS, LEON: Vincent d'Indy (Paris, two vols. 1946 and 1950).

Koechlin

CaLvoconsssi M. D.: ‘Charles Koechlin's Instrumental Works’, Music and
Letters, v (1924).

MELLERS, WILFRID: ‘Charles Koechlin’ in Studies in Contemporary Music (London,
1947).

Magnard
CARRAUD, GASTON: La Vie, l'oeuvre et la mort d'Albéric Magnard (Paris, 1921).

Mahler
ADLER, Сошо: Gustav Mahler (Vienna, 1916).
BAREORD, PHILIP: Mahler: Symphonies and Songs (London, 1970).

— — AN

BIBLIOGRAPHY 705

BEKKER, PAUL: Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Berlin and Stuttgart, 1921).

LOCKSPEISER, EDWARD: ‘Mahler in France’, Monthly Musical Record, xc (1960).

MAHLER, ALMA M.: Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Amsterdam, 1940;
enlarged and revised English translation, London, 1968).

MAHLER, GusrAv: Briefe, 1879-1911 (Berlin, Vienna and Leipzig, 1924).

‘Mahler’ numbers of Die Musik (1911) and Musikblütter des Anbruch (1920, 1930).

MITCHELL, DONALD: Gustav Mahler: The Early Years (London, 1958).

NEWLIN, Пика: Bruckner—Mahler—Schoenberg (New York, 1947).

PAMER, Fritz EGon: ‘Gustav Mahlers Lieder’, Studien zur Musikwissenschaft,
xvi (1929) and xvii (1930).

RATZ, ERWIN: ‘Zum Formproblem bei Gustav Mahler: Eine Analyse des ersten
Satzes der IX. Symphonie', Musikforschung, viii (1955).

----<2шп Formproblem bei Gustav Mahler: Eine Analyse des Finales der VI.
Symphonie', Musikforschung, ix (1956).

REDLICH, Hans F.: Bruckner and Mahler (London, 1955).

SCHAEFERS, ANTON: Gustav Mahlers Instrumentation (Düsseldorf, 1935).

SrEFAN, PAUL: Gustav Mahler (enlarged and revised edition, Munich, 1920).

TISCHLER, Hans: *Mahler's “Раз Lied von der Erde”’, Music Review, x (1949).

——‘Mahler’s Impact on the Crisis of Tonality’, Music Review, xii (1951).

WELLESZ, Есом: “Тһе Symphonies of Gustav Mahler', Music Review, i (1940).

Nielsen
NIELSEN, CARL: Levende Musik (Copenhagen, 1925).
SIMPSON, RoBERT: Carl Nielsen, Symphonist (London, 1952).

Rakhmaninov

CULSHAW, JOHN: Sergei Rachmaninov (London, 1949).

*Rakhmaninov' number of Tempo (1951).

TsrrovicH, T. E. (ed): 5. V. Rakhmaninov: sbornik statey i materialov (Moscow
and Leningrad, 1947).

VASINA-GROSSMAN, V. A.: ‘Romansi Rakhmaninova’, in Russkiy klassicheskiy
romans XIX veka (Moscow, 1956).

ZHITOMIRSKY, D.: ‘Fortepiannoe tvorchestvo Rakhmaninova', Sovetskaya muzika:
sbornik statey, 4 (1945).

Ravel

AKERET, KURT: Studien zum Klavierwerk von Maurice Ravel (Zürich, 1941).

BRUYR, José: Maurice Ravel, ou le lyrisme et les sortilèges (Paris, 1950).

Carvoconszssi, M. D.: ‘When Ravel composed to order’, Music and Letters, xxii
(1941).

JANKÉLÉVITCH, VLADIMIR: Ravel (2nd ed., Paris, 1956).

JOURDAN-MORHANGE, HÉLENE: Ravel et nous (Geneva, 1945).

ORENSTEIN, ARBIE: ‘Maurice Ravel’s Creative Process’, Musical Quarterly, liii (1967).

‘Ravel’ numbers of Revue musicale (1925, 1938).

ROLAND-MANUEL: A [а gloire de Ravel (Paris, 1938; English translation, London,
1947).

Reger

Васев, Сошо: Max Reger (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1923).

СОЕМЕМ, PauL: Max Regers Variationsschaffen (Berlin, 1935).

DENECKE, Н. L.: “Мах Regers Sonatenform in ihrer Entwicklung’, Festschrift Fritz
Stein (Brunswick, 1939).

GATSCHER, E.: Die Fugentechnik Max Regers in ihrer Entwicklung (Stuttgart, 1925).

HUESGEN, R.: Der junge Reger und seine Orgelwerke (Schrammberg, 1935).

Moser, Hans JOACHIM: “Мах Regers Orchesterwerke’, Festschrift Max Reger
(Leipzig, 1953).

706 BIBLIOGRAPHY

RAHNER, Huco Е.: “Мах Regers Choralfantasien für die Orgel’, Heidelberger
Studien zur Musikwissenschaft (Kassel, 1936).

*Reger' number of Die Musik (1921).

STEIN, Fritz: Max Reger (Potsdam,.1939).

—Thematisches Verzeichnis der im Druck erschienenen Werke von Max Reger
(enlarged edition, Leipzig, 1953).

THERSTAPPEN, Н. J.: ‘Uber die Grundlagen der Form bei Max Reger’, Festschrift
Fritz Stein (Brunswick, 1939).

WEHMEYER, СВЕТЕ: ‘Max Reger als Liederkomponist’, Kölner Beiträge zur Musik-
forschung (Regensburg, 1955).

WURZ, R. (ed.): Max Reger: eine Sammlung von Studien aus dem Kreise seiner
persónlichen Schüler (Munich, four Hefte, 1920-3).

Roslavets

Gojowv, Detter: “Nikolaj Andreevic Roslavec, ein früher Zw6lftonkomponist’,
Musikforschung, xxii (1969).

Козглуетв, NIKOLAY: ‘Nik. А. Roslavets о зере i svoem tvorchestve’, Sovremennaya
muzika, no. 5 (1924).

Roussel

BERNARD, ROBERT: Albert Roussel (Paris, 1948).

DEANE, BASIL: Albert Roussel (London, 1961).

Ho£nÉz, A. R.: Albert Roussel (Paris, 1938).

LOCKSPEISER, EDWARD: ‘Roussel and Ravel’, Music and Letters, xix (1938).

MELLERS, WILFRID: ‘Albert Roussel and La Musique francaise’, in Studies in
Contemporary Music (London, 1947).

PINCHERLE, Макс: Albert Roussel (Geneva, 1957).

‘Roussel’ numbers of Revue musicale (1929, 1937).

Satie

AUSTIN, WILLIAM: ‘Satie before and after Cocteau’, Musical Quarterly, xlviii (1962).

DANCKERT, WERNER: ‘Der Klassizismus Erik Saties und seine geistesgeschichtliche
Stellung’, Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, xii (1929-30).

MELLERS, WILFRID: ‘Erik Satie and the “Problem” of Contemporary Music’, in
Studies in Contemporary Music (London, 1947).

Myers, Комо H.: Erik Satie (London, 1948).

TEMPLIER, PIERRE-DANIEL: Erik Satie (Paris, 1932; English translation, London,
1969).

Schmitt
Hucuer, YVES: Florent Schmitt, l'homme et l'artiste, son époque et son oeuvre
(Paris, 1953).

Schoenberg

ARMITAGE, MERLE (ed.): Arnold Schoenberg (New York, 1939).

Вевс, ALBAN: Gurrelieder (Führer), (Vienna, 1913).

Kammersinfonie, Op. 9 (Thematische Analyse), (Vienna, n.d.).

—— Pelleas und Melisande, Op. 5 (Kurze thematische Analyse) (Vienna, n.d.).

——‘Warum ist Schönbergs Musik so schwer verstándlich?', reprinted in Willi
Reich, Alban Berg (Vienna, 1937).

Воот, PIERRE: ‘L’Oeuvre pour piano de Schönberg’, іп Relevés d'apprenti (Paris,
1966; English translation, 1968).

BRINKMANN, REINHOLD: Arnold Schónberg: Drei Klavierstiicke Op. 11 (Studien
zur frühen Atonalitat bei Schönberg) (Wiesbaden, 1969).

EHRENFORTH, К. H.: Ausdruck und Form (Schönbergs Durchbruch zur Atonalitát in
den George-Liedern, Op. 15) (Bonn, 1963).

BIBLIOGRAPHY 707

FRIEDBERG, RUTH: “Тһе Solo Keyboard Works of Arnold Schönberg’, Music
Review, xxiii (1962).

FRIEDHEIM, PHILIP: Tonality and Structure in the Early Works of Schoenberg (Diss.
New York Univ., 1963).

Hopkins, С. W.: ‘Schoenberg and the “Logic” of Atonality’, Tempo, 94 (1970).

JALOWETZ, HEINRICH: “Оп the Spontaneity of Schoenberg’s Music’, Musical
Quarterly, xxx (1944).

NEWLIN, DIKA: Bruckner—Mahler—Schoenberg (New York, 1947).

PAYNE, ANTHONY: Schoenberg (London, 1968).

RurER, Joser: Das Werk Arnold Schönbergs (Kassel, 1959; English translation,
London, 1962).

SCHOENBERG, ARNOLD: Harmonielehre (Vienna, 1911).

— Style and Idea (New York, 1951).

—‘Schoenberg’ Festschriften (Munich, 1912 and Vienna, 1925 and 1934);
‘Schoenberg’ numbers of Musikblatter des Anbruch (1924), Pult und Taktstock
(1927), etc.

WELLESZ, EGON: Arnold Schónberg (Vienna, 1921; English translation, London,
1925; new edition, 1972).

WILLE, RUDOLF: ‘Reihentechnik in Schónbergs opus 19, 2’, Musikforschung,
xix (1966).

Sibelius

ABRAHAM, GERALD (ed.): Sibelius: a Symposium (London, 1947).

Gray, CECIL: Sibelius: the Symphonies (London, 1935).

HILL, WILLIAM G.: ‘Some Aspects of Form in the Symphonies of Sibelius’, Music
Review, x (1949).

LAYTON, ROBERT: Sibelius (London, 1965).

PARMET, SIMON: Sibelius Symfonier (Helsinki, 1955; English translation, London,
1959).

Roma, Емо: Die Symphonien von Jean Sibelius: eine formanalytische Studie
(Jyvaskyla, 1941).

TANZBERGER, ERNST: Die symphonischen Dichtungen von Jean Sibelius (Würzburg,
1943).

TAWASTSTJERNA, ERIK: The Compositions of Sibelius (Helsinki, 1957-).

Skyrabin

Вевкоу, У.: ‘Nekotorie voprosi garmonii Skryabina', Sovetskaya muzika,
xxiii (1959).

COOPER, MARTIN: ‘Scriabin’s Mystical Beliefs’, Music and Letters, xvi (1935).

DICKENMANN, PAUL: Die Entwicklung der Harmonik bei А. Skrjabin (Berne, 1935).

Сі сн, С. С. J. von: Die sinfonischen Werke von Alexander Skrjabin (Bilthoven,
1963).

KELDIsH, YURY: ‘Ideynie protivorechiya v tvorchestve А. М. Skryabina’, Sovetskaya
muzika, xvi (1950).

Lissa, Zoria: “О harmonice А. М. Skrjabin’, Kwartalnik muzyczny, viii (1930).

SABANEYEV, LEONID: А. №. Skryabin (Moscow, 1922).
Vospominaniya o Skryabina (Moscow, 1925).

Skryabin, N. A., 1915-1940: Sbornik k 25-letiyu so dnya smerti (Moscow, 1940).

‘Skryabin’ number of Muzikalny sovremennik (1916).

WESTPHAL, Кокт: ‘Die Harmonik Scrjabins’, Musikblatter des Anbruch, xi (1929).

Strauss

Det Mar, NORMAN: Richard Strauss: a Critical Commentary on his Life and Work
(three volumes, London, 1963, 1969 and 1972).

Сүз, Fritz: Richard Strauss (Potsdam, 1934).

708 BIBLIOGRAPHY

MUELLER VON Asow, E. H.: Richard Strauss: Thematisches Verzeichnis (two
volumes, published Vienna, 1955 and 1959).

LORENZ, ALFRED: ‘Neue Formerkenntnisse angewandt auf Richard Straussens “Поп
Juan", Archiv für Musikforschung, i (1936).

ScHUH, WILLI (ed.): Richard Strauss Jahrbuch (Bonn, 1954—00).

SPECHT, RICHARD: Richard Strauss und sein Werk (Vienna, 1921).

STEINITZER, Max: Richard Strauss (Berlin, revised and enlarged edition, 1922).

TENSCHERT, ROLAND: ‘Die Kadenzbehandlung bei Richard Strauss’, Zeitschrift
für Musikwissenschaft, viii (1925-6).

——‘Versuch einer Typologie der Richard Strausschen Melodik’, Zeitschrift fiir
Musikwissenschaft, xvi (1934).

WACHTEN, EDMUND: ‘Der einheitliche Grundzug der Strausschen Formgestaltung’,
Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, xvi (1934).

Stravinsky

Boys, Henry: ‘Stravinsky: A Propos his Aesthetic’, Score, 2 (1950).

——‘Stravinsky: The Musical Materials’, Score, 4 (1951).

Drew, Davin: ‘Stravinsky’s Revisions’, Score, 20 (1957).

Evans, EDWIN: Stravinsky: ‘The Fire-Bird’ and ‘Petrushka’, (London, 1933).

‘GLEBOV, IGoR' (Boris Asafyev): Kniga o Stravinskom (Leningrad, 1929).

Hopkins, С. W.: ‘Stravinsky’s Chords’, Tempo, 76 and 77 (1966).

SCHAEFFNER, ANDRE: Stravinsky (Paris, 1931).

ScHUH, WILLI: ‘Zur Harmonik Igor Strawinskys’, Schweizerische Musikzeitung,
xcii (1952).

SMALLEY, ROGER: ‘The Sketchbook of The Rite of Spring’, Tempo, 91 (1969).

STRAVINSKY, IGOR: Poétique musicale (Cambridge, Mass., 1942; English translation,
Cambridge, Mass., 1947; revised edition, Paris, 1952).

‘Stravinsky’ numbers of Revue musicale (1923 and 1939), Musical Quarterly (1962)
and Tempo (1948, 1967 and 1971).

TANSMAN, ALEXANDRE: Igor Stravinsky (Paris, 1948; English translation, New York,
1949).

VLAD, RoMAN: Stravinsky (Milan, 1958; English translation, 2nd edition, London,
1967).

Wuite, ERIC WALTER: Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works (London, 1966).

Szymanowski

CHOMINSKY, 702ЕЕ: ‘Szymanowski i Skryabin’, in Russko-polskie muzikalnie
svyazi (ed. Igor Belza), (Moscow, 1963). |

LoBACZEWSKA, STEFANIA: Karol Szymanowski: Zycie i twórczosc (Cracow, 1950).

STUCKENSCHMIDT, H. H.: ‘Karol Szymanowski’, Music and Letters, xix (1938).

Vaughan Williams

Dickinson, A. E. F.: An Introduction to the Music of R. Vaughan Williams (London,
1928).

Foss, HuBERT: Ralph Vaughan Williams (London, 1950).

Howes, FRANK: The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London, 1954).

KENNEDY, MICHAEL: The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London, 1964).

KIMMEL, WILLIAM: ‘Vaughan Williams’s Choice of Words’, Music and Letters, xxi
(1938).

——‘Vaughan Williams’s Melodic Style’, Musical Quarterly, xxvii (1941).

PAYNE, Exsie: ‘Vaughan Williams and Folksong’, Music Review, xv (1954).

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS, RALPH: National Music (London, 1934).

Webern
Соме, EDWARD T.: ‘Webern’s Apprenticeship’, Musical Quarterly, liii (1967).

BIBLIOGRAPHY 709

KOLNEDER, WALTER: Anton Webern: Einführung in Werk und Stil (Rodenkirchen,
1961; English translation, London, 1968).

CHAPTER III

STAGE WORKS: 1890-1918

(1) General

GILMAN, LAWRENCE: Aspects of Modern Opera (London, 1924).

GROUT, DONALD Jay: A Short History of Opera (New York, 1947; 2nd ed., 1965).

IsTEL, EDGAR: Die moderne Oper vom Tode Wagners bis zum Weltkrieg (Leipzig,
1915; 2nd ed., 1923).

—‘German Opera since Richard Wagner’, Musical Quarterly, 1 (1915).

KLEIN, JOHN W.: ‘Verdi’s Italian Contemporaries and Successors’, Music and
Letters, xv (1934).

Louis, RUDOLF: Die deutsche Musik der Gegenwart (Munich, 1909; 3rd ed., 1912).

PROD'HOMME, JACQUES GABRIEL: “Тһе Recent Fiftieth Anniversary of the “New
Орега”?, Musical Quarterly, xii (1926).

ScHULLER, KENNETH GUSTAVE: 'Verismo' Opera and the Verists (Diss. Washington
Univ., 1960).

(ii) Individual Composers

d'Albert

RAUPP, WiLHELM: Eugen d'Albert. Ein Künstler und Menschenschicksal (Leipzig,
1930).

5снміт2, EUGEN: ‘Eugen d'Albert als Opernkomponist’, Hochland, vi (1909).

Товсні, Іллсі: ‘Ghismonda, opera in tre atti di Eugenio d'Albert', Rivista musicale
italiana, iii (1896).

Bartok

LENDVAI, ERNÓ: ‘A kékszakállu herceg vara’ (Duke Bluebeard’s Castle), Magyar
Zene, i (1961).

VERESS, SANDOR: ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’, Tempo, xiii (1949); xiv (1949-50); repr. in
Béla Barték: A Memorial Review (New York, 1950).

Bloch

COHEN, ALEX: ‘Ernest Bloch’s Macbeth’, Music and Letters, xix (1938).

Gatti, Сошо Mania: ‘Two Macbeths: Verdi-Bloch', Musical Quarterly, xii (1926).

HALL, RAYMOND: ‘The Macbeth of Bloch’, Modern Music, xv (1938).

HAstTINGs, JOHN: ‘Ernst Bloch and Modern Music’, Music Review, x (1949).

NEWLIN, Dika: ‘The Later Works of Ernest Bloch’, Musical Quarterly, xxxiii
(1947).

TiBALDI-CHIESA, M.: Ernest Bloch (Turin, 1933).

Busoni

Dent, EDWARD J.: ‘Busoni’s Doctor Faust’, Music and Letters, vii (1926).

Gatti, Сошо Maria: ‘The Stage Works of Ferruccio Busoni’, Musical Quarterly,
xx (1934).

GOSLICH, SIEGFRIED: ‘Раз Wandbild: Othmar Schoeck und Ferruccio Busoni’,
Musica, xi (1957).

GUERRINI, Сошо: Ferruccio Busoni: la уйа, la figura, l'opera (Florence, 1944).

STUCKENSCHMIDT, HANS HEINZ: ‘Rede über Busonis Doktor Faust’, Schweizerische
Musikzeitung, xcvi (1956).

710 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Charpentier

DzLMas, Marc: Gustave Charpentier et le lyrisme francais (Paris, 1931).

HiwoNET, ANDRE: Louise de Gustave Charpentier: Etude historique et critique,
analyse musicale (Paris, 1922). |

Hoover, KATHLEEN O’DONNELL: “Gustave Charpentier’, Musical Quarterly, xxv
(1939).

Debussy =

ACKERE, JULES VAN: Pelléas et Mélisande, ou le recontre miraculeuse d'une poésie
et d'une musique (Brussels, 1952).

APPLEDORN, MARY JEANNE VAN: 4 Stylistic Study of Claude Debussy's Opera
‘Pelléas et Mélisande' (Diss. Univ. of Rochester, 1966).

CHAILLEY, JACQUES: “Ге Symbolisme des thémes dans Pelléas et Mélisande',
L'information musicale, lxiv (1942).

DavisoN, ARCHIBALD T.: The Harmonic Contribution of Claude Debussy (Diss.
Harvard Univ., 1908).

EMMANUEL, Maurice: ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’: étude historique et critique, analyse
musicale (Paris, 1925).

СОВА, ANTOINE: ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’: Analyse poétique et musicale (Paris, 1952).

LOCKSPEISER, EDWARD: Debussy (London, 1936; 3rd ed., 1951).

— —Debussy: His Life and Mind (2 vols., London, 1962-5).

—‘Mussorgsky and Debussy’, Musical Quarterly, xxiii (1937).

PIZZETTI, ILDEBRANDO: ‘Pelléas et Mélisande ... Debussy’, Rivista musicale
italiana, xv (1908).

Delius

HUTCHINGS, ARTHUR: Delius (London, 1948).

— —'pelius's Operas’, Tempo, xxvi (1952-3).

KLEIN, JOHN W.: ‘Delius as a Musical Dramatist, Music Review, xxii (1961).

Dukas

Возме, HENRY DE: ‘Ariane et Barbe-bleue de M. Paul Dukas', Mercure musicale,
iii (1907).

PIZZETTI, ILDEBRANDO: ‘Ariane et Barbebleue ... de Paul Dukas’, Rivista musicale
italiana, xv (1908).

d'Indy

KUFFERATH, MAURICE: 'Fervaal . . . di V. d’Indy’, Rivista musicale italiana, iv (1897).

ROLLAND, ROMAIN: ‘L’Etranger de Vincent d'Indy', Rivista musicale italiana, xi
(1904).

VALLAS, LEON: Vincent d'Indy (2 vols., Paris, 1946-50).

Mascagni

Ромен, EDOARDO: Pietro Mascagni (Rome, 1912).

Товсні, Luici: ‘Guglielmo Ratclif. .. di Pietro Mascagni’, Rivista musicale italiana,
ii (1895).

‘Iris ... di Pietro Mascagni’, Rivista musicale italiana, vi (1899).

Massenet

BRUNEAU, ALFRED: Massenet (Paris, 1935).

MASSENET, JULES-EMILE-FREDERIC: Mes souvenirs (Paris, 1912).
PouGIN, ARTHUR: ‘Massenet’, Rivista musicale italiana, xix (1912).

Pfitzner

BERRSCHE, ALEXANDER: Kurze Einführung in Hans Pfitzners Musikdrama ‘Der arme
Heinrich? (Leipzig, 1910).

HALUSA, KARL: Pfitzners musikdramatisches Schaffen (Diss. Vienna, 1929).

BIBLIOGRAPHY 711

MANN, THOMAS: Pfitzners ‘Palestrina’ (Berlin, 1919).
PFITZNER, HANs ERICH: Сезаттейе Schriften (3 vols., Augsburg, 1926).
Rutz, Hans: Hans Pfitzner: Musik zwischen den Zeiten (Vienna, 1949).

Puccini

Витесь A.: ‘La Bohème’ di Giacomo Puccini: Studio critico (Palermo, 1931).

BONACCORSI, ALFREDO: Giacomo Puccini e i suoi antenati musicali (Milan, 1950).

CARNER, Mosco: “Тһе Exotic Element in Puccini', Musical Quarterly, xxii (1936).

— —Puccini: A Critical Biography (London, 1958).

——‘Puccini’s Early Operas’, Music and Letters, xix (1938).

Сатті, Сошо Maria: “Тһе Works of Giacomo Puccini’, Musical Quarterly, xiv
(1928).

MARIANI, RENATO: ‘L’ultimo Puccini’, Rassegna musicale, ix (1936).

PARKER, DouGLas C.: ‘A view of Giacomo Puccini’, Musical Quarterly, iii (1917).

Ricci, Іллсі: Puccini interprete di se stesso (Milan, 1954).

SARTORI, CLAUDIO (ed.): Giacomo Puccini (Milan, 1959).

Токсні, Іллсі: ‘Tosca, di С. Puccini’, Rivista musicale italiana, vii (1900).

Schillings

LEPEL, FELIX VON: Max von Schillings und seine Oper ‘Mona Lisa’: Ein Ruhmesblatt
fiir die stadtische Oper in Berlin-Charlottenburg (Berlin-Charlottenburg, 1954).

Richard Strauss

DEL Mar, NORMAN: Richard Strauss (3 vols., London, 1962, 1969, 1972).

ERHARDT, Отто: Richard Strauss, Leben, Wirken, Schaffen (Freiburg/Breisgau,
1953).

FAHNRICH, HERMANN: ‘Richard Strauss über das Verhältnis von Dichtung und
Musik (Wort und Ton) in seinem Opernschaffen', Musikforschung, xiv (1961).

GREGOR, JosEF: Richard Strauss, der Meister der Oper (Munich, 1939).

JEFFERSON, ALAN: The Operas of Richard Strauss in Britain, 1910-1963 (London,
1963).

KRALIK, HEINRICH: Richard Strauss, Weltbürger der Musik (Vienna, 1963).

KRÜGER, KARL-JOACHIM: Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Richard Strauss (Berlin, 1935)

MANN, WiLLIAM: Richard Strauss. A Critical Study of his Operas (London, 1964).

RorH, Ernst (ed.): Richard Strauss Bühnenwerke (London, 1954).

ScHMITZ, EUGEN: Richard Strauss als Musikdramatiker (Munich, 1907).

ScHUH, WILLI: Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Richard Strauss, Legende und Wirklich-
keit (Munich, 1964).

—— Über Opern von Richard Strauss (Zurich, 1947).

STRAUSS, RICHARD and HANS VON BÜLow: Correspondence (English translation,
London, 1955).

----апа HuGo von HOFMANNSTHAL: Briefwechsel (Zürich, 3rd ed., 1964).

— —English translation as А Working Friendship (New York, 1961).

—— and Комлім ROLLAND: Correspondence, ed. R. Meyers (Berkeley, Calif., 1968).

----апа FRANZ WULLNER: Briefwechsel, ed. D. Kämper (Cologne, 1963).

TENSCHERT, ROLAND: ‘Versuch einer Typologie der Richard Strausschen Melodik’,
Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, xvi (1934—5).

Dreimal sieben Variationen über das Thema Richard Strauss (Vienna, 1944).

TRENNER, FRANZ: Richard Strauss: Dokumente seines Lebens und Schaffens (Munich,
1954).

Wolf

BoLLERT, WERNER: ‘Hugo Wolfs Corregidor’, Musica, xiv (1960).

HELLMER, ELMUND (ed.): 'Der Corregidor' von Hugo Wolf (Berlin, 1900).

HERNRIED, RoBERT: ‘Hugo Wolf’s *Four Operas"', Musical Quarterly, xxxi
(1945).

712 BIBLIOGRAPHY

REICH, WILLI: ‘Dokument eines Gesprächs (Zur Wiener Erstaufführung von Wolfs

Corregidor)’, Musica, xiv (1960). "n
WALKER, FRANK: Hugo Wolf (London, 1951; 2nd ed., New York, 1968).
Wolf-Ferrari

GnRISSON, ALEXANDER CAROLA: Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (Zürich, 2nd ed., 1958).

PFANNKUCH, WILHELM: Das Operuschaffen Ermanno Wolf-Ferraris (Diss. Kiel
Univ., 1953). -

RiNGO, JAMEs: ‘Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari: An Appreciation of his Work’, Rivista
musicale italiana, xlix (1949).

Токсні, Luici: ‘La vita nuova di E. Wolf-Ferrari', Rivista musicale italiana, x (1903).

WOLF-FERRARI, ERMANNO: ‘Meine Beziehung zur komischen Oper’, Zeitschrift
fiir Musik, cviii (1941).

ZENTNER, WILHELM: ‘Zum Opernschaffen Ermanno Wolf-Ferraris’, Zeitschrift
für Musik, cviii (1941).

CHAPTER IV

MUSIC IN THE MAINLAND OF EUROPE: 1918-1939

() General

AUSTIN, WILLIAM W.: Harmonic Rhythm іп Twentieth-Century Music (Diss. Harvard
Univ., 1951).

BABBITT, RICHARD B.: The Harmonic Idioms in the Works of Les Six (Diss. Boston
Univ., 1963).

COLLAER, PAUL: La musique moderne, 1905-1955 (Paris, 1955; English translation,
аз 4 History of Modern Music, Cleveland, 1961).

CooPER, GROSVENOR W.: Ап introduction to the Analysis of Certain Contemporary
Harmonic Practices (Diss. Harvard Univ., 1939).

Davies, LAURENCE: Райз to Modern Music (London, 1971).

Deri, Отто: Exploring Twentieth Century Music (New York, 1968).

DuMESNIL, RENE: La Musique en France entre les deux guerres 1919-1939 (Geneva,
1946).

FRANCES, Вовевт: La perception de la musique (Paris, 1958).

Нил, EDWARD BURLINGAME: Modern French Music (Boston, 1924).

HAUSLER, Joser: Musik in 20 Jahrhundert von Schönberg zu Penderecki (Bremen,
1969).

HODIER, ANDRE: Since Debussy: A View of Contemporary Music (English translation,
New York, 1961).

KRENEK, Ernst: Music Here and Now (1937; English translation, New York, 1939).

— —'The New Music and Today's Theatre’, Modern Music, xiv (1937).

— — Opera between Ше Wars’, Modern Music, хх (1943).

KoMoROWsKI, HANS-PETER: Die ‘Invention’ in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts,
(Kölner Beiträge zur Musikforschung, lxii) (Regensburg, 1971).

Квонев, EKKEHART: Impressionismus іп der Musik (Leipzig, 1957).

LANG, PAUL HENRY and NATHAN BRODER (eds.): Contemporary Music in Europe
(New York, 1965).

МАСНІЈ5, ЈОЅЕРН : Introduction to Contemporary Music (New York, 1961).

MELLERS, WILFRID: Studies in Contemporary Music (London, 1948).

MERSMANN, Hans: Musik der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1923).

MEYER, LEONARD B.: Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions т
Twentieth-Century Culture (Chicago, 1967).

Myers, Коло Н. (ed.): Twentieth-Century Music (London, 1960).

PERLE, GEORGE: Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music
of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern (Berkeley, Calif., 1962).

BIBLIOGRAPHY 713

PEYSER, JoAN: The New Music (New York, 1971).

Rzri, RUDOLPH: The Thematic Process in Music (New York, 1951).

——Tonality, Atonality, Pantonality: A Study of some Trends in 20th Century
Music (New York, 1958).

SALAZAR, ADOLFO: La música moderna: Las corrientes directrices еп el arte musical
contemporáneo (Buenos Aires, 1944; English translation as Music in Our Time:
Trends in Music Since the Romantic Era, New York, 1946).

SALZMAN, Екіс: Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J., 1967).

ScHWARTZ, ELLIOTT and BARNEY CHILDs (eds.): Contemporary Composers оп
Contemporary Music (New York, 1967).

SMITHER, HOWARD E.: Theories of Rhythm in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,
with a Contribution to the Theory of Rhythm for the Study of Twentieth-Century
Music (Diss. Cornell Univ., 1960).

STUCKENSCHMIDT, HANS HEINZ: Neue Musik; Vol. П: Zwischen den beiden Kriegen
(Berlin, 1951).

— — "Opera in Germany Today’, Modern Music, xiii (1935).

— —Twentieth-Century Music (English translation, New York, 1969).

VETTER, HANS JOACHIM: Die Musik unseres Jahrhunderts (Mainz, 1968).

VLAD, ROMAN: Storia della dodecafonia (Milan, 1958).

WEISSMANN, ADOLPH: Germany's Latest Music Dramas’, Modern Music, iv (1927).

WESTPHAL, Ковт: Die moderne Musik (Leipzig, 1928).

YATES, PETER: Twentieth Century Music (New York, 1967).

(1) Individual Composers

Вагіок

ABRAHAM, GERALD: “Тһе Bartók of the Quartets', Music and Letters, xxvi (1945).

ВАввит, MILTON: “Тһе String Quartets of Bartok’, Musical Quarterly, xxxv (1949).

Bator, Victor: The Béla Bartók Archives: History and Catalogue (New York,
1963).

Béla Bartók: A Memorial Review (New York, 1950).

CITRON, PIERRE: Bartók (Paris, 1963).

DirrE, DENUS (ed.): Documenta Bartókiana (Budapest, 1964— ).

Сомвові, Отто: “Béla Bartok, 1881-1945, Musical Quarterly, xxxii (1946).

Корду, 7огтАм: ‘Béla Bartók’, Revue musicale, ii (1921).

Мовевох, SERGE: Béla Bartók (Paris, 1955).

STEVENS, HALSEY: The Life and Music of Béla Bartók (New York, 1953).

VINTON, JOHN: ‘Bartók on his own Music’, Journal of the American Musicological
Society, xix (1966).

WEISSMANN, JOHN S.: ‘Béla Bartók: An Estimate’, Music Review, vii (1946).

Berg

ARCHIBALD, Ковевт B.: Harmony in the Early Works of Alban Berg (Diss. Harvard
Univ., 1965).

BERG, ALBAN: “А Word about Wozzeck’, Modern Music, v (1927).

—— Écrits, ed. and tr. Henri Pousseur (Monaco, 1957).

FOoRNEBERG, ERICH: ‘Wozzeck’ von Alban Berg (Berlin-Lichterfelde, 1963).

KLEIN, Тонм W.: ‘Wozzeck—A Summing Up’, Music and Letters, xliv (1963).

PERLE, GEORGE: ‘Lulu: The Formal Design’, Journal of the American Musicological
Society, xvii (1964).

—‘The Music of Lulu: A New Analysis’, Journal of the American Musicological
Society, xii (1959); corrections: Journal of the American Musicological Society,
xiv (1961).

714 BIBLIOGRAPHY

PLorBscH, GERD: Alban Bergs ‘Wozzeck’ (Strasbourg, 1968).

REDLICH, HANs FERDINAND: Alban Berg: Versuch einer Wiirdigung (Vienna, 1957;
English condensation, The Man and his Music, New York, 1957).

REICH, WILLI: Alban Berg (Vienna, 1937; 2nd ed. Zurich, 1963; English translation,

The Life and Works of Alban Berg, London, 1965).

‘Alban Berg’s Lulu’, Musical Quarterly, xxii (1936).

—‘Alban Berg’s Oper Lulu’, Melos, xix (1952).

——‘Lulu—the Text and Music’, Modern Music, xii (1935).

—‘A Guide to Wozzeck’, Musical Quarterly, xxxviii (1952).

STEIN, ERWIN: ‘Berg and Schoenberg’, Tempo, xliv (1957).

Casella

D'AMICO, FEDELE and Соро М. GATTI: Alfredo Casella: con saggi ... appendice
biobibliografica (Milan, 1958).

CASELLA, ALFREDO: ‘Matière et timbre’, Revue musicale, ii (1921).

— —I segreti della Giara (Florence, 1941).

CASELLA, ALFREDO and ViRGILIO MORTARI: La tecnica dell'orchestra contemporanea
(Milan, 1950).

CORTESE, Louis: Alfredo Casella (Genoa, 1935).

Dallapiccola
D'AMICO, FEDELE: *Luigi Dallapiccola', Melos, xx (1953).
VLAD, RoMaN: Luigi Dallapiccola (English translation, Milan, 1957).

Falla

ARIZARA, Roporro: Manuel de Falla (Buenos Aires, 1961).

CAMPODONICO, Luis: Falla (French translation, Paris, 1959).

JAENISCH, JULIO: Manuel de Falla und die spanische Musik (Zürich, 1952).

MAYER-SERRA, Отто: ‘Falla’s Musical Nationalism’, Musical Quarterly, xxix
(1943).

MiLA, Massimo (ed.): Manuel de Falla (Milan, 1962).

РАНІЅЅА, JAIME: Vida y obra de Manuel de Falla (Buenos Aires, 1947; English
translation, Manuel de Falla: His Life and Works, London, 1954).

WORNER, КАвг Н. ‘Manuel de Falla’, Musica, i (1947).

Hindemith

Вілт25ткім, Marc: ‘Hin und Zurück in Philadephia’, Modern Music, v (1928).

BoATWRIGHT, HowaRp: ‘Paul Hindemith as a Teacher’, Musical Quarterly, i
(1964).

Gutman, Hans: ‘Tabloid Hindemith’, Modern Music, vii (1930).

HrNsEL, HERMAN R.: On Paul Hindemith’s Harmonic Fluctuation Theory (Diss.
Univ. of Illinois, 1964).

Німремітн, PAUL: A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations (New York,
1961).

——The Craft of Musical Composition (New York, 1945).

Reicu, У/илл: ‘Paul Hindemith’, Musical Quarterly, xvii (1931).

Rosner, HELMUT: Paul Hindemith: Katalog seiner Werke. Diskographie, Biblio-
graphie, Einführung in das Schaffen (Frankfurt/Main, 1970).

SCHILLING, Н. L.: Die Oper ‘Cardillac’ von P. Hindemith (Diss. Freiburg/Breisgau,
1957).

STONE, Kurt: Paul Hindemith: Catalogue of Published Works and Recordings
(New York, 1954).

STROBEL, HEINRICH: Paul Hindemith (Mainz, 1928; 3rd ed., 1948).

WiLLMs, FRANZ: Führer zur Oper ‘Cardillac’ von Paul Hindemith (Mainz, 1926).

——‘Paul Hindemith: Ein Versuch’, Von neuer Musik, i (1925).

BIBLIOGRAPHY 715

Honegger

Ввоув, José: Honegger et son oeuvre (Paris, 1947).

DELANNOY, Manczr: Arthur Honegger (Paris, 1953).

GEORGE, ANDRÉ: Arthur Honegger (Paris, 1926).

GERARD, CLAUDE: Arthur Honegger (Brussels, 1945).)

Ho£nÉE, ARTHUR: (Honegger) La vie, l'oeuvre, l'homme (Paris, 1942).
HONEGGER, ARTHUR: Incantation aux fossiles (Lausanne, 1948).

Je suis compositeur (Paris, 1951; German translation, Zürich, 1952).
PRUNIERES, HENRY: ‘Honegger’s Judith’, Modern Music, iii (1926).
TaPPOLET, WILLY: Arthur Honegger (Boudry-Neuchátel, 1957).

Janácek

Brop, Max: Leos Janácek: Leben und Werk (Vienna, 1956).

GERLACH, REINHARD: ‘Leoš Janáček und die Erste und Zweite Wiener Schule’,
Musikforschung, xxiv (1970).

HOLLANDER, Hans: ‘Leoš Janáček and his Operas’, Musical Quarterly, xv (1929).

— Leos Janáček: His Life and Work (English translation, London, 1963).

—‘Leo§ Janáček in seinen Opern’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, cxix (1958).

RACEK, JAN: ‘Der Dramatiker Janáček’, Deutsches Jahrbuch der Musikwissenschaft,
v (1961).
‘Leoš Janáceks und Béla Bartóks Bedeutung in der Weltmusik’, Studia Musi-
cologica, v (1963).

STEDRON, Вономік: The Work of Leos Janáček (Prague, 1959).

VOGEL, JAROSLAV: Leos Janáček: Leben und Werk (Prague, 1958; English transla-
tion, London, 1963).

Kodaly

EOszE, LÁszLÓ: Kodaly Zoltán (Budapest, 1956; English translation, Zoltán Kodály,
his Life and Work, London, 1962).

Mason, Сотлм: ‘Kodaly and Chamber Music’, Studia Musicologica, iii (1962).

STEVENS, НАІЅЕҮ: ‘The Choral Music of Zoltán Kodaly,’ Musical Quarterly, liv
(1968).

Martin

ANSERMET, ERNEST: ‘Der Weg Frank Martins’, Osterreichische Musikzeitschrift,
xi (1956).

KLEIN, RUDOLF: Frank Martin: sein Leben und Werk (Vienna, 1960).

KOoELLIKER, ANDRE: Frank Martin (Lausanne, 1963).

TUPPER, JANET E.: Stylistic Analysis of Selected Works by Frank Martin (Diss.
Indiana Univ., 1964).

Martini

CLAPHAM, JOHN: ‘Martint’s Instrumental Style’, Music Review, xxiv (1963).

HALBREICH, Harry: Bohuslav Martini: Werkverzeichnis: Dokumentation: Biographie
(Zürich, 1968).

MIHULE, JAROSLAV: Symfonie Bohuslava Martini (Prague, 1959).

ŠAFRÁNEK, Miros: ‘Bohuslav Martinu’, Musical Quarterly, xxix (1943).

—— Bohuslav Martini: zivot a dilo (Prague, 1961; English translation, London,
1964).

Messiaen

GoLEÁ, ANTOINE: Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen (Paris, 1961).

MESSIAEN, OLIVIER: La Technique de mon langage musicale (Paris, 1944; English
translation, Chicago, 1957).

SAMUEL, CLAUDE: Entretiens avec Olivier Messiaen (Paris, 1967).

716 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Milhaud

Beck, GEORGES: Darius Milhaud. Étude suivi du catalogue chronologique complet
de son ouvrage (Paris, 1949; Supplément (Paris, 1956).

COLLAER, PAUL: Darius Milhaud (Antwerp, 1947).

ТОРАТМКОЕЕ, NIKOLAI: “Christophe Colomb’, Modern Music, vii (1930).

Mason, Coun: ‘The Chamber Music of Milhaud’, Musical Quarterly, xliii (1957).

MILHAUD, Darius: ‘La mélodie’, Melos, iii (1922). ——

—‘Polytonalité et atonalité, Revue musicale, iv (1923).

----Ло1ев sans musique (Paris, 1949; 2nd ed., 1963; English translation, London,

1952).

Entretiens avec Claude Rostand (Paris, 1952).

Petrassi
WEISSMANN, JOHN: Goffredo Petrassi (Milan, 1957).
——‘Goffredo Petrassi and his Music’, Music Review, xxii (1961).

Pizzetti

GATTI, Сошо Mania: Ildebrando Pizzetti (Turin, 1934; 2nd ed., Milan, 1955;
English translation, London, 1951).

GAVAZZENI, GIANANDREA: Altri studi pizzettiani (Bergamo, 1956).

—Tre studi di Pizzetti (Como, 1937).

Poulenc

Durey, Louis: ‘Francis Poulenc’, The Chesterian, xxv (1922).

HELL, Немкі: Francis Poulenc, musicien francais (Paris, 1958; English translation,
London, 1959).

Roy, JEAN: Francis Poulenc: l'homme et son oeuvre (Paris, 1964).

SCHAEFFNER, ANDRE: ‘Francis Poulenc, musicien frangais’, Contrepoints, i (1946)

Prokofyev

BROWN, MALCOLM J.: The Symphonies of Sergei Prokofiev (Diss. Florida State
Univ., 1967).

NESTYEY, IZRAEL V.: Prokofyev (Moscow, 1957; English translation, Stanford,
1960).

—and С. EDELMAN (eds.): Sergey Prokofyev 1953-1963: stati i materiali
(Moscow, 1962).

SHLIFSHTEYN, S. I.: S. S. Prokofyev: materiali, dokumenti, vospominaniya (Moscow,
2nd ed. 1961; English translation, Moscow, 1960).

———S. S. Prokofyev: notografichesky spravochik (Moscow, 1962).

Ravel

FARGUE, LÉoN-PAUL: Maurice Ravel (Paris, 1949).

JouRDAN-MORHANGE, HELENE: Ravel et nous: l'homme, l'ami, le musicien (Geneva,
1945).

МАСНАВЕУ, ARMAND: Maurice Ravel (Paris, 1947).

ROLAND-MANUEL, ALEXIS: Maurice Ravel (Paris, 1938; English translation, Lon-
don, 1947).

— Maurice Ravel et son oeuvre dramatique (Paris, 1928).

SEROFF, VICTOR: Maurice Ravel (New York, 1953).

Respighi

Мил, Massimo: ‘Probleme di gusto ed arte іп Ottorino Respighi’, Rassegan
musicale, vi (1933).

Екөрісні, ErLsA: Ottorino Respighi: dati biografici ordinati (Milan, 1954; English
translation, London, 1962).

RiNALDI, Mario: ‘Ottorino Respighi’, Musica d'oggi, iv (1961).

BIBLIOGRAPHY 717

Satie

APOLLINAIRE, GUILLAUME: Selected Writings (English translation, New York, 1948).

AUSTIN, WILLIAM W.: ‘Satie before and after Cocteau’, Musical Quarterly, xlviii
(1962).

COCTEAU, JEAN: Fragments d'un conférence sur Erik Satie (1920; repr. Liège 1957
and Music Review, у (1944) ).

EcorCHEVILLE, JULES: ‘Erik Satie’, Bulletin de la Société internationale de musique,
vii (1911).

Myers, Кошо H.: Erik Satie (London, 1948).

TEMPLIER, PIERRE-DANIEL: Erik Satie (Paris, 1932).

Schoenberg .

ADORNO, THEODOR WIESENGRUND: ‘Arnold Schönberg’, Die grossen Deutschen,
iv (1957).

BonETZ, BENJAMIN and Epwanp T. Соме (eds.): Perspectives on Schoenberg апа
Stravinsky (Princeton, N.J., 1968).

BROEKEMA, ANDREW J.: А Stylistic Analysis and Comparison of the Solo Vocal
Works of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern (Diss. Univ. of
Texas, 1962).

BUCHANAN, HERBERT B.: “А key to Schoenberg's Erwartung (Op. 17), Journal of
the American Musicological Society, xx (1967).

CLIFTON, THOMAS J.: Types of Ambiguity in the Tonal Compositions of Arnold
Schoenberg (Diss. Stanford Univ., 1966).

EPsrEIN, Davip M. Schoenberg’s ‘Grundgestalt’ and Total Serialism: Their Relevance
to Homophonic Analysis (Diss. Princeton Univ., 1968).

FRIEDHEIM, PHILIP: ‘Rhythmic Structure in Schoenberg's Atonal Compositions’,
Journal of the American Musicological Society, xix (1966).

Нил, RICHARD S.: ‘Schoenberg’s Tone-Rows and the Tonal System of the Future’,
Musical Quarterly, xxii (1936).

LEIBOWITZ, RENE: Introduction à la musique de douze sons (Paris, 1949).

—— Qu'est-ce que la musique de douze sons? (Liège, 1948).

——Schoenberg et son école: l'étape contemporaine du langage musical (Paris, 1947:
English translation, New York, 1949).

LESTER, JOEL: A Theory of Atonal Prolongations as used in ап Analysis of the
Serenade, Op. 24 by Arnold Schoenberg (Diss. Princeton Univ., 1970).

NAMENWIRTH, SIMON M.: Twenty Years of Schoenberg Criticisms: Changes in the
evaluation of once unfamiliar music (Diss. Univ. of Minnesota, 1965).

ODEGARD, PETER S.: The Variation Sets of Arnold Schoenberg (Diss. Univ. of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley, 1964).

Pisk, PAUL A.: ‘Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Opera’, Modern Music, vii (1930).

RUFER, JOSEF: Komposition mit zwölf Töne (Berlin, 1952; English translation,
London, 1954).

Das Werk Arnold Schónbergs (Kassel, 1959; English translation, New York,

1963).

SCHOENBERG, ARNOLD: Style and Idea (New York, 1950).

‘Structural Functions of Harmony, ed. H. Searle (New York, 1954).

STEFAN, PAUL: ‘Schoenberg’s Operas’, Modern Music, ii (1925) and vii (1929-30).

STUCKENSCHMIDT, HANS HEINZ: Arnold Schónberg (Zürich, 1951; 2nd ed. 1957;
English translation, New York, 1960).

SUDERBURG, ROBERT C.: Tonal Cohesion in Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music
(Diss. Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1966).

WOÓRNER, KARL H.: Gotteswort und Magie. Die Oper ‘Moses und Aaron’ von Arnold
Schönberg (Heidelberg, 1959; English translation, Schoenberg’s ‘Moses апа
Aaron’, New York, 1964).

—‘Arnold Schoenberg and the Theatre’, Musical Quarterly xlviii (1962).
47

718 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stravinsky

BLITZSTEIN, Marc: “Тһе Phenomenon of Stravinsky’, Musical Quarterly, xxi (1935).

BonETZ, BENJAMIN and ЕрууАвр T. Соме (eds.): Perspectives on Schoenberg and
Stravinsky (Princeton, N.J., 1968).

CRAFT, ROBERT: Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship 1948-1971 (New York, 1972).

FLEISCHER, HERBERT: Stravinsky (Berlin, 1931).

FREDERICKSON, LAWRENCE: Stravinsky’s Instrumentation: A Study of his Orchestral
Techniques (Diss. Univ. of Illinois, 1960).

HANDSCHIN, JACQUES: Igor Strawinsky : Versuch einer Einführung (Zurich, 1933).

KIRCHMEYER, HELMUT: Igor Stravinsky: Zeitgeschichte im Personlichkeitsbild:
Grundlagen und Voraussetzungen zur modernen Konstructionstechnik (Regens-
burg, 1958).

LANG, PAUL HENRY (ed.): Stravinsky: A New Appraisal of His Work (New York,
1963).

NABOKOV, NicHOLAs: Igor Strawinsky (Berlin, 1964).

RAMUZ, CHARLES FERDINAND: Souvenirs sur Igor Strawinsky (Paris, 1929; 2nd ed.,
Lausanne, 1952).

SCHAEFFNER, ANDRE: Strawinsky (Paris, 1931).

STRAVINSKY, Тсов: Autobiography (New York, 1962).

—— Poétiques musicales (Cambridge, Mass., 1942; English translation, Poetics of
Music, New York, 1956).

VLAD, RoMAN: Strawinsky (Turin, 1958; English translation, London, 1960),

WADE, CARROLL D.: “А selected Bibliography of Igor Stravinsky', Musical Quarterly,
xlviii (1962); repr. in Paul Henry Lang, ed., Stravinsky: A New Appraisal of his
Work (New York, 1963).

White, ERIC WALTER: Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (London, 1966).

Szymanowski

GAVEZZENI, GIANANDREA: ‘Karol Szymanowskie il Re Ruggiero’, Rassegna musicale,
x (1937).

JACHIMECKI, ZDZISEAW: Karol Szymanowski (Cracow, 1927).

Varése

Сноу WEN-CHUNG: ‘Varèse: А Sketch of the Man and his Music’, Musical
Quarterly, lii (1966).

CowELL, HENRY: “Тһе Music of Edgard Varèse’, Modern Music, у (1928).

VARESE, Louise: Varèse: A Looking-Glass Diary. Vol. Т: 1883-1928 (New York,
1972).

VIVIER, ODILE: ‘Innovation instrumentale d'Edgar Varése', Revue musicale, ccxxvi
(1955).

Webern

ANTHONY, DoNALD B.: Microrhythm in the Published Works of Anton Webern
(Diss. Stanford Univ., 1968).

Anton Webern, special issue of Die Reihe, ii (German ed., 1955; English ed., 1958).

Brown, Ковевт B.: The Early Atonal Music of Anton Webern: Sound Material
and Structure (Diss. Brandeis Univ., 1965).

KaARKOsCHKA, ERHARD: Studien zur Entwicklung der Kompositiontechnik іт
Friihwerk Anton Weberns (Diss. Tiibingen, 1959).

KOLNEDER, WALTER: Anton Webern: Einführung in Werk und Stil (Rodenkirchen,
1961; English translation, London, 1968).

McKENZIE, WALLACE CHESSLEY: Zhe Music of Anton Webern (Diss. North Texas
State College, 1960).

PERLE, GEORGE: ‘Webern’s Twelve-Tone Sketches’, Musical Quarterly, lvii (1971).

REICH, WILLI (ed.): Anton Webern: Weg und Gestalt. Selbstzeugnisse und Worte der
Freunde (Zurich, 1961).

BIBLIOGRAPHY 719

WEBERN, ANTON: Der Weg zur neuen Musik, ed. by Willi Reich (Vienna, 1960;
English translation, The Path to the New Music, Bryn Mawr, Pa., 1963).
Webern Archive of the Moldenhauer Collection at the University of Washington
(Seattle, 1963). (Now located at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.)

Weill

BLITZSTEIN, Marc: “Оп Mahagonny’, The Score (1958).

Drew, Davip: *Topicality and the Universal: The Strange Case of Weill's Die
Bürgschaft', Music and Letters, xxxix (1958).

——‘Weill’s School Opera Der Jasager’, Musical Times, cvi (1965).

GUTMAN, Hans: ‘Mahagonny and Other Novelties’, Modern Music, vii (1930).

KOTSCHENREUTHER, HELLMUT: Kurt Weill (Berlin, 1962).

STEFAN-GRUENFELDT, PAUL: ‘Antinomie der neuen Oper: Kurt Weill und Strawin-
sky’, Musikblatter des Anbruch, x (1928).

Torksponr, CACILIE: John Gay's 'Beggar's Opera’ und Bert Brechts ‘Dreigroschenoper’
(Diss. Bonn Univ., 1934).

CHAPTER V

MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN MAINSTREAM 1940-1960

(i) General

ADORNO, T. W.: Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen, 1948).

— —'Modern Music is growing old’, The Score, xviii (1956).

BASART, ANN PHILLIPS: Serial Music: a Classified Bibliography on 12-tone and
Electronic Music (Berkeley, 1961).

Cross, ANTHONY: “Тһе Significance of Aleatoricism in twentieth-century Music’,
Music Review, xxix (1968).

EVANS, PETER: ‘Compromises with Serialism', Proceedings of the Royal Musical
Association, Іххху (1962).

FORTE, ALLEN: Contemporary Tone Structures (New York, 1955).

GERHARD, ROBERTO: ‘Developments in twelve-note technique’, The Score, xvii
(1956).

——-'Tonality in twelve-note music’, The Score, vi (1952).

KRENEK, ERNsT: *New developments of the twelve tone technique', Music Review,
iv (1943).

——— Extents and limits of serial techniques’, Musical Quarterly, xlvi (1960).

LANG, PAUL HENRY and BRODER, NATHAN (eds.): Contemporary Music in Europe
(New York, 1965).

КОЕЕВ, ЈОЅЕЕ: Composition with Twelve Notes related only to one another (London,
1954).

Ruwert, NicoLas: ‘Contradictions within the serial language’, Die Reihe, vi (1964).

VLAD, ROMAN: Модегний e tradizione nella musica contemporanea (Turin, 1955).

Хиллс, WINFRIED: Variationen über neue Musik (Munich, 1959; reissued as Die
neue Musik: Linien und Portráts, 1963).

(ii) Individual Composers

Boulez

BOULEZ, PIERRE: ‘Propositions’, Polyphonie, ii (1948).

— АЕ the ends of fruitful land’, Die Reihe, i (1955).

— ‘Sonate, que me veux-tu?’, Perspectives of New Music, i (1963).
——‘Alea’, Perspectives of New Music, iii (1964).

— — Penser la musique aujourd'hui (Paris, 1964; English translation, Boulez on
Music Today, London, 1971).

GOLEA, ANTOINE: Rencontres avec Pierre Boulez (Paris, 1958).

720 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dallapiccola

DALLAPICCOLA, Їллїсї: “Оп Ше twelve-note road’, Music Survey, iv (1951).

NATHAN, Hans: “Тһе twelve-tone compositions of Luigi Dallapiccola’, Musical
Quarterly, xliv (1958).

—‘Luigi Dallapiccola’ (conversations), Music Review, xxvii (1966).

VLAD, Комам: Luigi Dallapiccola (Milan, 1957).

Egk 5
WOÓRNER, К. H.: ‘Egk and Orff’, Music Review, xiv (1953).

Gerhard
Drew, Davip: ‘Roberto Gerhard—the musical character’, The Score, xvii (1956).

Henze

HENZE, HANS WERNER: Essays (Mainz, 1964).

Hindemith

BRINER, ANDREAS: Paul Hindemith (Zürich, 1971).

HINDEMITH, PAUL: The Craft of Musical Composition (London, 1942).

—— —A Composer's World (New York, 1952).

КЕМР, IAN: Hindemith (London, 1970).

LANDAU, VICTOR: ‘Paul Hindemith: a Case Study in Theory and Practice’, Music
Review, xxi (1960).

—— ‘Hindemith the System Builder: a Critique’, Music Review, xxii (1961).

REDLICH, H. F.: ‘Paul Hindemith: a Reassessment’, Music Review, xxv (1964).

STEPHAN, RUDOLPH: ‘Hindemith’s Marienleben (1922-48): an assessment of its
two versions’, Music Review, xv (1954).

STROBEL, HEINRICH: Paul Hindemith (3rd edition, Mainz, 1948).

THOMPSON, WILLIAM: ‘Hindemith’s Contribution to Music Theory’, Journal of
Music Theory’, ix (1965).

Ligeti
LIGETI, GYÖRGY: ‘Metamorphoses of Musical Form’, Die Reihe, vii (1965).

Messiaen

Drew, рлур: ‘Messiaen—a provisional study’, The Score, x, xii and xiv (1954-5).
GoLÉA, ANTOINE: Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen (Paris, 1961).

MESSIAEN, OLIVIER: Technique de mon langage musicale (Paris, 1944).

Orff
WOÓRNER, K. H.: ‘Egk and Orff’, Music Review, xiv (1953).

Petrassi
WEISSMANN, JOHN: Goffredo Petrassi (Milan, 1957).

Pousseur
PoUssEUR, HENRI: ‘Music, Form and Practice’, Die Reihe, vi (1964).
—‘Outline of a Method’, Die Reihe, iii (1959).

Schaeffer E
SCHAEFFER, PIERRE: А [а recherche d'une musique concréte (Paris, 1952).

Schoenberg
See Bibliography to Chapter IV.

Skalkottas
PAPAIOANNOU, YIANNIS: ‘Nikos Skalkottas', in Hartog (ed.), European Music in
the Twentieth Century (2nd ed., London, 1961).

BIBLIOGRAPHY 721

Stockhausen

HARVEY, JONATHAN: ‘Stockhausen: Theory and Music’, Music Review, xxix (1968).
MARCUS, GENEVIEVE: ‘Stockhausen’s Zeitmasse', Music Review, xxix (1968).
STOCKHAUSEN, KARLHEINZ: ‘How time passes . . .^, Die Reihe, iii (1959).

— — Electronic and Instrumental Music’, Die Reihe, v (1961).

— —'Music in Space’, Die Reihe, v (1961).

— — Music and Speech’, Die Reihe, vi (1964).

— "The Concept of Unity in Electronic Music’, Perspectives of New Music, 1 (1962).
WORNER, К. H.: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Werk und Wollen (Rodenkirchen, 1963).

Stravinsky

ВАввит, Милом: ‘Remarks on the recent Stravinsky’, Perspectives of New Music,
ii (1964).

Cong, E. T.: “Тһе Uses of Convention: Stravinsky and his Models’, Musical
Quarterly, xlviii (1962).

— —'Stravinsky: the Progress of a Method’, Perspectives of New Music, i (1962).

GERHARD, ROBERTO: ‘Twelve-note technique in Stravinsky’, The Score, xx (1957).

PAULI, HANsJORG: ‘On Stravinsky's Threni', Tempo, xix (1958).

STEIN, Erwin: ‘Stravinsky’s Septet—an Analysis’, Tempo, xxxi (1954).

STRAVINSKY, IGOR and CRAFT, ROBERT: Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (London,
1959).

— Memories and Commentaries (London, 1960).

——Expositions and Developments (London, 1961).

——Dialogues and a Diary (London, 1963).

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