The Rest is Noise

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by Fourth Estate in 2007 and by Harper Perennial in 2009

First published in 2007 by Farrar Straus and Giroux in the United States

Copyright © Alex Ross 2007 and 2009

Alex Ross asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007380862

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Praise

ALEX ROSS, music critic for the New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany, three honorary doctorates and a MacArthur Fellowship.

In 2013, a groundbreaking, year-long festival at the Southbank Centre will bring The Rest is Noise to life – with concerts, talks and other events inspired by the book

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2008

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD 2007

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2008

‘Just occasionally someone writes a book you’ve waited all your life to read. Alex Ross’s enthralling history of twentieth-century music is one of those books’

Guardian

‘A superb and inclusive account by a champion of modern music’

Sunday Times

‘Print is silent. Which is why the task of writing about music is so difficult. I should therefore probably explain that the noise you now ought to be hearing is the sound of my hands as they stop typing and start applauding this vital, engaging, happily polyphonic book’

Observer

‘Magnificent: a study of the politics of music and also of the impact of political movements on music. A harmonious mix of musical gossip and politics’

Sunday Telegraph

‘To write a book that convincingly describes the path of classical music through the turbulent twentieth century is an act worthy of celebration. To write one, as Alex Ross has, that is entertaining, enlightening and inspiring to both devotees and less classically literate music fans is worth breaking out the bunting for’

Time Out

‘A remarkable achievement, quite outstripping comparable surveys. A highly enjoyable book of impressive scholarship and critical intelligence that every music lover should read’

Spectator

‘Alex Ross’s incredibly nourishing book will rekindle anyone’s fire for music’

BJÖRK

‘It’s a history of 20th-century music so vivid and original in approach that it made me listen again to many pieces I thought I knew well’

PHILIP PULLMAN, Guardian, Books of the Year

‘An audacious, pacy, thrilling survey of 20th-century composition’

The Times, Books of the Year

‘Essential …An engrossing survey of classical music in the 20th century’

CASPAR LLEWELLYN SMITH, Observer, Books of the Year

‘Stunning …Visionary music critic Alex Ross comes closer than anyone to describing the spellbinding sensations music provokes. The Rest is Noise spins out seamlessly and is a joy to read. Ross shadows musicians and their intimate worlds in vibrant detail’

BLAIR TINDALL, Financial Times, Books of the Year

‘The Rest is Noise combines scrupulous and inventive analyses of the 20th century’s music with lavish care over that music’s improvised history’

ADAM THIRLWELL, Guardian, Books of the Year

‘A gripping account’

ROBERT SANDALL, Sunday Times, Books of the Year

‘The New Yorker’s supremely gifted critic tells the story of musical composition through the 20th century – and makes it sound brand new. Here is a writer who can link life and work without trivialising either. This history of modern sounds develops into an intimate history of modern souls as well’

BOYD TONKIN, Independent, Books of the Year

‘Puts the history back into music and the music back into history. Alex Ross’s brave avoidance of musical notation and brilliant use of metaphorical and descriptive language, means that The Rest is Noise grapples with the actual stuff of music as few other books have done’

TLS

‘A panoramic history of music in the last century. Magisterial’

DAMIAN THOMPSON, Daily Telegraph

‘An utterly gripping account of the relationship between music and public life in the last century. The Rest is Noise is a wonderful book, both as an account of 20th-century music and as something of a cautionary tale about the influence of politics on art’

Scotland on Sunday

‘There is so much in it that is good, and so much of the discussion of particular works is likely to make any reader want to go off and listen to the music, for themselves. If it does encourage more people to explore, it will be a work of cultural importance’

Prospect

‘The Rest is Noise looks set to become the definitive reference point for everyone who loves modern music’

LRB

‘Alex Ross, music critic at the New Yorker, has confronted this colossal task with all the necessary qualities and produced a book that makes some sense of the most convoluted musical century of human history. Ross takes the extremes, the wild diversity and contradictions as manifest realities to be understood through their relationships, rather than antagonisms that must cancel each other out’

The Wire

‘Full of material you really need to savour. It is the superb selection of image and anecdote that makes this book work so well. Warm, joyful and unfailingly adroit in his evocation of music in words – Ross, with this book, establishes himself as the supreme champion of modern music’

Sunday Times

By the same author

Listen to This

Dedication

For my parents and Jonathan

Epigraph

It seems to me … that despite the logical, moral rigor music may appear to display, it belongs to a world of spirits, for whose absolute reliability in matters of human reason and dignity I would not exactly want to put my hand in the fire. That I am nevertheless devoted to it with all my heart is one of those contradictions which, whether a cause for joy or regret, are inseparable from human nature.

—Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

Where to Listen

Part I - 1900–1933

1. The Golden Age

2. Doctor Faust

3. Dance of the Earth

4. Invisible Men

5. Apparition from the Woods

6. City of Nets

Part II - 1933–1945

7. The Art of Fear

8. Music for All

9. Death Fugue

Part III - 1945–2000

10. Zero Hour

11. Brave New World

12. “Grimes! Grimes!”

13. Zion Park

14. Beethoven Was Wrong

15. Sunken Cathedrals

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Suggested Listening and Reading

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

PREFACE

In the spring of 1928, George Gershwin, the creator of Rhapsody in Blue, toured Europe and met the leading composers of the day. In Vienna, he called at the home of Alban Berg, whose blood-soaked, dissonant, sublimely dark opera Wozzeck had had its premiere in Berlin three years earlier. To welcome his American visitor, Berg arranged for a string quartet to perform his Lyric Suite, in which Viennese lyricism was refined into something like a dangerous narcotic.

Gershwin then went to the piano to play some of his songs. He hesitated. Berg’s work had left him awestruck. Were his own pieces worthy of these murky, opulent surroundings? Berg looked at him sternly and said, “Mr. Gershwin, music is music.”

If only it were that simple. Ultimately, all music acts on its audience through the same physics of sound, shaking the air and arousing curious sensations. In the twentieth century, however, musical life disintegrated into a teeming mass of cultures and subcultures, each with its own canon and jargon. Some genres have attained more popularity than others; none has true mass appeal. What delights one group gives headaches to another. Hip-hop tracks thrill teenagers and horrify their parents. Popular standards that break the hearts of an older generation become insipid kitsch in the ears of their grandchildren. Berg’s Wozzeck is, for some, one of the most gripping operas ever written; Gershwin thought so, and emulated it in Porgy and Bess, not least in the hazy chords that float through “Summertime.” For others, Wozzeck is a welter of ugliness. The arguments easily grow heated; we can be intolerant in reaction to others’ tastes, even violent. Then again, beauty may catch us in unexpected places. “Wherever we are,” John Cage wrote in his book Silence, “what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.”

Twentieth-century classical composition, the subject of this book, sounds like noise to many. It is a largely untamed art, an unassimilated underground. While the splattered abstractions of Jackson Pollock sell on the art market for a hundred million dollars or more, and while experimental works by Matthew Barney or David Lynch are analyzed in college dorms across the land, the equivalent in music still sends ripples of unease through concert audiences and makes little perceptible impact on the outside world. Classical music is stereotyped as an art of the dead, a repertory that begins with Bach and terminates with Mahler and Puccini. People are sometimes surprised to learn that composers are still writing at all.

Yet these sounds are hardly alien. Atonal chords crop up in jazz; avant-garde sounds appear in Hollywood film scores; minimalism has marked rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward. Sometimes the music resembles noise because it is noise, or near to it, by design. Sometimes, as with Berg’s Wozzeck, it mixes the familiar and the strange, consonance and dissonance. Sometimes it is so singularly beautiful that people gasp in wonder when they hear it. Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, with its grandly singing lines and gently ringing chords, stops time with each performance.

Because composers have infiltrated every aspect of modern existence, their work can be depicted only on the largest possible canvas. The Rest Is Noise chronicles not only the artists themselves but also the politicians, dictators, millionaire patrons, and CEOs who tried to control what music was written; the intellectuals who attempted to adjudicate style; the writers, painters, dancers, and filmmakers who provided companionship on lonely roads of exploration; the audiences who variously reveled in, reviled, or ignored what composers were doing; the technologies that changed how music was made and heard; and the revolutions, hot and cold wars, waves of emigration, and deeper social transformations that reshaped the landscape in which composers worked.

What the march of history really has to do with music itself is the subject of sharp debate. In the classical field it has long been fashionable to fence music off from society, to declare it a self-sufficient language. In the hyper-political twentieth century, that barrier crumbles time and again: Béla Bartók writes string quartets inspired by field recordings of Transylvanian folk songs, Shostakovich works on his Leningrad Symphony while German guns are firing on the city, John Adams creates an opera starring Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong. Nevertheless, articulating the connection between music and the outer world remains devilishly difficult. Musical meaning is vague, mutable, and, in the end, deeply personal. Still, even if history can never tell us exactly what music means, music can tell us something about history. My subtitle is meant literally; this is the twentieth century heard through its music.

Histories of music since 1900 often take the form of a teleological tale, a goal-obsessed narrative full of great leaps forward and heroic battles with the philistine bourgeoisie. When the concept of progress assumes exaggerated importance, many works are struck from the historical record on the grounds that they have nothing new to say. These pieces often happen to be those that have found a broader public—the symphonies of Sibelius and Shostakovich, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Carl Orff’s Carmina burana. Two distinct repertories have formed, one intellectual and one popular. Here they are merged: no language is considered intrinsically more modern than any other.

In the same way, the story criss-crosses the often ill-defined or imaginary border separating classical music from neighboring genres. Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, the Beatles, and the Velvet Underground have substantial walk-on roles, as the conversation between Gershwin and Berg goes on from generation to generation. Berg was right: music unfolds along an unbroken continuum, however dissimilar the sounds on the surface. Music is always migrating from its point of origin to its destiny in someone’s fleeting moment of experience—last night’s concert, tomorrow’s solitary jog.

The Rest Is Noise is written not just for those well versed in classical music but also—especially—for those who feel passing curiosity about this obscure pandemonium on the outskirts of culture. I approach the subject from multiple angles: biography, musical description, cultural and social history, evocations of place, raw politics, firsthand accounts by the participants themselves. Each chapter cuts a wide swath through a given period, but there is no attempt to be comprehensive: certain careers stand in for entire scenes, certain key pieces stand in for entire careers, and much great music is left on the cutting-room floor.

A list of recommended recordings appears at the back, along with ac know ledg ments of the many brilliant scholars who assisted me and citations of the hundreds of books, articles, and archival resources that I consulted. More, including dozens of sound samples, can be found at www.therestisnoise.com. The abundant, benighted twentieth century is only beginning to be seen whole.

WHERE TO LISTEN

If you would like to hear some of the music discussed in these pages, a free audio companion is available at www.therestisnoise.com/audio. There you will find streaming samples arranged by chapter, along with links to audio-rich Web sites and other channels of direct access to the music. An iTunes playlist of twenty representative excerpts can be found at www.therestisnoise.com/playlist. For a glossary of musical terms go to www.therestisnoise.com/glossary.

Part I - 1900–1933

I am ready, I feel free To cleave the ether on a novel flight, To novel spheres of pure activity.

—GOETHE, FAUST, PART I

1 THE GOLDEN AGE

Strauss, Mahler, and the Fin de Siècle

When Richard Strauss conducted his opera Salome on May 16, 1906, in the Austrian city of Graz, several crowned heads of European music gathered to witness the event. The premiere of Salome had taken place in Dresden five months earlier, and word had got out that Strauss had created something beyond the pale—an ultra-dissonant biblical spectacle, based on a play by an Irish degenerate whose name was not mentioned in polite company, a work so frightful in its depiction of adolescent lust that imperial censors had banned it from the Court Opera in Vienna.

Giacomo Puccini, the creator of La Bohème and Tosca, made a trip north to hear what “terribly cacophonous thing” his German rival had concocted. Gustav Mahler, the director of the Vienna Opera, attended with his wife, the beautiful and controversial Alma. The bold young composer Arnold Schoenberg arrived from Vienna with his brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky and no fewer than six of his pupils. One of them, Alban Berg, traveled with an older friend, who later recalled the “feverish impatience and boundless excitement” that all felt as the evening approached. The widow of Johann Strauss II, composer of On the Beautiful Blue Danube, represented old Vienna.

Ordinary music enthusiasts filled out the crowd—“young people from Vienna, with only the vocal score as hand luggage,” Richard Strauss noted. Among them may have been the seventeen-year-old Adolf Hitler, who had just seen Mahler conduct Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in Vienna. Hitler later told Strauss’s son that he had borrowed money from relatives to make the trip. There was even a fictional character present—Adrian Leverkühn, the hero of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the tale of a composer in league with the devil.

The Graz papers brought news from Croatia, where a Serbo-Croat movement was gaining momentum, and from Russia, where the tsar was locked in conflict with the country’s first parliament. Both stories carried tremors of future chaos—the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, the Russian Revolution of 1917. For the moment, though, Europe maintained the facade of civilization. The British war minister, Richard Haldane, was quoted as saying that he loved German literature and enjoyed reciting passages from Goethe’s Faust.

Strauss and Mahler, the titans of Austro-German music, spent the afternoon in the hills above the city, as Alma Mahler recounted in her memoirs. A photographer captured the composers outside the opera house, apparently preparing to set out on their expedition—Strauss smiling in a boater hat, Mahler squinting in the sun. The company visited a waterfall and had lunch in an inn, where they sat at a plain wooden table. They must have made a strange pair: Strauss, tall and lanky, with a bulbous forehead, a weak chin, strong but sunken eyes; Mahler, a full head shorter, a muscular hawk of a man. As the sun began to go down, Mahler became nervous about the time and suggested that the party head back to the Hotel Elefant, where they were staying, to prepare for the performance. “They can’t start without me,” Strauss said. “Let ’em wait.” Mahler replied: “If you won’t go, then I will—and conduct in your place.”

Mahler was forty-five, Strauss forty-one. They were in most respects polar opposites. Mahler was a kaleidoscope of moods—childlike, heaven-storming, despotic, despairing. In Vienna, as he strode from his apartment near the Schwarzenbergplatz to the opera house on the Ringstrasse, cabdrivers would whisper to their passengers, “Der Mahler!” Strauss was earthy, self-satisfied, more than a little cynical, a closed book to most observers. The soprano Gemma Bellincioni, who sat next to him at a banquet after the performance in Graz, described him as “a pure kind of German, without poses, without long-winded speeches, little gossip and no inclination to talk about himself and his work, a gaze of steel, an indecipherable expression.” Strauss came from Munich, a backward place in the eyes of sophisticated Viennese such as Gustav and Alma. Alma underlined this impression in her memoir by rendering Strauss’s dialogue in an exaggerated Bavarian dialect.

Not surprisingly, the relationship between the two composers suffered from frequent misunderstandings. Mahler would recoil from unintended slights; Strauss would puzzle over the sudden silences that ensued. Strauss was still trying to understand his old colleague some four decades later, when he read Alma’s book and annotated it. “All untrue,” he wrote, next to the description of his behavior in Graz.

“Strauss and I tunnel from opposite sides of the mountain,” Mahler said. “One day we shall meet.” Both saw music as a medium of conflict, a battlefield of extremes. They reveled in the tremendous sounds that a hundred-piece orchestra could make, yet they also released energies of fragmentation and collapse. The heroic narratives of nineteenth-century Romanticism, from Beethoven’s symphonies to Wagner’s music dramas, invariably ended with a blaze of transcendence, of spiritual overcoming. Mahler and Strauss told stories of more circuitous shape, often questioning the possibility of a truly happy outcome.

Each made a point of supporting the other’s music. In 1901, Strauss became president of the Allgemeiner deutscher Musikverein, or All-German Music Association, and his first major act was to program Mahler’s Third Symphony for the festival the following year. Mahler’s works appeared so often on the association’s programs in subsequent seasons that some critics took to calling the organization the Allgemeiner deutscher Mahlerverein. Others dubbed it the Annual German Carnival of Cacophony. Mahler, for his part, marveled at Salome. Strauss had played and sung the score for him the previous year, in a piano shop in Strasbourg, while passersby pressed against the windows trying to overhear. Salome promised to be one of the highlights of Mahler’s Vienna tenure, but the censors balked at accepting an opera in which biblical characters perform unspeakable acts. Furious, Mahler began hinting that his days in Vienna were numbered. He wrote to Strauss in March 1906: “You would not believe how vexatious this matter has been for me or (between ourselves) what consequences it may have for me.”