The Archaeology of Postmodernity, Part III: Transvestism in Music
E. R. E. Knutsson
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Knutsson-PostmodernismIII.html#EK
December 27, 2009
The Austrian statesman Clemens von Metternich once declared that the Orient started southeast of the city walls of Vienna. Western Europe's centuries-long confrontation with Oriental empires helped define Central Europe as a cultural and historical frontier region. The experience of imperial subjugation and multi-ethnicity — an Eastern European patchwork of ethnic groups with different languages, cultures, and traditions living closely together — became essential parts of the Central European historical experience.
Schloss Schönbrunn, Vienna
The allegiance of Jews to the institutions of the Habsburg monarchy was largely motivated by the dynastic program of the Habsburgs, who maintained that their own interests transcended the narrow concerns of specific ethnic, religious, or national groups in their multinational empire.
Emperor Joseph II's Patent of Tolerance in 1781 marked the beginning of the formal, political emancipation of the Jews. This process was further fueled by the revolutions of 1848, and was formally completed in 1867 when the Austrian and Hungarian constitutions established the principle of equality for all citizens. Robert Wistrich points out that by 1907, "there was already a Jewish National Club in the Austrian Parliament, where Jewish deputies represented explicitly Jewish interests — the kind of separatist Jewish politics which did not exist anywhere in the western world."
No wonder, then, that the Jews of Austria, regardless of social class, religious views, or level of modernization, "were Habsburg-treu (loyal to the dynasty) in the late nineteenth century," as noted by Marsha Rozenblit:
The Jews … tended to identify themselves as Austrians rather than as members of the German nation. Jewish spokesmen emphasized the Austrian identity of Jews. … They understood that the supra-national empire best served them as a bulwark against the narrow chauvinism and anti-Semitism of the national camps.
Nevertheless, despite their allegiance to the monarchy, Jews retained a strong national identity as Jews. Joseph Samuel Bloch, the Galician-born Viennese rabbi and parliamentary deputy who tirelessly fought anti-Semitism, provides an excellent example of such behavior. According to Rozenblit:
[Bloch] was no Zionist, yet as early as the 1880s he wanted his newspaper to 'rouse a feeling of kinship among all who belonged to the Jewish race and to make them conscious of their inescapable fate, as well as at the same time arousing a noble pride in their common past'. He urged the founding of a defence organization against anti-Semitism in 1884 (the Union had been founded in 1886) which would 'elevate and foster Jewish consciousness (Stammesbewusstsein)'.
As Anthony Alofsin points out, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was "a collage of so many nationalities that it could never be transformed into a unified nation-state." Within this collage, Jews achieved cultural preeminence. As Robert S. Wistrich points out,
In 1900, Gustav Mahler was the leading conductor and composer in the city, Karl Kraus its high priest of satire, Arthur Schnitzler its outstanding playwright, Adolf von Sonnenthal its greatest actor. The founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, Victor Adler, was a 'Protestant' Jew and many of his leading associates were middle-class Jewish intellectuals. Sigmund Freud had just published his epoch-making Interpretation of Dreams and psychoanalysis was about to be born. Waiting in the wings were such central figures of twentieth-century culture as ArnoldSchoenberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Buber and Franz Kafka, not to mention writers like Joseph Roth, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Felix Salten, Stefan Zweig and Peter Altenberg – all of them of Jewish origin.
The result was, says Wistrich, a multi-ethno-cultural encounter that "proved to be a cradle of modernism and post-modernism in the arts and sciences":
The fact that in the versunkene Welt (sunken world) of 1900 most of high culture was 'Jewish' did not prevent the emergence of a crude, atavistic, tribal nationalism which would eventually culminate in theAnschluss less than four decades later and the destruction of Austrian Jewry. Indeed, the brilliance of the Jewish achievement in fin-de-siècle Vienna … was undoubtedly a contributing factor to the tragic end.
Schoenberg: Rome vs Jerusalem — Judea vs Germania?
Alexander Ringer points out, perhaps defensively, that "as long as familiarity with New England transcendentalism or American individualism is considered indispensable for a meaningful appraisal of Charles Ives and his particular mission, Arnold Schoenberg, his exact contemporary and eventual fellow American, deserves equally serious attention in equivalent Jewish terms."
In this context, the significance of Schoenberg's "antirational" view of art and his personal experiences with anti-Semitism in the early 1920s has beenemphasized:
His acknowledgement that he could not escape his Jewish heritage initiated a protracted period of reflection upon Jewish issues from both theological and political points of view culminating in the early 1930s with yet another attempt to give a comprehensive statement of his position by means of words and music — this time in his opera Moses and Aron, which presents his personal vision of Judaism.
The moment of truth is usually believed to have come in 1921, when he was asked for his certificate of baptism (to prove that he was not a Jew) while on holiday in Mattsee, near Salzburg (Austria). Schoenberg explicitly articulated his identification with a classically Jewish perspective and declared himself"no longer a European" but a Jew, in a letter to the painter Wassily Kandinsky written in 1923:
For I have at last learnt the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year, and I shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely even a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me), but I am a Jew. I am content that it should be so! Today I no longer wish to be an exception; I have no objection at all to being lumped together with all the rest. … We are two kinds of people. Definitively!
Schoenberg's statements of an explicitly Zionist position begin in 1924, when he, according to Nicholas Cook, "argued that only military victory could secure a Jewish state in Palestine against its enemies." In The Biblical Way (1926) he presented his belief in the necessity of an exodus of European Jewry in the form of a psychodrama.
In a letter of 13 June 1933, after Hitler's rise to power in Germany, Schoenberg declared: "It is necessary to give up all Western acquisitions; we are Asians and nothing essential binds us to the West. … We must return to our origins." A few weeks later, Schoenberg stated that he planned "a long tour of America, which could perhaps turn into a world tour, to persuade people to help the Jews in Germany." He explains that he considers this more important than his art, and that he is determined "to do nothing in the future but work for the Jewish national cause." On another occasion during the same year he states it explicitly: "I offer the sacrifice of my art for the sake of Jewry."
Arnold Schoenberg
According to William E. Benjamin, "there is no doubt that personal experiences of anti-Semitism in the years immediately following [World War I] played a role, though they seem only to have accelerated developments already taking place in [Schoenberg's] psyche."
Although Schoenberg — whose ancestry included both rabbis and cantors — for a period of time discarded the Jewish faith for Lutheran Protestantism, the proximity of his ideas to Jewish theological thought remained obvious. Adorno had a point when he asserted that Schoenberg translated the Old Testament ban on images into music: Dissonance — defined as form divorced from imitation of external nature — can be seen as a revitalization of the Jewish ban on images. The need to change forms of expression in art is absolutely necessary in order to fulfill the old Jewish prohibition on images. As William E. Benjamin points out,
Schoenberg realized that Judaism provided a historical model for what he was attempting as an artist. He came to see that the Jewish concept of law — as mediation between an unknowable God and the task of constructing a meaningful social existence — offered a parallel, on a grand scale, for his efforts to devise a method of pitch organization that could mediate between the idea of a piece — an intricate web of tonal relationships that appeared to him instantaneously and as a unit — and the listener's need to follow a musical argument over time.
From the early 1920s, Schoenberg was, according to Gottfried Boehm,"committed to an uncompromising Hebraic monotheism through which he sought to legitimize his modernist experiment in musical expression."Robert Wistrich emphasizes the "connection between Schoenberg's musical agenda, his Jewish identity and the commitment to a Jewish national renewal (by returning to the essence of ancient Judaism)": "The Mosaic aversion to idolatry, to visible symbols and mystery, as well as the Judaic call for the triumph of rational consciousness, are harnessed by Schoenberg to the cause of twentieth-century modernist expressionism."
In Judaism, as in Islam, "it was sacrilegious to make a figurative representation of God. With very few exceptions, there were no Jewish painters before the Russian artist Marc Chagall, who had to come to Paris to paint."
Gleichgewichtsstörung: The Schoenberg-Kandinsky-Tango
Schoenberg's friendship and cooperation with the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky — a philosemite who was erroneously listed as a Jew in the Grosse Jüdische National-Biographie (1929) — underscores the importance of the blurring of boundaries between art forms, as well as the underlying, religiously motivated, "aniconic" (i.e., without icons) or "iconoclastic" thematic structure.Music meant a great deal to Kandinsky; he referred to his own paintings as"compositions," and became deeply interested in Schoenberg's attempts to establish correspondences between musical tones and colors, and in his rejection of traditional tonal and harmonic patterns.
A new kind of transvestism among the arts was thus born:
We see, for example, a painter who wrote an opera libretto (Kokoschka), a poet who composed music (Pound), and a composer who painted pictures (Schoenberg). It is as if artistic talent were a kind of libido, an electricity that could discharge itself with equal success in a poem, a sonata, or a sculpture. Throughout the modernist movement, the major writers and composers both enforced and transgressed the boundaries among the various arts with unusual energy – almost savage at times.
As Christian Meyer, director of the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna,points out:
The first decade of the twentieth century saw an almost simultaneous musical and visual revolution. Because of Schoenberg's innovations, musicians were freed from the system of tempered tonality. At the same time, painters, especially Kandinsky, broke away from the system of central perspective and figural representation. These traditions had been legitimated for centuries by an overwhelming number of masterpieces and were so universally sanctioned that they had come to be regarded as the unquestioned essence of both arts. This explains the anarchist energy that had to be unleashed to liberate music and painting from the bonds of tradition, and at the same time it illuminates the "atonal character" of pre-World War I painting in Europe, which reflects this revolution. While Schoenberg's music was an inspiration to Kandinsky as he explored abstraction, today Kandinsky's paintings function as ambassadors for Schoenberg's musical works. The strong colorful essence of Kandinsky's prewar works has the same richness of sound colors in Schoenberg's compositions.
Schoenberg approved of Kandinsky's Der gelbe Klang with its "ungraspable" dimension, comparing it to his own Die glückliche Hand. Kandinsky explained to Schoenberg that Der gelbe Klang was based on the anti-geometrical type of construction attained "by the 'principle' of dissonance." Referring to the Ten Commandments in a letter to Schoenberg, he emphasized the power of negation and the difference between the law as a sign (word) and its signified (the meaning of the law). Kandinsky broke the link between the sign and a transcendental linguistic signified and hence equated art with reality. As with Schoenberg, the artistic form is conceived as pure perception — independent of external references.
Kandinsky and Schoenberg viewed their urge to change forms of expression as motivated by the desire to comply with the ancient Jewish prohibition against images. The old Jewish prohibition on images is characterized by its ability to uphold a separation between the pictorial and its referent, that is, the difference between the sign and what it signifies. Gottfried Boehm has emphasized the logic of concealment embedded in iconoclasm as a general condition of pictorial formulation or iconicity. From the Jewish prohibition on image, Boehm points out, the image is interpreted neither as a sign, substitute or thing, not according to the idea of depiction, "but rather as an apprehensible process which bears a striking similarity to language."
In Composition with Twelve Tones, Schoenberg described the affinity between music and language as grammatical in structure:
Comparable to the effect of punctuation in the construction of sentences, of subdivision into paragraphs, and of fusion into chapters; this affinity to language is mirrored in the construction of the composition, "the shape and size" of it, dynamics and tempo, ... instrumentation and orchestration.
Vassily Kandinsky's Impression III (Concert), painted immediately after attending a concert featuring Schoenberg's music in Munich on 2 January 1911
Schoenberg's conflation of music and language is consistent with the idea that Jews have no tradition in the plastic arts. As noted by Kalman P. Bland,"Jewish aniconism implies that Jews are a People of the Book rather than a People of the Image. Proponents of Jewish aniconism deny the existence of authentic Jewish traditions in painting, sculpture, and architecture. They concede that Jews imitate, in production and reception, the foreign art of their host or neighboring cultures. … The Hebrews tended to think of understanding as a kind of hearing, whereas the Greeks thought of it more as a kind of seeing."
As ordinarily understood, truth results from the relationship between language and the world. It does not apply to the decorative arts or music where the traditional purpose was to produce an aesthetic feeling of appreciation — "aesthetic hedonism" or pleasure. However, Steven Beller cites Schoenberg's maxim "music should not decorate, it should be true," and suggests that his explicit invocation of musical logic (most obviously in his serialism) represents an "invasion of the world of aesthetics by the ethical impulse of truth." Beller comments that "it does not seem improbable that this stemmed from attitudes whose origins lay in his Jewish background."Nicholas Cook agrees: "The whole debate about ornamentation … might be seen as resulting from the application to art of traditional Jewish thinking."
The Jewish position, inclined to abstraction as in the work of Schoenberg or Kraus, "stood in tension with the aesthetic hedonism of the official Catholic culture of Austrian society." No wonder, then, that shouting and scuffling accompanied the 1908 premiere of Schoenberg's Second Quartet in Vienna — a work that certainly did not result in aesthetic pleasure in the audience. A near-riot erupted on March 31, 1913, at an orchestral concert in Vienna in which works by Mahler, Berg, Webern, Zemlinsky, and Schoenberg were played.
As Carl Schorske points out,
The system Schoenberg thus devised was no return to the hierarchical, privileged order of the diatonic system. Yet its democracy of twelve tones would cohere again in a systematic way: in a hidden order, created by the composer — one in which above and below, forward and back, were related visibly to the analytic mind, even though not generally accessible to the listening ear. … Schoenberg as psychological Expressionist confronted his listener with an art whose surface was broken, charged with the full life of feeling of man adrift and vulnerable in the ungovernable universe; yet beneath it he posited out of his own powers a subliminal, inaudible world of rational order that would integrate the chaos. Here liberated dissonance became a new harmony; psychological chaos, a meta-sensuous order. … Thus Schoenberg the artist, even as he turned back to the faith of his fathers and submission to God, became man the creator, what Goethe would have called 'der kleine Gott der Welt.'
At a personal level, Schoenberg was hardly a moral icon. Richard Taruskinpoints out that Schoenberg's personality "was as absolutist and despotic as any dictator's," and that "his personal relationships could be repellently exploitative." Schoenberg's only name for skeptics, adversaries, or opponents was "enemies."
Nor was he shy about his own accomplishments. In endless pronouncements and anecdotes, Taruskin points out, Schoenberg claimed to have inherited the role of the Hegelian Weltgenie ("world-genius"). He loved to recall the answer that he gave an officer who asked him whether he was the Arnold Schoenberg:"Somebody had to be, nobody else volunteered, so I answered the call."
Nor are Schoenberg's own pronouncements on his role as a revolutionary to be taken at face value. The big step that others called the leap into "atonality," a term that he deplored for its negativity, Schoenberg called pantonality or the "emancipation of dissonance." But, as Taruskin points out, it was not dissonance itself that had been emancipated: It was the composer who was liberated "from the constraints of 'voice leading rules' whereby dissonance was subordinated to consonance in traditional harmony and counterpoint."
The assertion that Schoenberg's atonality represents a consequence of the chromaticism of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde has been commonplace for quite some time. Heinrich Schenker held that Wagner was directly to blame for the excesses of Schoenberg and his school. But, as Richard Taruskinpoints out, the Wagnerian "crisis of tonality" was not Wagnerian at all: "It was read back into Wagner by Schoenberg's apologists":
Wagner used the chromaticism of Tristan und Isolde to delay to the point of torture the harmonic resolution that would symbolize the slaking of sexual desire. That harmonic tension … was the mainspring that controlled the syntax of what we now call "tonal" music. Did the delays caused by Wagner's chromaticism attenuate that harmonic tension? Don't be silly. They only magnified it, vastly so. Wagner's chromaticism gave tonality a new source of strength and expressivity. The consequences Schoenberg drew from Wagner's musical style were entirely idiosyncratic and ahistorical, inevitable only in eyes blinded by "dialectic." To say the very least, they had nothing to do with Wagner's creative aims, least of all inTristan.
Schoenberg's style recognized "no distinction between consonance and dissonance, so that harmonically speaking, literally anything goes."Schoenberg once cracked to a pupil, "Now that I've emancipated dissonance, anybody can be a composer." As Taruskin emphasizes, removing the qualitative distinction between consonance and dissonance "eliminates the concept of the one being beautiful and the other ugly."
"The beginnings of Dada," as Tristan Tzara declared, "were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust." That disgust was reflected in Schoenberg's banal use of language in Die Sanftergebenen: "O wie schön lebt sich's doch im Dreck" (Oh, how beautiful it is to live in the muck).
Without Schoenberg, undoubtedly, "our era would have made a different sound." Doubtless it would have been much more pleasing to European ears.
E. R. E. Knutsson (email him) is a freelance writer.
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