The New York Review of Books - USA (2022-06-23)

34 The New York Review

the realm of music, with a capital offense.

Wozzeck quickly became an inter- national sensation, with productions in Prague, Leningrad, Oldenburg, Vi- enna, and other cities. So great was the interest in the first US performance, presented by the Philadelphia Grand Opera, led by Leopold Stokowski, in 1931, that a special train was chartered from New York for the city’s music cognoscenti (including George Gersh- win). During the last ten years of his life Berg was known as the celebrated creator of Wozzeck.

As Simms and Erwin point out, Berg reacted strangely to success. Although he enjoyed attending premieres of his opera, he began to retreat into a private world of secret programs and platonic affairs. In music, neoclassicism and other new styles were taking hold. Au- diences were looking beyond the atonality of the Second Viennese School, and Berg felt that he had to f ree h i msel f from Schoenberg’s influence and go his own way. And Helene’s ongoing health problems, real and imaginary, required lengthy absences for spa treatments, leaving him feeling alone and dejected. Berg responded by beginning a passionate but apparently unconsum- mated affair with Hanna Fuchs, the wife of the Prague industrialist Her- bert Fuchs- Robettin and sister of the novelist Franz Werfel. His next major work, the Lyric Suite for string quartet (1926), incorporated not only a newly worked- out twelve- tone system mark- edly different from Schoenberg’s but

also hidden symbols that referred to his liaison with Fuchs. Over time, Berg’s love fantasies extended to two other women, Anny Askenase and Edith Ed- wards, even as he continued to profess his commitment to Helene and his love for Hanna. The letters exchanged with all four reveal the bleakness Berg felt about his personal life and the growing unrest in Europe. After the Lyric Suite, Berg turned to the composition of Lulu. He had considered writing a second opera soon after completing Wozzeck but struggled to find an appropriate subject. At one point he made notes for an opera on Vincent van Gogh. Then he considered setting Gerhart Haupt- mann’s Und Pippa tanzt! (And Pippa Dances!), a popular German fairy- tale play in which the heroine dances her- self to death (not unlike the young girl in The Rite of Spring). Berg finally settled on Wedekind’s two Lulu plays, Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pando- ra’s Box), combining them into one three- act libretto. Widely condemned for its risqué subject matter, Wede- kind’s “Monster Tragedy,” as the plays were subtitled, traced the lascivious ad- ventures of the waif- temptress Lulu as she escapes the streets, becomes a ma- nipulated and manipulative mistress, takes various lovers (male and female), commits murder, and eventually dies at the hand of Jack the Ripper. Berg por- trayed Lulu’s destructive path with a wild array of musical styles, from traditional numbers with coloratura singing to passages in Sprechstimme (pitchless speechlike singing) to the use of twelve- tone and palindromic techniques.

As work on the opera stretched into the 1930s, he experienced financial difficulties when performances of his works in Germany dropped sharply, not only because the music’s style was objectionable to the Nazis but also because of his association with Schoen- berg, a German of Jewish descent. Berg repeatedly assured the authorities of his Aryan roots, but to no avail. To pay the bills he accepted a com- mission in the summer of 1935 to compose a concerto for the American violinist Louis Krasner. He initially planned an outgoing, upbeat piece designed for American audiences, but when Manon Gropius, the eighteen- year- old daughter of his friend and financial supporter Alma Mahler and her husband, the architect Walter Gropius, died suddenly, he turned the concerto into a four- movement elegy “in memory of an angel.” Containing a twelve- tone row as well as variations on the Bach chorale “Ich habe genug” (I am content), the Violin Concerto was his ultimate reconciliation of atonal and tonal elements in an instrumental work. He then returned to Lulu in the fall but was unable to finish the last act.

In many ways Berg was the odd man out in the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg began as a tonal composer in the late- Romantic German tradition (he dedicated his textbook on music theory, Harmonielehre, to Gus- tav Mahler), but after 1900 he moved toward a twelve- tone system in which every pitch in the scale carried equal weight. Schoenberg claimed that this liberated music from the traditional pull of tonal chords and emancipated dissonance from its expected resolution in consonance. For Schoenberg, dissonance was the new consonance. This method took shape around 1907 in works such as the Second String Quartet and reached full form in the Suite for Piano of 1923, in which interest is created through the manipulation of a tone row rather than harmonic resolution. By this point, however, atonality—or “pantonality,” as Schoen- berg called it—was falling from favor. Simms and Erwin quote the conduc- tor Bruno Walter, who said that pure twelve- tone music “may be clever or bold, but it can never be felt musically.” There may be some truth in this. Daniel Levitin, in This Is Your Brain on Music (2006), makes the case that for a musical work to be successful, the composer must provide “road signs” for the listener—audible markers that serve to guide and reward. Neurosci- entists, using MRIs, EEGs, and other tests, have shown recently that such signs are often analyzed in the brain by the hippocampus and the amygdala, which assign them emotional meaning that allows them to be memorized. If the markers are directionless—that is, not pointing in some way to a memorable harmonic or melodic goal—there’s less of a chance that information will be retained. This may be why purely atonal music has failed to win a wide following. Webern carried Schoenberg’s method to the next level, introducing techniques that systematized additional aspects of composition—not just pitch but also rhythm, instrumental color, and dynam- ics. The result was serialism, a mecha- nistic approach that evaporated the last drops of subjective warmth.

Berg went in a different direction. Ini- tially he seems to have adopted atonality in part to appease his overbearing teacher. The Three Orchestral Pieces, written in 1914–1915 for Schoenberg’s fortieth birthday, represents the high point of Berg’s rigid use of complex tex- tures, counterpoint, and twelve- tone chords and lines. The British musicolo- gist Mosco Carner termed the brutally dissonant third movement “organized chaos,” and even Berg’s loyal student Theodor Adorno later conceded that it was “terra incognita.” But from that point onward, Berg began to evolve his own distinctive style, one that combined aspects of to- nality and atonality. He continued to use twelve- tone technique, but he organized the rows in ways that maximized their tonal potential. The tone row in the Violin Concerto, for example, can be used to derive five traditionally tonal chords: two major triads, two minor triads, and a whole- tone tetrachord. Berg seems to have initiated this process with the concert aria Der Wein of 1929, in which a carefully constructed tone row contains tonal potential and is ac- companied by chords moving in recognizable circle- of- fifth progressions. Berg experimented with using highly dissonant chords in a tonal way: the three acts of Wozzeck conclude on nearly the same whole- tone harmony to create a Levitin- type road sign. And as he further distanced himself from Schoenberg, he increasingly softened the atonal aspects of his writing with elements borrowed from tonal music: the use of memorable lyrical melodies (“Lulu’s Lied” in Lulu), musical cross- references (the return of the Drum Major’s music in Wozzeck), traditional forms (the five character pieces, sym- phony in five movements, and five in- ventions of Wozzeck), recognizable conventions (the sextet in Lulu), plush orchestration (the exotic scoring of Der Wein), and symmetrical structures (the palindromic film as the centerpiece of Lulu). In Wozzeck he stipulated small choreographic details to strengthen the dramatic whole: the precise timing for lowering the curtain or that Marie must be stabbed only once. In Lulu he superimposed double casting on We- dekind’s play, to allow parallels to be drawn between characters in acts 1 and

All this led to music that is complex
yet coherent, dissonant yet appealing,
calculated yet seemingly spontaneous.
Berg also used codes in his music
to embed secrets from his private life.
This is especially evident in the Lyric
Suite. Although ostensibly a modern-
ist work based on a twentieth- century
tone row, its six movements have titles
characteristic of nineteenth- century
Romantic music: Allegretto gioviale,
Andante amoroso, Allegro misterioso/
Trio estatico, Adagio appassionato,
Presto delirando, and Largo desolato.
Berg publicly dedicated the work to
Zemlinsky, but in an annotated score
given to Hanna Fuchs he revealed that
he had written the piece for her, and
that he had celebrated their relation-
ship through a signature theme made
from their initials, HF and AB (in
German the note B- natural is H, and
B- flat is B) as well as references to their
personal numbers (10 for Hanna, the
number of letters in her name; 23 for
himself, derived from various sources).
Hanna’s daughter Dorothea, nick-
named Dodo, was also represented, in
the form of a motif based on the notes

Religion is the typical expression of an existence philosophy but individual and collective lifestyle and attitude also register. Existence philosophy awareness is very low despite tremendous advance. Proof: popular religious memes— Christ, Karma, Sharia, and Torah—express significant imaginative intelligence but score near zero in beauty, poetry and truth. Conceptions of a deity as a sin absolving child sacrificer, elite favoring soul recycler, or punisher for behavior and ethnic ritual non-compliance are unreal. High-awareness existence philosophy identifies genuine existence information agents. Believing in a directing or relevant deity means rejecting two of the three greatest existence insight providers—Darwin and Einstein. God has better things to do than pull the strings of existence; that is evolution’s job (so to speak). The only absolute in the universe: there are no absolutes; fast-moving events register differently relative to observer mass, position, trajectory, and velocity while slow-moving events are felt differently depending on biology, culture, environment and history. What is the third major existence insight stream? Identified by Kierkegaard, paradox conditions atmos- pherically. Mystery forces, gods, miracles, and myths are inauthentic existence conditioners. Backfires, greed, luck, perversities, self-interest miscalculations and unintended consequences, these, along with cooperation, discipline, good faith effort, knowledge, resource access, and science, condition existence paradoxically. You must be highly intelligent to be capable of self-annihilating stupidity. Consider the current paradoxes of early global capitalism. Description requires sorting through dozens of dimensions, unachievable without unity. Disunity inevitably results in serial disorder. Consider existence threats beyond natural phenomena: air-land-sea degradation; episodic destructive- ness caused by brinksmanship, dictatorship, militarism, or terrorism; omnipresent potential for biological engineering & nuclear accident and cyber, economic & nuclear war; and plague (economic & microbial). We are at a crossroad; will we realize thriving endurance or premature extinction? Self- engineering quality has emerged as the determining issue for our species. Recommendation #1: get real!

PayPal what you wish or request sample—[email protected] unsuitable for .epub because of footnotes, indicate format preference: Word or PDF (default)

For the first time, we can apply authentic physical and sociocultural theories to explain our behavior. Sinner or saint; social pyramid, square or rectangle; steward or wrecker; key continuums operate and determine, regardless of awareness. Deficits guarantee unpleasantness. Early global capitalism has its own logic; where trends to premature extinction proliferate, existence philosophy must challenge.

Stauffer 33 35 .indd 34 5 / 25 / 22 3 : 39 PM

The New York Review of Books - USA (2022-06-23)

Get our desktop app

Company

Features

Documentation

Resources