A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a Theoretic-Analytical Context

Elliott Antokoletz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415881876
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135037291
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a Theoretic-Analytical Context is an integrated account of the genres and concepts of twentieth-century art music, organized topically according to aesthetic, stylistic, technical, and geographic categories, and set within the larger political, social, economic, and cultural framework. While the organization is topical, it is historical within that framework.

Musical issues interwoven with political, cultural, and social conditions have had a significant impact on the course of twentieth-century musical tendencies and styles. The goal of this book is to provide a theoretic-analytical basis that will appeal to those instructors who want to incorporate into student learning an analysis of the musical works that have reflected cultural influences on the major musical phenomena of the twentieth century. Focusing on the wide variety of theoretical issues spawned by twentieth-century music, A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a Theoretic-Analytical Context reflects the theoretical/analytical essence of musical structure and design.

PART 1

Music to the Late 1940s

CHAPTER 1

The Vienna of Freud

Toward Expressionism and the Transformation of Chromatic Tonality

Transformation of German late Romantic musical styles into more concentrated expression istic idioms in the early twentieth century was concomitant with, and to an extent dependent upon, certain new tendencies in literature and psychology. Reaction by many turn-of-the-century dramatists against the naturalistic tendencies of nineteenth-century theatre appears to have been based on a new interest in psychological motivation and the projection of spiritual rather than naturalistic actualities. Some of the most prominent among these new dramatists were Strindberg, Yeats, Ibsen, Chekhov, Toller, Joyce, and other figures of diverse national backgrounds. In Vienna, these new literary assumptions were primarily manifested in the dramas and novels of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Jacob Wassermann, and Arthur Schnitzler, who founded the group known as “Young Vienna” in 1900 in opposition to the German naturalist school of drama. These writers were to reveal new psychological insights into the pathological conditions of their individual characters. As the seat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a scientific and cultural center, Vienna had also attracted such musical figures as Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Arnold Schoenberg. The qualitative change in the language of art music around the turn of the century was manifested especially in the music of Strauss and Schoenberg.

This change in music is emblematic not only of the reconceptualizations that were taking place in psychology and literature, but also in the changing conception of man and his relation to society on the whole. By the end of the nineteenth century, many comforting beliefs about what it meant to be human and the accompanying rules and traditions inherent in that notion had been brought into question. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution challenged mankind’s special connection with a divine creator, and even the idea of a deity external to man was replaced, among many, by reliance on the scientific method as the only acceptable avenue to truth. Ties between church and state came into question as the last vestiges of royalty’s claim to a divine mandate had vanished not only from nations, but also from the basic unit of the family. However, although God’s presence may no longer have been felt in traditional places of worship, it had not vanished. It had found shelter in the unconscious,¹ that mysterious realm of the human mind that Pierre Janet, Josef Breuer, and Sigmund Freud had begun to explore in a systematic way by the end of the nineteenth century. In music, Strauss and Schoenberg were to transform German late romanticism into a new realm of expressionistic intensity. Ethan Mordden places Strauss’s opera, Elektra (1909), in proper perspective:

a monumental nexus of revenge tragedy, psychological study, and classical reinvestment—the regeneration of old themes via modern interrogation … the heroine’s monologue, a case for Freud not merely in word-pictures, but in sounds as well, insatiable natterings, outbursts, screaming; Elektra’s confrontations with her sister and her mother, the latter scene presaging the expressionism of atonal opera.²

Mahler, Strauss, Hofmannsthal, and the Vienna of Freud

The Romantic ideal seems to have reached its culmination in the late nineteenth century in an almost unlimited sense of emotional intensity, which stretched the boundaries of symphonic and operatic structure. Among the last of the great composers in the Austro-German tradition, both Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss exemplify this ideal on the threshold of a new musical idiom. Their grandiose formal designs are also burdened by a new level of psychological intensity, even obsession, as in Strauss’s operatic setting of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra. Mahler’s own personality, which imbues every fiber of his musical structures, often invokes a gloomy, even pathological quality not unfamiliar to many Romantic figures. Mahler’s preoccupation with death in both his life and music, which perhaps reflects his unhappy, impoverished childhood, is projected into the titles and moods of such works as Kindertotenlieder (1901–1904) and the scherzo movement of his Fourth Symphony, in which the scordatura violin part was originally assigned the words “Death Strikes Up.” The text of the finale presents a child-like vision of heaven. Also, in the manuscript of his unfinished Tenth Symphony, his marginal annotations invoke “death and annihilation.” In addition to Mahler’s experience as a Jew, which led to his conversion to Catholicism in 1897, suffering continued to be a part of his personal life. Thus, in 1910, a year before his death, he entered into treatment with Sigmund Freud, who was greatly impressed by Mahler’s insights into psycho analysis.³

As with Mahler, Strauss’s music also reflects profound psychological perceptions. The means by which Strauss’s setting of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra (1906–1908) transforms the harmonic structures of the traditional major–minor scale system into a new musical language and how this language conveys the psycho-dramatic meaning of the original Hofmannsthal play are inextricably connected to the new dramaturgical and psychological principles that were emerging in literature at that time. In Vienna, these new literary assumptions were also manifested in the dramas and novels of Jacob Wassermann and Arthur Schnitzler, who founded the group known as “Young Vienna” in 1900 in opposition to the German Naturalist school of drama. Wearied by the “intolerable erotic screamings” of Tristan und Isolde, Hofmannsthal concerned himself with psychological motivation, more lucid character delineation, and the symbolic transcendence of external reality.

Between 1906 and 1908, Hofmannsthal and Strauss began their collaboration with the operatic setting of Elektra. In many of his librettos, Hofmannsthal approached the subject of love and hate from a profound human perspective. During this time in Vienna, Freud’s psychoanalytic studies, Studien über Hysterie (1895; Studies in Hysteria, 1955) and Die Traumdeutung (1899; The Interpretation of Dreams, 1953), were instrumental in establishing the premise of subconscious domination over the conscious mind. The connection between Hofmannsthal’s psychological approach to Elektra and Freud’s theories is a direct one.⁴ When the Austrian theater director Max Reinhardt expressed to Hofmannsthal his disinterest in what he considered to be the dullness of the ancient Greek dramatic style, Hofmannsthal was impelled to turn to a study of Rohde’s Psyche as well as Freud’s Studien über Hysterie before producing his version of the Elektra play in 1903. These psychoanalytic influences led Hofmannsthal to his more intense and powerful version of the original Sophocles model.

In conjunction with these developments in literature and psychology, composers sought new technical means to express the more profound psychological states underlying emotions. The ultra-chromaticism of Wagner, Bruckner, and Mahler reached its most intensive stage in the dissonant chromatic tonality of Elektra, a landmark in Strauss’s operatic development that epitomizes late Romantic music on the threshold of the new chromatic idiom. While the expressionistic quality as well as certain “nontonal” aspects of Elektra predate the free-atonality of Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909) and Berg’s Wozzeck (1914–1922), Strauss never crossed that threshold. After Elektra, in his operas Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos (1911–1912), he reverted to classical techniques and forms. Elektra foreshadowed certain chara...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Music to the Late 1940s
• Part II Music Since the Mid-1940s
• Credits
• General Index