Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxvi:4 (Spring, 2006), 675–681.

OPERATIC MODERNISM Carl E. Schorske 1 Operatic Modernism My purpose in these informal re- marks is to give some thought to the term “Modernism.” Let me begin by reminding us of Theodore Rabb’s injunction: that we examine opera as one of the central means of expression of an age.

I do have a complaint against him—not with his categories, but Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/4/675/1697180/jinh.2006.36.4.675.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 rather with the scale that this particular panel is asked to address. Every other panel had a rather carefully localized temporal span and an arena that was geographically deªned (often nationally deªned). Thus, Linda Colley, when commenting on the papers about George Frideric Handel’s London, had an opposite task from mine, namely, to broaden the scope of her panel. In her illu- minating comment, she showed us that when we talk about Lon- don and Handel, we must really talk about Europe too: that Lon- don was part of Europe and that its consciousness, with respect to music, belonged to Europe. She was trying to stretch the limits that seemed to me to attend the previous panels, when discussions of earlier periods of history were allowed to concentrate strongly on a composer or an opera, or the makers of an opera. Here, by contrast, we have before us the whole panoply of European com- plexity, from 1890 (or, using Michael Steinberg’s date, 1883, the death of Wagner) to 1930. So to pay attention to our central issue– opera as “central expression of an age”—throughout this period is difªcult. I agree, though, that we should try to talk about Mod- ernism just the same, and I should like ªrst to offer a quick re- minder of how the term ªrst appeared. I shall then focus on the 1920s, a special moment in the cultural consciousness when the three very different operas discussed by our panelists were written and ªrst performed: Arthur Honegger’s Antigone (1927), Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt (1920), and Leos Janacek’s Katya Kabanova (1921). First I would like to say that Modernism can be taken up from Carl E. Schorske is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Emeritus, Princeton Univer- sity. He is the author of Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Prince- ton, 1998); Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1979). © 2006 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. 1 In accordance with Carl Schorske’s wishes, this transcript retains the informal oral tone of its presentation at the conference from which this special issue derived. 676 | CARL E. SCHORSKE the point of view of the people who ªrst used the term, and what they used it for: what they were doing with this idea, Modernism. Obviously it is not going to be the same in different places. When Charles Baudelaire says “modernism,” he distinctly means that this is a culture and an art and an intellection that should reºect mo- dernity, “la vie moderne.” And by that he means something other

than the past. It is the distinction from the past that is really critical Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/4/675/1697180/jinh.2006.36.4.675.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 in his deªnition. It’s not the ªrst time we hear about the battles of the ancients and the moderns—they went on in the eighteenth century—but now we’ve got a new chapter, and I think it de- serves a little examination. 1890, Ted Rabb’s starting date, is really a wonderful one to pick for the development of Modernism on a wider scale. For there was an outburst of a particular Modernist consciousness of newness in the decade of the 1890s. Just think of the terms that were used: Jugend in North Germany; Art Nouveau, beginning in Belgium and then spreading to France and also to the Germanys, various Germanys. In Munich, Berlin, and Vienna, the movement in art chose the name Secession, which really meant seceding from the ways of our elders. The slogan in Vienna was: “to the time its art, to art its freedom.” That was the slogan, and what was meant by it was that we should no longer conªne ourselves to the cul- tural standards that have been imposed upon us by the past. An- other slogan in Vienna was “Wir vernichten morsches Leben,” we are going to destroy decaying life. The journal of the Secession stressed the sense of renewal in its title, “Ver Sacrum” (Sacred Spring). I see the ruptures from the past as taking place across national boundaries and at different paces in the various arts. They soon take conscious form in the antithesis, Modernism versus Historicism, and the case of architecture dramatizes the rupture from the past especially well. It can also lead us into what was pos- sible for Modernism when it found a single language across Eu- rope. In the nineteenth century, the prevailing style was historical, borrowing from the Gothic, from Classicism, from the Renais- sance. All these different style-architectures were assaulted by the pre-War pioneers of Modernism in several ways. Some of those within Art Nouveau were narcissistic, aiming to build houses that would reºect the client’s personality down to the last ashtray. Even Frank Lloyd Wright has resonances of this conception: If OPERATIC MODERNISM | 677 you design for living, for modern life, you should be yourself— your individuality should be reºected. And then there was an opposite current—very important, too—that was manifested in Adolph Loos or other modernists who wanted to strip away the historical textures. If you looked upon nineteenth-century Vienna as Loos did, it was a Potemkin

city: a city with a lot of old costumes that ought to be thrown Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/4/675/1697180/jinh.2006.36.4.675.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 away to ªt the demands of modern times. I don’t want to go into the details of this, but I do want to leap forward from the begin- ning of this protest against the past, which was the background for the 1920s, to that decade. For then there was born what we now call modern architecture. It swept Europe. It was absolutely amaz- ing: one so-called international style that could serve quite differ- ent social systems. Whether it was a Bata plant in Czechoslovakia, or a communal factory housing development in Soviet Russia—as a result of the Vkhutemas art schools and the constructivist archi- tects of that era—or the Frankfurt Siedlungen: All these different building types were executed in a style that was seen to be, and felt to be, modern—simple, designed for living, designed to function. There was even a wonderful organization, the ciam, the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne, where all the luminaries came together: Charles-Eduoard Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, avant-garde architects from France to Eastern Europe. They were all, through their congresses, committed to developing further their international language. If we had had that in music, we could have an easier session here today. Now I would like to take another tack entirely. It is not the spatial approach that is possible in this one art, architecture, which can serve many social or political masters because it can function quite clearly and easily as a lingua franca. What, I would like to ask, is there in the opera that would correspond to this? Well, of course, there is no equivalent. But there is a way of organizing op- era that might be seen as corresponding in a modernist mode, and for that I would like to turn to Berlin for just a moment to exem- plify it in the Kroll Opera. My example comes from the beginning of the 1920s, when, through the German Revolution, the Socialists and the Independ- ent Socialists gained control of the Prussian government. There was no overall Reich cultural authority over the opera houses, only that of Prussia. That was the cultural authority that governed 678 | CARL E. SCHORSKE the operatic scene in Berlin. There were three houses. The old opera house, the State Opera Unter den Linden, normally pre- sented a conservative repertoire with conservative methods. There was one great modermist breakthrough in that house: the staging of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1925). The premiere of that opera was mounted just when the old head of Berlin’s State Opera, Max von

Schillings, was ªred and Erich Kleiber came in and did this mar- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/4/675/1697180/jinh.2006.36.4.675.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 velous work. There was also a municipal opera house, intended originally for somewhat lighter fare, and that was turned over to Bruno Walter. Then there was a new, experimental house, the Kroll Opera, with its imaginative conductor, Otto Klemperer. The Socialists, who had command of the cultural ministries in Prussia and Berlin, supported all three, for in their democracy, both tradition and innovation were to be respected. But their most enthusiastic support went to the Kroll. I would like to dwell for a moment on the Kroll Opera be- cause there you ªnd one phenomenon that is very characteristic of Modernism at its best, perhaps, and that is multiculturalism. The repertoire represented all classes, all chapters in the history of op- era, but with particular stress on avant-garde work. Let me name just a few of the operas that were performed there to give you a sense of the variety. There was Igor Stravinky’s Oedipus Rex (1927). I know that’s not quite opera, but it was staged as opera. There was Giacomo Puccini’s Trittico (Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica, and Gianni Schicchi); Paul Hindemith’s Cardillak (1926) and Hin und zurück (1927); four different operas by Ernst Krenek; a French triple bill with Maurice Ravel, Darius Milhaud’s The Poor Sailor (1927), and Jacques Ibert; an Arnold Schoenberg double bill with Erwartung (1924) and Die Glückliche Hand (1913). These were typi- cal of the 1920s: They were written before that, but the idea of re- ducing opera to monodrama, getting it down to size—that whole reductionist revolt against grandness—was characteristic of the early postwar cultural way of Modernism. It wanted to reduce things to make them simple to bring them to the public. So this was the scene. I could go on with a listing of the dif- ferent operas that were given. There was, for example, one by Leos Janacek, based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead (1861/62). But with all these currents at work in the Kroll opera house, there was also the problem of the new relationship to the public. The idea here was that opera should be for the ordinary OPERATIC MODERNISM | 679 man: the workers and the like, with the stress on the workers. Kroll managed to do that by keeping a huge block of seats reserved for people who were related to working-class organizations. They sought to create an alliance, so to speak, between the avant-garde in opera and the avant-garde in politics, if we can call it that. Mi- chael Steinberg would call it the emancipation—not the redemp-

tion, but the emancipation—of the lower classes through this in- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/4/675/1697180/jinh.2006.36.4.675.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 stitutional device. Beyond these ambitions I detect (and I am being a bit more traditionalist here) two strands. Both were already present at this time, and they are dramatized (for me, at least) by the tension with a Modernism that tries to establish an international community of discourse and cannot manage it. We remain pluralized whatever we do. If the dodecaphonic movement had managed to establish itself—and it hoped it would—as the language of music hereafter, that would have been one thing. But nobody could get to the top of the pile; it wasn’t possible, there were too many differentiations. And the national dimension wasn’t the only problem: There was also a cultural divide, a kind of fragmentation (another characteris- tic of the modern age if you like, certainly in intellectual life, a process which Friedrich Nietzsche was very good at catching). This was a fragmentation for which no uniform discourse could be established, with the exception of architecture. And in opera, the alternative Modernisms had already crystallized before the 1920s. If we go back even before 1914 and into Austria, I believe there are two operas that dramatize how a historistic survival, tem- pered by modern musical idiom, could be managed, alongside the rejection of that kind of discourse by people who went truly mod- ernist. The cases I have in mind are Hugo Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss’ Rosenkavalier (1911) in contrast to another kind of opera, Berg’s Wozzeck. Alternatively, one could cite Rosenkavalier and Salome (1905), or Electra (1909), for Hofmannsthal and Strauss, and on the other hand Wozzeck and Lulu (1937) for Berg. Both composers tackled huge issues for the age—issues that I think were pervasive. One was the return of the repressed: the emergence of a rather overt preoccupation with Eros and Thanatos. They are an unholy pair, and they emerge in the con- sciousness very strongly together. The other issue was a concern for the social problem, for the forms of social power and how to relate to them. If you look at Rosenkavalier, you see the most amaz- 680 | CARL E. SCHORSKE ing historical construction. It is a conservative piece in many ways, but it is concerned with the formation of the so-called zweite Gesellschaft, the “second society,” composed of an alliance be- tween the old aristocracy and the new bourgeoisie who ªnd themselves together in the household, and surround the Marschallin and Baron Ochs in Rosenkavalier.

The opera’s story is the story of how to let go: how to let go Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/4/675/1697180/jinh.2006.36.4.675.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 of power when a new form of power is arising. It is just a contrac- tion of power, but in the middle of it is Maria Theresa (that’s the name of the Marschallin). She is not a creature of Joseph II, al- though, in line with the Enlightenment, she is of a different or- der—still in many ways Baroque. Everything comes together as Hofmannsthal elaborates her character. The entire opera is built on tremendous historical accretions. The scenery, which was done in the ªrst instance by Alfred Roller, one of art nouveau’s ªrst artists in Vienna: those scenes are based on William Hogarth. The singer is somebody from Venice, who would be found in an aristocratic household, and the two main characters are an accretion of the sort of historical constitu- ents that created the development of the High Baroque, with Maria Theresa on the crossover from Enlightenment to Baroque. You have a right way and a wrong way for an aristocrat to let go: The wrong way is Baron Ochs; the right way is the Marschallin. You have a dramatization of the issue through a female character, who is fully competent erotically (so to speak) and who knows how to reconcile, to blend, and to make the transition from one era to another, even at the sacriªce of herself. It is a historicism of letting go, but allowing something new to come up in the way of the bourgeois-aristocratic alliance that is formed by Octavian and his Sophie. There is something a little elegiac about the whole op- era, but it is also rich in a history that is now being put to new pur- poses. The problem of the passing of aristocracy to the zweite Gesellschaft is an allegory for the twentieth century, when the zweite Gesellschaft in turn must learn to yield power to the new forces of democracy in the twentieth century. Now let me turn to the other side. I am not going to deal with Salome, because you know how that work takes care of our instinctual life, and does it in spades. Electra gives it all a classical gloss, and that is where Hofmannsthal comes in and provides a li- bretto that makes it not so dissimilar from Honegger’s use of OPERATIC MODERNISM | 681 Sophocles. If, on the other hand, you look at Wozzeck and Lulu and at Berg, you see that he took up two enormous, central issues. One was what we might call the military-scientiªc complex in Wozzeck: this oppressive machine which turns Wozzeck, the man of the people, the poor man, into an object of scientiªc inquest that is ruthless, heartless, and just as oppressive as the military disci-

pline under which he lives and has to make his living. Berg is Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/4/675/1697180/jinh.2006.36.4.675.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 turned on by the play, George Büchner’s Woyzek, because he sees this as a central issue in the thwarting of the human species. The machine is driving someone into insanity through the kind of op- pression that the modern state can generate and modern culture can support. It is a liberating impulse that leads Berg to become totally infatuated with the theme. The other opera is Lulu, and that comes from Munich, from Frank Wedekind. Berg’s espousal of this extraordinary play, Pan- dora’s Box, makes him really deal with the distortion of the femi- nine. And you can see how turned on were not just Berg but ev- erybody else in his circle: Schoenberg, Karl Kraus, all the people who belong to this circle, who want a new Modernism, the truth- speaking Modernism as opposed to those who want the aesthetic Modernism, the reconciling Modernism which is historically rooted in the manner of Hofmannsthal and Strauss in Rosenkav- alier. It seems to me here we have two strides forward. Berg con- fronts frontally, as part of our modernity, the legacies of Wedekind and Büchner. Büchner was an anachronism, providing Wozzeck with a libretto from 1838. When the opera was written, it was to- tally off the wall in terms of its perceptions, which belong so deeply to the contemporary era. What we have, then, is a con- frontation between two Modernisms: ªrst, a Modernism that re- jects its prehistory in favor of exploring in depth, frontally, the new issues as they present themselves to us now (this is the case of Berg); and a second Modernism, which addresses the issues obliquely, nuanced, and deeply respectful of the historical legacy that provides the material and the means with which the contem- porary situation can be faced metaphorically (the case of Strauss). By looking at all these strands, we can indeed ªnd operatic Mod- ernism. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/36/4/675/1697180/jinh.2006.36.4.675.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021