ARNOLD SCHOENBERG Ode to
Napoleon Buonaparte (Byron) for speaker, piano and string quartet, Op. 41
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Fifteen
Variations with a Fugue in E-flat major, op. 35 – “Eroica Variations”FREDERIC RZEWSKI The People United Will Never Be Defeated!
‘Why
write?’
‘What Jean-Paul Sartre says in
his essay, What is Literature?, about
the problem “why write?”, is witnessed in utterly authentic fashion in
Schoenberg’s creative necessity.’ Luigi Nono’s Darmstadt lecture, from which
those words are taken, focused on Schoenberg’s post-war cantata, A Survivor from Warsaw, but those words
were intended more broadly. Schoenberg’s wartime Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte is as overt a work of ‘political ‘commitment’
as A Survivor or any of his
posthumous son-in-law’s works, indeed as any work by Beethoven or Frederic
Rzewski. In the words of Sartre, as quoted by Nono (himself transcribed by the
young Helmut Lachenmann, another composer very much of this ilk): ‘If I am presented
with this world and its injustices, then I should not look at it coldly, but
... with indignation, that I might expose it and create it in its nature as
injustice and abuse.’
 |
| Luigi Nono, Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Bruno Maderna (?) |
Denunciation
and developing variation
The day following the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in Californian exile from the National
Socialism whose genocidal tendencies he had long feared, Schoenberg heard on
the wireless Roosevelt’s ‘day of infamy’ address. A month later, in January
1942, the League of Composers, which had previously sponsored the American
premiere (under Stokowski) of Schoenberg’s Die
glückliche Hand, offered him a commission, for its twentieth anniversary,
for a ‘short chamber work’, which Schoenberg composed between March and June of
that year, although, concerned that it might not be well enough performed by
the commissioning forces, Schoenberg withheld it until 1944, when it received
its premiere in New York.
The words and their
meaning were of great importance to Schoenberg. He hoped, alas vainly, that
Orson Welles, whose radio work had greatly impressed him might act as speaker:
one of those great musical might-have-beens. Byron’s excoriating ode, allegedly
to, yet unmistakeably against, Napoleon, offered a clear contemporary parallel
to Hitler. ‘I knew,’ the composer said with specific reference to this work,
that ‘it was the moral duty of intelligentsia to take a stand against tyranny.’
Unlike, say, in Pierrot lunaire,
there is no straightforward cabaret, no sense of recitation as artfulness. The
words are to be heard as words, but the mode of their expression is crucial.
Schoenberg insisted to another pupil, Heinrich Jalowetz, who was preparing a
recording, on the requirement for a
large number of ‘shades, essential to express one hundred and seventy kinds of
derision, sarcasm, hatred, ridicule, contempt, condemnation, etc., which I
tried to portray in my music.’ In that vein, not only might Bonaparte become
Hitler, not only might Byron’s reference to the Emperor’s Habsburg bride, ‘proud
Austria’s mournful flower’, evoke Schoenberg’s post-Anschluss homeland, but also Byron’s ‘Cincinnatus of the West … bequeath’d the
name of Washington’ might yet inspire Roosevelt, whose speech had so inspired
Schoenberg at the outset.
Allusions to the Marseillaise and to Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony – its Morse Code, ‘V for Victory’ connotations especially popular at
this time – nevertheless make their musico-dramatic points amongst ‘The triumph
and the vanity, the rapture of the strife – the earthquake voice of Victory,’
and the countervailing ‘Dark spirit! what must be the madness of thy memory!’ And yet, for all the post-Wagnerism of Schoenberg’s conception
here of the artist and his role in society, of the artistic work and its angry,
political standing, it is with a motivic working born of neo-Brahmsian musical
integrity, every note and its placing crucial to the composer’s idea of
‘developing variation’, that the score leads shatteringly to a conclusion both
encompassing and negating E-flat major. That Schoenbergian struggle between
Brahms and Wagner which we can trace back at least as far as the programmatic
string sextet, Verklärte Nacht,
continues to develop, to take on new meaning. We can argue endlessly about when
our ears may first lay claim to detect that tonal reference, for there are
various ‘traditional’ triads, even major and minor ones, which are derived from
the work’s determining hexachord. There can be no doubt, however, which
masterwork stands before those ears, its humanism honoured and deconstructed;
it is Beethoven’s Sinfonia
eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire d'un grand'uomo. Its
tonality clearly troubled Schoenberg, and yet it clearly mattered. He responded
somewhat defensively: ‘It is true that the Ode
at the end sounds like E-flat. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I was wrong,
but at present you cannot make me feel like this.’
‘A new style’: preparing the way for the Eroica
Beethoven’s
so-called Eroica Variations make a
playful, complicating backward step in Igor Levit’s programming tonight.
Variation form has sometimes, erroneously considered an ugly sister amongst
earlier Classical forms, as if Mozart, Haydn, and others had written nothing of
worth. Nevertheless, Beethoven certainly seems to have considered his work in
this genre in 1802, an F major set, op.34, immediately preceding this E-flat
major work, to have offered something of a new departure. ‘‘I have made two sets of variations,’ he wrote to Breitkopf
& Härtel; ‘both are written in quite a new style and each in an entirely
different way … you will never regret the two works. … I myself can assure you
that in both works the style is completely new for me.’ Leaving aside special
pleading to a publisher, an art at which Beethoven was no amateur, the scope
and scale of these works is indeed new for the composer, just as his Third, Eroica Symphony would mark a significant
development from his first two essays in the genre.
Whereas, in the op.34 set, Beethoven had startlingly composed each
variation in a different key, taking us through a pattern of falling thirds, the
tonal plan of the E-flat Variations adheres to tradition, each variation
written in the tonic, until a turn to the minore,
followed by a slow, ornate Largo
movement, prior to a brilliant, barnstorming finale. There is more than one way
to be radical, though, and what could be more radical than to open with an
Introduction that presents only the bass of the theme, presented in ghostly octaves,
with a rudely jesting wake-up call a little after half the way through (itself
following a bar’s silence)? The first three variations treat, with ever more
complicated texture, with that bass – and then, at last, the theme!
Taken from his ballet, The Creatures
of Prometheus, op.43 (do not be misled by the later opus number) as well as
a little Contredanse, that sixteen-bar theme proceeds to be ‘varied’, the
importance, even primacy, of melody reinstated, if nevertheless far from uncontested.
(How could it be, following those introductory variations?) The melody and its
variations are now dependent on the bass, and perhaps vice versa too: a typically Beethovenian dialectic. Many typical variational devices are
revisited: crossing of hands, syncopation between those hands, canonical play,
introduction of triplets and other note values. Prophetically for Beethoven,
the finale, now on the grandest of scales, is fugal; here the subject is not
the melody but again the bass.
When Beethoven next employed this theme and bass, in his Eroica Symphony, it would be in a work
whose political frame of reference was more overt, Bonaparte’s name furiously
scribbled out upon his self-proclamation as Emperor, replaced with a generic,
universal tribute to the ‘memory of a great man’. Much, although far from all,
of Beethoven’s method had been outlined here.
The
People United: the musician as ‘organiser and redistributor of energies’
Rzewski is a fine pianist in his own right; he gave, in 1962, the first
performance of Stockhausen’s Klavierstück
X, and performed works by, amongst others, Boulez, Cage, Bussotti, and
Kagel. Not entirely unlike Schoenberg and Beethoven, he would turn to more
overtly political writing and other activity – if again like them, far from
unequivocally – in his case, in the wake of the turmoil of the late 1960s. Perhaps
not entirely unlike Eisler, whose work Rzewski has also performed, he had
developed a wariness of avant-gardism, concerned that it might unwittingly
divorce itself from urgent political matters. These words from 1968 were to
prove indicative of one important tendency within his subsequent work.
We are all ‘musicians’. We are all ‘creators’. Music is a creative process in which we can all share, and the closer we can come to each other in this process, abandoning esoteric categories and professional elitism, the closer we can all come to the ancient idea of music as a universal language … The musician takes on a new function: he is no longer the mythical star, elevated to a sham glory and authority, but rather an unseen worker, using his skill to help others less prepared than he to experience the miracle, to become great artists in a few minutes ... His role is that of organiser and redistributor of energies; he draws upon the raw human resources at hand and reshapes them ...
Whilst it is perhaps all too easy to draw a contrast between Boulezian
ghosts of an imaginary ‘Darmstadt’ and such words, Rzewski’s growing interest
in socialist ideas of collective improvisation, in use of popular and folk
melodies, would have been anathema to many of the composers whose work he had
previously, enthusiastically been performing.
Such interest may certainly be seen – and heard – in his set of thirty-six
variations on a theme by Sergio Ortega:
¡El
pueblo unido, jamás será vencido! Initially intended as an anthem
for Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity coalition, it gained further revolutionary
currency as a symbol of resistance both within Chile and without, following Allende’s
overthrow and murder. The theme, as one might expect, is
presented in forthright fashion: a focus of revolutionary inspiration, one
might think. (Might we also hear a kinship with Beethoven’s bass?) Yet
there is no sense of presenting music that all could play, far from it; its
variations are unabashedly, heroically virtuosic. From Webern-like pointillism
of the first variation, ‘Weaving, delicate but firm’ – a tribute to, or
distancing from, Boulez and Stockhausen? – through something not so far from
shellshock in the face of repression in the third variation, we traverse an
almost incredible array of styles and procedures. We may not find them all to
our taste, as they range from Rachmaninov-like grand pianism to minimalism,
from Ravel back – or forward – to Webern. That, however, is surely part of the
point. The people are diverse yet united: musically and politically.
(This essay was first published in a 2017 Salzburg Festival programme to accompany a recital given by Igor Levit and friends.)
