I certainly was not quite just when I thought that Beethoven was responsible for the rise of expressionism in music. No doubt he was influenced by the romantic movement, but we can see from his notebooks that he was far removed from merely expressing his feelings or his whims. He often worked very hard through version after version of an idea, trying to clarify and to simplify it, as a comparison of the Choral Fantasy with the notebooks for his Ninth Symphony will show. And yet, the indirect influence of his tempestuous personality, and the attempts to emulate him led, I believe, to a decline in music. It still seems to me that this decline was brought about largely by expressionist theories of music. But I would not now contend that there are not other equally pernicious creeds, and among them some anti-expressionist creeds, which have led to all kinds of formalistic experiments, from serialism to musique concrète. All these movements, however, and especially the “anti-” movements, largely result from that brand of “historicism” which I will discuss in this section, and especially from the historicist attitude towards “progress”.
Of course, there can be something like progress in art, in the sense that certain new possibilities may be discovered, and also new problems.79 In music such inventions as counterpoint revealed almost an infinity of new possibilities and problems. There is also purely technological progress (for example in certain instruments). But although this may open new possibilities, it is not of fundamental significance. (Changes in the “medium” may remove more problems than they create.) There could conceivably be progress even in the sense that musical knowledge grows—that is, a composer’s mastery of the discoveries of all his great predecessors; but I do not think that anything like this has been achieved by any musician. (Einstein may not have been a greater physicist than Newton, but he mastered Newtonian technique completely; no similar relation seems ever to have existed in the field of music.) Even Mozart, who may have come closest to it, did not attain it, and Schubert did not come close to it. There is also always the danger that newly realized possibilities may kill old ones: dynamic effects, dissonance, or even modulation may, if used too freely, dull our sensitivity to the less obvious effects of counterpoint or, say, to an allusion to the old modes.
The loss of possibilities which may be the result of any innovation is an interesting problem. Thus counterpoint threatened the loss of monodic and especially of rhythmic effects, and contrapuntal music was criticized for this reason, as well as for its complexity. There is no doubt that this criticism had some wholesome effects, and that some of the great masters of counterpoint, Bach included, took the greatest interest in the intricacies and contrasts resulting from combining recitatives, arias, and other monodic alternatives with contrapuntal writing. Many recent composers have been less imaginative. (Schönberg realized that, in a context of dissonances, consonances have to be carefully prepared, introduced, and perhaps even resolved. But this meant that their old function was lost.)
It was Wagner80 who introduced into music an idea of progress which (in 1935 or thereabouts) I called “historicist”, and who thereby, I still believe, became the main villain of the piece. He also sponsored the uncritical and almost hysterical idea of the unappreciated genius: the genius who not only expresses the spirit of his time but who actually is “ahead of his time”; a leader who is normally misunderstood by all his contemporaries except a few “advanced” connoisseurs.
My thesis is that the doctrine of art as self-expression is merely trivial, muddleheaded and empty—though not necessarily vicious, unless taken seriously, when it may easily lead to self-centred attitudes and megalomania. But the doctrine that the genius must be in advance of his time is almost wholly false and vicious, and opens up the universe of art to evaluations which have nothing to do with the values of art.
Intellectually, both theories are on such a low level that it is astonishing that they were ever taken seriously. The first can be dismissed as trivial and muddled on purely intellectual grounds, without even looking more closely at art itself. The second—the theory that art is the expression of the genius in advance of his time—can be refuted by countless examples of geniuses genuinely appreciated by many patrons of the arts of their own time. Most of the great painters of the Renaissance were highly appreciated. So were many great musicians. Bach was appreciated by King Frederick of Prussia—besides, he obviously was not ahead of his time (as was, perhaps, Telemann): his son Carl Philipp Emanuel thought him passé and spoke of him habitually as “The Old Fusspot” (“der alte Zopf”). Mozart, though he died in poverty, was appreciated throughout Europe. An exception is perhaps Schubert, appreciated only by a comparatively small circle of friends in Vienna; but even he was getting more widely known at the time of his premature death. The story that Beethoven was not appreciated by his contemporaries is a myth. Yet let me say here again (see the text between notes 47 and 48 in section 10 above) that I think that success in life is largely a matter of luck. It has little correlation with merit, and in all fields of life there have always been many people of great merit who did not succeed. Thus it is only to be expected that this happened also in the sciences and in the arts.
The theory that art advances with the great artists in the van is not just a myth; it has led to the formation of cliques and pressure groups which, with their propaganda machines, almost resemble a political party or a church faction.
Admittedly there were cliques before Wagner. But there was nothing quite like the Wagnerians (unless later the Freudians): a pressure group, a party, a church with rituals. But I shall say no more about this, since Nietzsche has said it all much better.81
I saw some of these things at close quarters in Schönberg’s Society for Private Performances. Schönberg started as a Wagnerian, as did so many of his contemporaries. After a time his problem and that of many members of his circle became, as one of them said in a lecture, “How can we supersede Wagner?” or even “How can we supersede the remnants of Wagner in ourselves?”. Still later it became: “How can we remain ahead of everybody else, and even constantly supersede ourselves?”. Yet I feel that the will to be ahead of one’s time has nothing to do with service to music, and nothing to do with genuine dedication to one’s own work.
Anton von Webern was an exception to this. He was a dedicated musician and a simple, lovable man. But he had been brought up in the philosophical doctrine of self-expression, and he never doubted its truth. He once told me how he wrote his Orchesterstücke: he just listened to sounds that came to him, and he wrote them down; and when no more sounds came, he stopped. This, he said, was the explanation of the extreme brevity of his pieces. Nobody could doubt the purity of his heart. But there was not much music to be found in his modest compositions.
There may be something in the ambition to write a great work; and such an ambition may indeed be instrumental in creating a great work, though many great works have been produced without any ambition other than to do one’s work well. But the ambition to write a work which is ahead of its time and which will preferably not be understood too soon—which will shock as many people as possible—has nothing to do with art, even though many art critics have fostered this attitude and popularized it.
Fashions, I suppose, are as unavoidable in art as in many other fields. But it should be obvious that those rare artists who were not only masters of their art but blessed with the gift of originality were seldom anxious to follow a fashion, and never tried to be leaders of fashion. Neither Johann Sebastian Bach nor Mozart nor Schubert created a new fashion or “style” in music. Yet one who did was Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, a well-trained musician of talent and charm—and less originality of invention than the great masters. This holds for all fashions, including that of primitivism—though primitivism may be partly motivated by a preference for simplicity; and one of Schopenhauer’s wisest remarks (though not perhaps his most original one) was: “In all art… simplicity is essential… ; at least it is always dangerous to neglect it.”82 I think what he meant was the striving for the kind of simplicity which we find especially in the subjects of the great composers. As we may see from the Seraglio, for example, the final result may be complex; but Mozart could still proudly reply to the Emperor Joseph that there was not one note too many in it.
But although fashions may be unavoidable, and although new styles may emerge, we ought to despise attempts to be fashionable. It should be obvious that “modernism”—the wish to be new or different at any price, to be ahead of one’s time, to produce “The Work of Art of the Future” (the title of an essay by Wagner)—has nothing to do with the things an artist should value and should try to create.
Historicism in art is just a mistake. Yet one finds it everywhere. Even in philosophy one hears of a new style of philosophizing, or of a “Philosophy in a New Key”—as if it were the key that mattered rather than the tune played, and as if it mattered whether the key was old or new.
Of course I do not blame an artist or a musician for trying to say something new. What I really blame many of the “modern” musicians for is their failure to love great music—the great masters and their miraculous works, the greatest perhaps that man has produced.