WIEN, WIEN, NUR DU ALLEIN

THERE IS A great book to be written. It would show that the twentieth century as we have lived it in the West is, in essential ways, an Austro-Hungarian product and export. We conduct our inward lives in or in conflict with a landscape mapped by Freud and his disciples and dissenters. Our philosophy and the central place we assign to language in the study of human thought derive from Wittgenstein and the Vienna school of logical positivism. The novel after Joyce is, in the main, divided between the two poles of introspective narration and lyric experiment defined by Musil and by Broch. Our music follows two great currents: that of Bruckner, Mahler, and Bartók on the one hand; that of Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern on the other. Though the role of Paris was, of course, vital, it is now increasingly clear that certain sources of aesthetic modernism, from Art Deco to Action painting, can be found in the Viennese Jugendstil and in Austrian Expressionism. The functionalist, antiseptic ideals so prominent in today’s architecture were predicted in the work of Adolf Loos. Political-social satire in London and New York, the sick joke, the conviction that the language of those who govern us is a poisonous smoke screen echo the genius of Karl Kraus. Ernst Mach had a profound influence on the development of Einstein’s thinking. The logic and sociology of the natural sciences cannot be formulated without reference to Karl Popper. And where shall we place the manifold effects of Schumpeter, Hayek, von Neumann? One could prolong the roll call.

The conflagration of artistic, scientific, social, and philosophical energies in Central Europe came of fundamental instabilities. It was, as the physicists say, “implosive,” a compaction of conflicting forces in a violently shrinking space. Imperial decay and ethnic emancipation, anti-Semitism and Jewish success, an archaic familial order and a pervasive sexuality—such were the antinomies between which passed great flashes and arcs of creative voltage. These, in turn, precipitated the ambience of social crisis, the nervous style, the eroticism of general sensibility which to this day characterize the Western city, the atelier of Western arts, the dishevelled conventions of Western intellectual life. Between the 1880s and 1914, between 1919 and 1938, Vienna, along with Prague and Budapest, raced through, externalized, and found hectic but poignant expression for the larger crises of European and, later, of American orders of value. In this implosion, the Jewish component—Freud, Mahler, Kafka, Schoenberg, Kraus, and so many others—was almost dominant. Thus, there is a fatal logic and finality in the fact that the person of Hitler and so much of Nazi ideology sprang from Austrian ground. (Historians have traced the key term Judenrein, “untainted by Jews,” to the membership rules of an Austrian bicycle club at the turn of the century.) It was in Vienna that the young Hitler concocted his inspired venom. As the waltz tune has it, Wien, Wien, nur du allein. Vienna was the capital of the age of anxiety, the hub of Jewish genius, and the city from which the Holocaust would seep. The book I have in mind would have to be a large one.

Perhaps this thought reconciles one to the scale of Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer’s “Anton von Webern” (Knopf, $25). Some of Webern’s finest works—three studies for cello and piano, for example—run to under a minute. Even his full-length pieces tend to extreme concision. The man himself was sparse. Yet this biography exceeds eight hundred pages. Of course, it is more than merely an account of Webern’s life. The Moldenhauers, who have devoted much of their own lives to the greater glory of Webern, have produced a biography, a mildly technical commentary on much of Webern’s music, and a portrayal of the culture in which he lived and composed. Webern was born in 1883 and died, absurdly and tragically, in September, 1945. These are the decades of the Viennese implosion. The patient reader—even the reader whose interests are not primarily musical—will find fascinating material leading toward an understanding of the spirit of the age. The paradox is this: Webern is a figure apart, who found fulfillment in a nearly esoteric ideal of musical purity and in the solitude of the Austrian Alps. He is, at the same time, a profoundly representative phenomenon of the psychological and social conditions of modern art. As Boulez has proclaimed, there are pieces by Webern, only a few bars long, that seem to crystallize modernity. Yet there has been no musician closer to Bach.

When it came to his craft, Anton Webern—he dropped the “von,” though he remained proud of his faintly aristocratic lineage—was abrasively independent. Despite lifelong economic stress, which compelled him to earn his living as an arranger, teacher, and part-time virtuoso conductor (the finest since Mahler, said many experts), Webern would not compromise. No amount of criticism, public ridicule, or scandal—the performance of his “Six Pieces” in March, 1913, occasioned a tumult fully comparable to that unleashed two months later by Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps”—deflected Webern from his resolve to pack with emotional strength and formal inevitability even the smallest unit of tone, of pitch, of rhythm. There has not been a tougher musical intelligence. Yet in personal and political terms Webern’s history painfully illustrates just that ache for authority, for simplistic explanations, which led to naïve pietistic grandiloquence in a Bruckner and a Mahler, and which was to be instrumental in the development and triumph of Nazism. As in many mountaineers, so in Webern, aloneness and servitude, asceticism and rapture were inextricably meshed.

Webern’s relationship to Arnold Schoenberg represents almost a parody of Freud’s model of man’s quest for an omnipotent father figure. “I believe that the disciples of Jesus Christ could not have felt more deeply for their Lord than we for you,” Webern assured the Master. Schoenberg was the “guardian angel” without whom Webern’s existence would have had no purpose. “I can really not exist in the thought that you could not feel friendly towards me,” pleaded Webern on the occasion of a minor misunderstanding, adding, “I indeed deserve punishment!” “With terrible anxiety I have thought only of you,” Webern wrote to his god at the moment of political crisis in 1933. Webern’s precarious psychological and material resources were totally at Schoenberg’s demanding service. The case is the more interesting because much in Webern’s music, while reflecting Schoenberg’s teachings and Schoenberg’s adoption of a twelve-tone system, was markedly different and, as musicians and musicologists today emphasize, even signalled a break with the conservative elements in Schoenberg’s work. Adlerian psychoanalysis, to which Webern had successful recourse at a stage of acute depression and creative arrest, did nothing to weaken his fixation on authority.

The political consequences were predictable. Though Webern had overcome the ready, conventional anti-Semitism in which he was brought up (and which may have given to his later worship of Schoenberg its edge of overcompensation), his chauvinism never faltered. The Hitler regime seemed to embody an awesome renascence of the German and Central European genius. Such a regime must, assuredly, side with the art of the future. One must simply “attempt to convince the Hitler regime of the lightness of the twelve-tone system.” Two days before the Nazi troops stomped into Vienna, Webern informed a friend, “I am totally immersed in my work and cannot, cannot be disturbed.” Webern’s youngest daughter enlisted in the female counterpart of the Hitler Youth. Soon, and under the flag of the Third Reich, Webern gave her in marriage to a uniformed Storm Trooper. He had promptly furnished all requisite proof of the Webern family’s Aryan purity.

His confidence in Teutonic might and victory long remained firm. In June, 1942, he reported, “Sometimes such a feeling overcomes me, such hope!” A trifling courtesy shown to Webern by a German consul in Switzerland in early 1943 evoked ecstasies of patriotic gratitude: “Never before had it happened to me that a representative of my fatherland had paid any attention to me! . . . I see it as a good omen and as a reward for my loyalty.” An article by Goebbels, in the autumn after the German defeat at Stalingrad, in 1943, caused Webern to ask in a letter, “Do we face something totally unexpected?” In February, 1945, Allied bombardments of his beloved Vienna reached a peak, and his son was mortally wounded in action. But almost to the twelfth hour Webern would not believe that the Germanic spirit, whose achievements dominated the history of Western music, whose lyric poetry and idealist metaphysics had given to Webern’s being its talismanic center, could succumb to barbarism and ruin. The conviction he had voiced in August, 1914—“An unshakable faith in the German spirit, which indeed has created, almost exclusively, the culture of mankind, is awakened in me”—continued to animate his heart and mind. The desperate flight he made from Vienna and his sudden end represent a plunge into an unforeseen abyss.

The Moldenhauers provide the evidence with absolute scrupulousness. Their discomforts in so doing are palpable. They ask themselves and the reader whether Schoenberg’s exiled, Jewish presence came to haunt Webern at his daughter’s wedding. The question ought, one fears, to be different: What would have happened if the Nazis had enlisted, instead of rejecting, the talents and the prestige of Dr. Anton Webern? How would he have responded if his music had been performed in the Reich instead of being banned as decadent trash fatally tainted by its association with Schoenberg and the degenerate eroticism of Berg? Time and again, Webern sought to break out of the circle of silence which the authorities had closed around him. And he did venture a few gestures of sympathy and support for hunted Jewish friends, when even the slightest such gesture took great courage. Nevertheless, the fact is that ostracism saved Webern’s moral character and subsequent reputation. In the weeks before his death, Webern was being summoned to preside over the reconstruction of the pulverized musical life of Vienna. But the problem goes far beyond myopia in an individual, in an unworldly master of high art. The almost schizophrenic duality of authoritarian and radically rebellious strains in Webern’s character of rigid constraint and utter innovation in his music, is emblematic of the self-lacerating quality of Viennese culture. Our sensibility is direct heir to this creative stress.

Moreover, if there was much blindness and sorrow in Webern’s career there was also a steady conquest. By 1920, the years of neglect were ending. The famous “Passacaglia” and the early song cycles were beginning to make their way. The first all-Webern concert took place in April, 1931. The composer’s fiftieth birthday became something of an occasion: a quartet was heard on the BBC, the symphony was broadcast in Prague, the saxophone quartet was played in Winterthur. In Vienna itself, so long and vociferously hostile, there was a small festivity at the house of an American patron, and a young foursome (Polish Jews, as Webern noted) performed.

Webern never doubted either the lightness of his musical doctrines or his ultimate acceptance. At a time when his pieces were regarded as absurd cacophony or as unperformable, Webern calmly assured a pupil, “Sometime in the future even the postman will whistle my melodies!” Given the ambience of our current postal services, this may not be quite the case. But recognition has been worldwide. Six International Webern Festivals took place between 1962 and 1978. Stravinsky came to see in Webern “the just man of music,” the tuning fork against which contemporary composers must test their integrity. It is to Webern’s ear that so much in the music of Stockhausen, of Boulez, of Elliott Carter, of George Crumb seems to address itself.

Webern could not know of these confirmations as he lay dying, shot by a G.I. in an obscure imbroglio of trigger-happiness or mistaken identity in a village in the Austrian Alps. The episode, which remains very nearly unbearable in its aura of pure hazard and waste, was cleared up by Hans Moldenhauer’s untiring research. But Webern’s posthumous acclaim was precisely what he had anticipated. “I have never for a single moment lost heart.” Doubters, detractors, philistines “have always appeared to me as ‘ghosts.’” Thus, Webern would approve of the pious monumentality of this book. He would recognize its somewhat pedantic style and also its candor as typically Viennese.