The early twentieth century saw numerous changes in the areas of technology, society, and the arts, music in particular. Seeking to secure their spot in the permanent classical repertoire and fighting for space on concert programs with the “old” music, composers felt the need to offer a unique style and voice that struck a balance between conventional and new elements. Each composer came up with a unique solution to this dilemma, differing greatly in what each kept and rejected from past traditions and the innovations they created.
By 1900, the classical repertoire of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven had secured their place in history and in the concert hall, with everything from orchestral music to chamber music, to solo repertoire for piano or voice being performed. The expectations of players and audience members alike had drastically changed since the eighteenth century, when they always desired something new and innovative and anything more than a few decades old was considered unfashionable. By the twentieth century, audiences were demanding music that was at least a generation old, and new music was judged against the masterworks of the permanent classical repertoire. This is the challenge that composers in the first half of the twentieth century faced: how to compete against the classics for the attention of performers and audiences who were enamored with those traditional masterworks while creating something unique and distinguished that would forever hold a place in the permanent repertoire.
Composers in Germany and Austria (both German-speaking countries) faced perhaps the greatest challenge of all composers, given that the standard-bearers' music was German. Of all German composers of their Generation, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss were the most successful, each finding their own way of building upon the inherited traditions while creating a music that was both innovative and familiar. Mahler (1860-1911) was the leading composers of symphonies, following Brahms and Bruckner. Although he started his career as a dynamic, precise, and expressive conductor, he eventually turned to composition, mainly in the summers between conducting seasons. It was during this time that he composed his five orchestral song cycles and nine symphonies, with a tenth symphony left unfinished.
As a composer of symphonies, Mahler drew upon the foundation created by Beethoven, using the symphony as a vehicle for a bold, highly personal statement. Mahler once said that the job of the composer in a symphony was “to construct a world,” and his symphonies often feel filled with life experience, telling a story or recreating a visual scene. Mahler also created his own unique style through his choice of instruments. Typically his works demand an incredibly large cadre of performers. For example, his Second Symphony calls for an enormous section of strings, seventeen woodwinds, twenty-five brass instruments, six timpani plus additional percussion, four harps, organ, soprano and alto soloists, and a large chorus. His Eighth Symphony demanded even larger forces, earning itself the nickname “Symphony of a Thousand.”
While Mahler's symphonies usually were programmatic and revolved around some type of program, his orchestral song cycles were truly a collective artwork that would inspired Wagner. His haunting Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) is set to the poetry of Friedrich Rückert. In the Kindertotenlieder, Mahler continues in Wagner's musical language of creating stark contrast between consonant and dissonant sounds and unstable, shifting tonalities, creating an ironic, understated restraint given that the subject is the death of one's child. In his Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), Mahler drew not upon German poetry but upon translations of Chinese poetry. In this work, Mahler achieves a perfect balance between the orchestra and singers, a Wagnerian ideal.
While Mahler chose to follow Beethoven by composing song cycles and symphonies, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) followed a different path: having established himself as the successful heir of composing symphonic poems after Liszt, Strauss shifted his compositional efforts to opera in an effort to inherit Wagner's new style. While his first two operas were mediocre at best, Strauss hit a home run with his Salome in 1905. A one-act play by Oscar Wilde in German translation, the opera tells the biblical story of Salome, who performs her famous Dance of the Seven Veils to persuade Herod to deliver the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter so that she might kiss his cold, dead lips. This was by far the most bizarre opera ever in subject matter, and Strauss used this to his advantage by composing in a complex and dissonant style. In this opera and in his immensely popular Der Rosenkavalier (The Cavalier of the Rose), Strauss aimed to appeal directly to the emotions of the audience.
A well-known composer these days, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) chose not to extend the Wagnerian tradition as Mahler and Strauss did; rather, he delighted in the moment. His work is often associated with impressionism (analogous to the impressionist painters), but his music is actually closer to symbolism. French impressionism in art was characterized by the works of painters such as Claude Monet, in which artists sought not to portray things as they were in reality, but as the impressions given to the artist. Symbolism, a contemporary artistic movement, was reflected in the poetry of such greats as Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, whose poetry used intense imagery, disrupted syntax, and symbols to effect a dreamlike state to suggest emotions and experiences rather than stating them directly. Debussy knew these poets' work well, and he often used their texts for his songs and dramatic works.
Debussy's music is all about atmosphere, evoking a mood, feeling, or scene through individual images that carry the work's meaning and structure. One can hear this clearly in Debussy's famous Claire de lune (“Moonlight”), which is based on a poem of the same name by Paul Verlaine. His style is also evident in his orchestral piece Prélude à “L'après-midi d'un faune” (Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun”), which he based on symbolist poem by Mallarmé, and in which he evokes mood through suggestion and indirections instead of direct emotional appeal or expression. While Debussy's music stretches tonality to new limits at times, his status as a late Romantic or early Modern composer is ambiguous and unclear.
The beginning of the twentieth also produced a number of composers who were clearly members of the first generation of modern music. Their music clearly absorbed the traditions of the past, but their personal style and language were so unique, distinctive, and individual that they can hardly be called late Romanticists. One such composer was Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), a French composer who is often associated with the impressionism of Debussy, but whose music is far more modern. In many ways, he was a master assimilator, absorbing and reworking a variety of influences in all his music. In England, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) and Gustav Holst (1874-1934) established a new English musical renaissance. Vaughan Williams incorporated English folk music in many of his works, while Holst looked also to other sources, such as Hindu sacred texts in his Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda. Nationalism and innovation also inspired the music of Czech composer Leoš Janáček, Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, Spain's Manuel de Falla, and Russia's Sergi Rachmaninov.
Opinions have changed many times about the composers of classical repertoire in the early twentieth century. Like the music of past eras that blurred the boundaries between those periods, the music of the early twentieth century served as a bridge between the monumental figures of the late Romantic period and the truly modern composers that we will learn about in the next chapter. All of the composers in this time display characteristics of both late Romanticism and early Modernism, which is perhaps why the music of Mahler, Sibelius, Ravel, Debussy, Rachmaninov, and Strauss have cemented their place in the classical repertoire with extremely popular music.