7 Neo-classical opera
‘Back to Bach’; ‘a call to order’; given the nature of the neo-classicists’ own slogans, one can perhaps forgive their critics for portraying them as proponents of aesthetic regression. ‘Stravinsky and Reaction’ is in fact the very heading of the second half of Theodor Adorno’s Philosophy of the New Music , written in the mid-1940s, in which the author uses all his formidable linguistic and philosophical powers to hold up Schoenberg as a paragon by at the same time stripping Stravinsky’s works, in particular those of his neo-classical oeuvre, of any aesthetic justification: ‘the Soldier’s Tale turns psychotic behavioural patterns into musical configurations without any hesitation’; ‘in purely musical terms, no difference can be perceived between his infantile and his neo-classical works’ (Adorno 1978a , 160, 187). Pierre Boulez has been more succinct in his judgement of Stravinsky’s neo-classicism: ‘I really hate these works, I cannot stand them’ (in Danuser 1997 , 330).
The term ‘neo-classicism’ has been used both to castigate and to praise. It has generally been applied solely to that music written between c. 1920 and 1950 which – as in the case of Stravinsky – is essentially tonal and employs formal, harmonic or melodic elements (or any combination thereof) taken from the music of the eighteenth century, often to ironic effect – though the term ‘neo-classicism’ is somewhat misleading, in that the source of those forms and gestures was primarily the music of the baroque rather than of Viennese classicism. Taruskin has characterized the movement as possessing an ‘aesthetic of abstraction’ ( 1997 , 466). However, ‘neo-classical’ has also been used to categorize just about all Western music composed during the period in question, on account of the antiquating tendencies so common at the time – for even Schoenberg and his followers, long regarded as an opposing pole to Stravinsky, utilized old forms and procedures. Neo-classicism of the Stravinskyan kind has been pilloried by left-wing critics on account of its popularity with the right-wing dictatorships of the 1930s and 1940s. However, other commentators, such as Elliott Carter, found neo-classicism attractive as a means of expressing an anti-German, anti-fascist aesthetic (Danuser 1997 , 325). The term thus risks being used, in the words of Luciano Berio, as ‘an empty container that can be filled with very different and contradictory elements’ (326).
A ‘return’ to something that either existed or is at least thought to have existed – Richard Taruskin describes it as ‘a tendentious journey back to where we had never been’ ( 1993 , 286) – suggests that there is something unpalatable in the present that one feels compelled to leave behind. And one does not have to be a Marxist historian to accept that artistic trends around 1920 and the years thereafter were influenced by a reaction against the chaos of four years of war, the ensuing influenza epidemic (whose death toll was even greater than that of the War), and the economic morass that followed both. Carter has written how he remembers his father taking him ‘in about 1923 to see the French battlefield and to visit Germany during the million-or-more marks to the dollar period. So a retreat into a more ordered, more restrained style seemed a meaningful reaction’ (Danuser 1997 , 310).
This desire for a ‘return to order’ was in fact common to most of the leading composers in the years after the First World War. As Boulez has remarked of the Second Viennese School: ‘[Schoenberg’s] Erwartung , Die glückliche Hand , even Pierrot lunaire . . . are pieces where you are always on the verge of chaos . . . you have no codified rules any more, no system of compositional regulations . . . [ Schoenberg and his followers] needed some kind of “Ordnung”’ (322). Nor should it surprise one that, after such excesses of slaughter, the late-romantic and expressionist aesthetic excesses (real and perceived) of the prewar years should have seemed neither financially realizable nor even morally desirable. Neo-classicism certainly embraced a tendency to economy and restraint – say, at its most crass, the difference between the almost exactly contemporaneous Frau ohne Schatten by Strauss and Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale (first performed in 1919 and 1918 respectively), the former a vast opera on a quasi-mythical topic, given its premiere at the Viennese State Opera and demanding that venue’s whole panoply of orchestral, vocal and theatrical forces, the latter a succinct retelling of a folk tale requiring three actors, a dancer and a band of seven players, and designed as a ‘touring work’ to be performed anywhere and everywhere. By 1916, even Strauss himself saw his Frau ohne Schatten as ‘the last romantic opera’ (Hammelmann and Osers 1961 , 259), and pleaded with Hofmannsthal to turn with him to operetta, as ‘tragedy in the theatre, after this war, strikes me at present as something rather idiotic and childish’ (250).
The history of musical neo-classicism in the twentieth century is intricately involved with that of opera. To be sure, ‘antiquating’ tendencies have probably existed in music for almost as long as has music itself. The innovations of the Florentine Camerata and of Wagner – namely, the birth of opera and of music drama respectively – were both based upon a supposed ‘return’ to the practices of Classical Greek theatre. And, if one wanted, one could even place the birth of musical neo-classicism in Wagner’s own work, be it in the diatonic bombast of Die Meistersinger (1868) or the allusions to the music of the baroque in Parsifal (1882) – see, for example, the interlude in Act I during the walk to the Castle of the Grail, with its sequential harmony and dotted rhythms almost reminiscent of a French overture. A more convincing argument could be made for Strauss’s Rosenkavalier (1911) or, more especially, Ariadne auf Naxos (1912–16) as the starting-point for neo-classicism, for they mark a step backwards (though the word is admittedly loaded) from the expressionism of Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909), and a conscious attempt to re-establish ‘Mozartian’ values. Ariadne was conceived by Strauss from the very start as a succession of closed musical numbers, with recitatives and arias modelled on Mozart, Bellini and Donizetti, and an orchestra of just fifteen to twenty players (though the forces needed were more than double that in the end). It even features characters taken from the Italian commedia dell’arte that were beloved of later, more overtly neo-classical music theatre – as in works by Busoni, Prokofiev and Stravinsky (see Strauss’s letter to Hofmannsthal of 22 May 1911: 82). Contemporaneous with Ariadne was Pfitzner’s Palestrina (1917), which takes the quasi-religious, antiquating element of Parsifal a few steps further through the incorporation of sections of Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli into its own musical fabric. However, apart from the fact that Pfitzner was working intentionally in the Wagnerian tradition, this is less a case of latent neo-classicism than of old music being utilized as local colour in a manner not too far removed from Puccini’s chinoiserie (or, rather, japonaiserie ) in Madama Butterfly (1904). An over-enthusiastic Englishman might even claim a fellow native as the creator of the first neo-classical opera: Ralph Vaughan Williams, in Hugh the Drover , completed in early 1914. An attempt to revive the English ballad opera, it uses recitative and, at least in part, a number format. Vaughan Williams’s utilization of English folk song (both real and invented) is arguably not far removed from the neo-classicists’ re-using of musical material taken from the eighteenth century – the proximity of the two ventures is underlined by the ease with which Vaughan Williams himself appropriated neo-classical gestures in his works of the 1920s such as the Concerto Accademico for violin and orchestra or the central section of the famous ‘Greensleeves’ interlude from his later opera Sir John in Love (1929), cast as a kind of invention for two flutes with string accompaniment. However, since Vaughan Williams had left neither tonality nor conventional musical form before Hugh and thus could not ‘return’ to it, and since his use of foreign melodic material is characterized by nostalgia instead of the neo-classicists’ critical distance or ironic detachment, to add the prefix ‘neo’ to his ‘classicality’ would be stretching the term too far .
Busoni
If there is any single defining moment in neo-classical opera in all its guises, then it is a reaction against German music drama in general, and against Wagner in particular – a trend that had become clear even before the cataclysm of the First World War. Thomas Mann postulated in 1911 a ‘new Classicality’ that would be ‘cooler, more refined, even of a healthier intellectuality’ than Wagner (Erika Mann 1983 , 28), though Ferruccio Busoni was the first composer to codify what this new aesthetic might entail, to give it a name and put it into practice. In the second edition of his Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music , published in 1916, he wrote that ‘I find qualified justification in the methods of old opera by which the atmosphere generated by the dramatic movement of a scene is concentrated in a single, closed piece (the aria)’ (Busoni 1983 , 58). This represented a definite break with the Wagnerian legacy, for Wagner himself over half a century earlier had declared the division of operatic music into recitative and aria to be passé . This declaration many, if not most, of his successors had long accepted as law. In 1913, Busoni wrote the libretto for his opera Arlecchino (‘Harlequin’, a figure taken from the commedia dell’arte ). Its music was completed in 1916, and the work was first performed, in Zurich, on 11 May 1917. This opera is modelled on the number opera of the eighteenth century and includes ironic references to the musical styles and operatic situations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even featuring a parodistic duel. A further possible influence on Busoni was Ernst von Dohnányi’s mime play Der Schleier der Pierrette (The Veil of Pierrette ) after the play by Arthur Schnitzler, composed in 1908–9 and first performed in Dresden in 1910. Its characters include Pierrot, Pierrette and Arlechino (sic ). In Busoni, Arlecchino is a non-singing role, though here, all the characters speak their parts. But while Dohnányi’s score includes many dance numbers (mostly waltzes), the music is essentially late romantic, and the plot – a love triangle in which all three die of poison – is a far cry from either the commedia dell’arte or the ironic detachment of Busoni’s Arlecchino . (Another, roughly contemporaneous, ‘pantomime’ using a character from the commedia dell’arte was Sibelius’s Scaramouche to a text by Poul Knudsen and Mikael Trepka Bloch; again, its approach is far removed from Busoni’s, and it was in any case not performed until 1922.)
Figure 7.1 Busoni’s Arlecchino : cover design to vocal score, 1917. (Via Chris Walton)
The development of Busoni’s aesthetic can be traced in his writings and correspondence of these years (see Busoni 1999 ). In 1919 he gave his ideas a collective name: ‘Junge Klassizität’ (‘Young Classicality’). The phrase was first used in an unpublished article written in Zurich, ‘Musikalischer Rückblick und Ausblick’; Busoni’s famous open letter to Paul Bekker, published in the Frankfurter Zeitung of 15/16 January 1920, contains his first published elucidation of the term (see also Messing 1988 , 69–70). Busoni preferred it to ‘new Classicality’, as this smacked to him of merely imitating the past (he was also most probably aware of Mann’s article of eight years earlier). Nevertheless, the term ‘new Classicality’ became increasingly associated with him. Busoni’s ideas for opera were finally published in 1921 in an article entitled ‘Über die Möglichkeiten der Oper’ (‘On the possibilities of opera’: Busoni 1983 , 121–35). There, he held up the example of Mozart’s Magic Flute as the operatic ideal, castigated the erotic and with it all excess of expression, called for love duets and everything that is purely illustrative to be abandoned, stressed the ‘abstract’ nature of music, and maintained that opera must comprise a series of short, closed numbers. Busoni may have codified what were to become the basic tenets of neo-classical opera, and first put them into practice in Arlecchino , but his oeuvre otherwise does display discrepancies between intention and effect. His friend, the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck, once remarked that ‘Busoni keeps coming with his Mozart scores, but when he writes something that works, it’s always out of Meistersinger ’ (Walton 1994 , 154) – a comment grounded in professional jealousy, perhaps, but uncomfortably close to the truth: there are passages in Doktor Faust in particular that suggest that Busoni aimed to create a ‘new’ German people’s opera after the manner of Die Meistersinger .
Stravinsky in the 1920s
Stravinsky’s first truly neo-classical stage work was Pulcinella (first performed in Paris in 1920), a ballet with songs in which he ‘re-composed’ music by Pergolesi and his contemporaries, and in which the plot depicts the escapades of the title-hero, a figure taken – like Busoni’s Harlequin – from the commedia dell’arte . This genre from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provided inspiration for numerous writers and composers in the early twentieth century, not just the ‘Young’ and ‘Neo-’ Classicists, and inspired several to experiment with mixtures of music and speech: besides the examples by Busoni, Dohnányi and Sibelius mentioned above, there is the obvious one of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire . Busoni’s Turandot , first performed in a double bill with Arlecchino in Zurich in 1917, is based on the same fable by Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806) as is Puccini’s opera of that name. However, unlike Puccini, Busoni retains Gozzi’s commedia dell’arte figures Truffaldino and Pantalone, despite the Chinese setting . Gozzi was also the source for the plot of Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges , composed in 1919 and first performed in Chicago on 30 December 1921, and arguably the first full-scale opera to conform in large part to the neo-classical aesthetic. The plot tells of a hypochondriac prince in an imaginary kingdom who, through the machinations of various sorcerers, falls in love with three oranges, and in the end marries a princess who emerges from one of them (and with her, it is implied, lives happily ever after). The libretto, by Prokofiev himself, is a mixture of fairy tale, satire and slapstick; a prologue features an argument between ‘Tragedians’ and ‘Ridiculous Ones’, and the latter group reappears throughout the opera – even interfering in it to ensure the happy ending – thus providing an element of ironic detachment. Stylistically, the opera owes much to the neo-classical vein of the composer’s Classical Symphony of 1916–17 .
Stravinsky’s first neo-classical opera – in which he follows Busoni’s ideas implicitly, if not by intention – was Mavra , composed in 1921–2 and first performed in Paris on 3 June 1922. It is an opera buffa in one act of just 25 minutes, and is based on a story by Pushkin in which a girl disguises her lover as a (female) cook in order to inveigle him into her mother’s house. A neighbour makes up the complement of four characters, and the whole is accompanied by a small orchestra dominated by wind instruments. The formal organization is that of a number opera with dialogue, while the music is decidedly tonal, largely periodic in structure, intentionally non-Wagnerian and occasionally even jazzy, with an emphasis on melody and accompaniment . Stravinsky’s next opera (described by him as an ‘opera-oratorio’) is generally regarded as one of the seminal works of musical neo-classicism: Oedipus Rex , composed between January 1926 and May 1927. It is a setting of a Latin translation of Jean Cocteau’s French version of the play by Sophocles, and is cast in two acts of just under half an hour each. Thebes is suffering from a plague, but the oracle says it can be saved if the murderer of its former king, Laius, can be found and punished. The current king, Oedipus, promises to do the deed and deliver his people, but when he discovers that he, unwittingly, is the murderer, that Laius was his father, and that the widowed queen he married is in fact his own mother, he gouges out his eyes and leaves the city.
According to Stravinsky himself, he had already made the decision to write an opera in a ‘dead’ language before he settled on the actual plot. Only at this point did he turn to his old friend Cocteau to provide the text ; Cocteau’s French was then translated into Latin by Abbé Jean Daniélou. The instrumental forces required by the work are greater than those of Mavra , but by no means excessive – triple woodwind, four each of trumpets and horns, three trombones, one tuba, percussion, harp, piano and strings. There are six solo roles – Oedipus (tenor), his wife Jocasta (mezzo-soprano), Créon (bass-baritone), Tirésias (bass), the Shepherd (tenor) and the Messenger (bass-baritone); a male chorus of only modest size is also required. The manner of staging was determined by Stravinsky himself: masks were to be worn, and there was to be next to no movement of the singers except of their arms, in order for them to appear as living statues. A narrator in evening dress relates the bare bones of the plot in the vernacular. Just as Stravinsky wanted a language that was ‘turned to stone’ for his text, so should the audience be alienated from the action itself. (While it is tempting to stress the undeniable parallels between the roughly contemporaneous alienating techniques in the dramatic work of Stravinsky and the playwright Bertolt Brecht, those of the former are a purely aesthetic device, while those of the latter were designed primarily as a means of raising the political consciousness of the audience.) The ‘dead’ language, combined with the use of masks and the altogether static nature of its production, also imparts to Oedipus Rex a certain ritual character that aligns it with other ‘ritualistic’ works in Stravinsky’s oeuvre, such as The Rite of Spring (1913) and Les Noces (1923).
The music of Oedipus is decidedly tonal, its metres regular, its forms those of number opera, and there are no leitmotives or reminiscence motives, though a carefully devised key scheme helps to impart musical unity. The work’s musical gestures (as Stravinsky once admitted) owe as much to Verdi and Italian opera of the nineteenth century as to the eighteenth century: Jocasta’s aria ‘Nonn’erubescite’ is particularly and elaborately Italianate, and was a favourite of the young Benjamin Britten’s. While an opera lasting less than an hour requiring modest forces (by comparison with pre-First World War conditions) might seem a typical example of the scaling-down of resources characteristic of the neo-classical period, one can however read Oedipus as having internalized those very late-romantic excesses that Stravinsky supposedly despised, their having been, as it were, subsumed into the very genesis of the work. For what could be more excessive than to take a Greek play, commission a French version of it and have this, in turn, translated into Latin, only to be explained anyway, in French, by a narrator? The whole paraphernalia of operatic production – costumes, sets, lighting – are channelled into a work where no one really does anything, nor does anything really happen, on stage. The details of the work’s complex genesis were no secret, but became just as much a part of its mystique as (say) Berg’s own analysis of his opera Wozzeck became an integral aspect of that work’s reception history. Oedipus Rex was first performed as an oratorio by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on 30 May 1927 in Paris, and as an opera on 23 February 1928 in Vienna. It was not an immediate success, but by the end of the decade it had been performed across Europe, and its influence was incalculable.
Stravinsky’s neo-classical style, which drew not just on the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but also on jazz, had already left its mark on many of his contemporaries before Oedipus , and was to leave few untouched. In the works of the leading French composers of the 1920s, the influence of Stravinsky, of native opéra bouffe and of American popular music merged, often imperceptibly. There, as in Italy, the vestiges of the old number opera had not died, and now found new confirmation in the neo-classical aesthetic. Two years before the first performance of Oedipus , Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1925) was given its world premiere in Monte Carlo; in this opera, the creatures and objects maltreated by a petulant child come to life to confront him. Although not neo-classical in intent, the influence of Stravinsky’s music after 1918 is evident here, and Ravel follows Stravinsky’s lead by including references to jazz (for a Wedgwood teapot that speaks English) . The composers who made up ‘Les Six’ – Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric, Germaine Tailleferre, Darius Milhaud and Louis Durey – were all influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the neo-classical Stravinsky, though Stravinskyan wit was transformed on occasion into Gallic absurdity. This was the case in Honegger’s comic opera Les Aventures du Roi Pausole , first performed with much success at the Bouffes-Parisiens in 1930. Not only does this number oper(ett)a flirt brazenly with jazz, but its debt to Stravinsky is clear right from its opening bars, which contain an obvious, though possibly unintentional, reference to Pulcinella ; as it happens, Honegger had as recently as 1925 spoken pejoratively about that same work (see Honegger 1925 ). Pausole found a worthy successor almost 20 years later in Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias (Paris, 1947), based on a surrealist comedy by Guillaume Apollinaire in which a man and his wife swap roles and sexes, and he bears thousands of children.
Stravinsky’s modernist credentials enabled him to impart aesthetic validity to matters regarded by many as contrary to the modern – not just a return to tonality, but also to a number format in opera and to a heterogeneity of musical material that might now include everything down to the latest popular fashions, be these American jazz or local popular music. The boundaries between neo-classicism and existing traditions are in the case of some composers blurred; thus, Jaromir Weinberger’s Schwanda the Bagpiper (Prague, 1927) is generally regarded as a Czech folk opera, though in its musical means it is not far from contemporaneous neo-classicism. Weinberger had studied with Max Reger, and besides its polkas and furiants, Schwanda displays its composer’s delight and skill in writing fugues. The proximity of Vaughan Williams’s neo-classicism of the 1920s to his folk-song inspired style has already been noted. The example of Stravinsky also had a liberating effect on the younger generation of American and English composers, ranging from Virgil Thomson with his starkly diatonic Four Saints in Three Acts (New York, 1934) to Britten, whose Peter Grimes (London, 1945) owes as much to Stravinsky as to Berg or Verdi. Even the very opening of the opera, with its dotted rhythms and bustling scale-patterns, is unmistakably neo-classical in origin.
Schoenberg and Berg
The neo-classical urge was by no means confined to Stravinsky and his fellow Parisians in the 1920s. It is, depending upon one’s viewpoint, either a case of synchronicity or banal coincidence that in the same month that the epithet ‘neo-classical’ was publicly applied to Stravinsky’s music for the first time, by Boris Schloezer in La Revue contemporaine on 1 February 1923, Schoenberg completed his Suite, Op. 25, and his Klavierstücke , Op. 23, in which works he first employed his newly invented ‘technique of composing with twelve tones’. It was around the same time that he announced his discovery to his students (see Max Deutsch in Szmolyan 1971 , 118). Given the fact that musical journalism had already, from 1920 onwards, defined Schoenberg and Stravinsky as musically and aesthetically opposing poles (the ideas behind Adorno’s much later polemic had a long pedigree), it is not a little ironic that in his first works in the twelve-tone system, Schoenberg too utilized musical forms taken from the eighteenth century. Boulez has even maintained that ‘Stravinsky’s and Schoenberg’s paths to neo-classicism differ basically only in one being diatonic and the other chromatic’ ( 1977 , 33–4). While this serves to blur considerable stylistic and aesthetic differences between the two men and their respective followers – for example, the elements of wit, of playfulness, distortion, even parody manifest in Stravinsky that are generally considered defining characteristics of neo-classicism are largely missing from Schoenberg – there are certain undoubted parallels. The very fact that Schoenberg found it necessary to pillory the ‘neo-classicists’ and ‘pseudo-tonalists’ in general, and Stravinsky in particular, in his own brief cantata Der neue Klassizismus (The New Classicism ), Op. 28 no. 3 (1925), merely serves to underline the real similarities between the aesthetics of the two men. (Schoenberg’s text mocks ‘der kleine Modernsky’ (‘the little Modernsky’); Stravinsky referred to this ‘very nasty verse about me (though I almost forgive him, for setting it to such a remarkable mirror canon)’ in Stravinsky and Craft 1962a , 69.) For, as Adorno once commented of Schreker’s influence on Wozzeck , ‘one usually parodies that to which one is naturally drawn, even if one’s feelings towards it are ambivalent’ ( 1968 , 26).
Schoenberg’s one-act Von Heute auf Morgen , to a text by his wife, was the first twelve-tone opera, though it too uses set pieces and recitatives. First performed in Frankfurt in 1930, it was an attempt to ride the bandwagon of the Zeitoper : opera with a topical, often domestic theme. It depicts a simple marital squabble, not unlike that in Strauss’s Intermezzo (1924) – the only opera by Strauss, apart from Salome and Elektra , that Schoenberg admitted to liking (Kennedy 1999 , 33). But Schoenberg’s humour (and that of his wife) is heavy-handed in a peculiarly Teutonic manner, while the dissonance level and complexity of the music stand in stark contrast to the triviality of the plot. The opera has the feel of unintentional parody (of ‘something to which [Schoenberg] was naturally drawn’) – as if what was supposed to be a fairy princess has turned out an ugly sister instead. An exactly contemporaneous, but more successful, operatic telling of a domestic squabble using neo-classical formal means is the one-act, 40-minute Vom Fischer un syner Fru (Of the Fisherman and his Wife ; Dresden, 1930) by Othmar Schoeck. In his previous opera, Penthesilea (1923–5), Schoeck had ventured into expressionism and atonality, but Vom Fischer , based on the famous Grimm fairy tale, confirmed his return to tonality – though a tonality, as Derrick Puffett has written, ‘after the Fall’ (in Baumann 1982 , 61). Here, the trajectory of the drama is perfectly matched by the musical form, that of a set of orchestral variations with concluding fugue after the manner of Brahms and of Schoeck’s teacher, Reger.
Schoenberg’s next, and final, opera was Moses und Aron (1930–32), which in its use of old forms such as canons and fugues is no less neo-classical than his other works of this period. Indeed, Boulez has described it, mockingly, as ‘Schönberg as “Papa Bach”’, but has added that ‘today Moses und Aron reminds me, in the best sense, of the Passions by Bach’ (Danuser 1997 , 331). The most influential example of eighteenth-century forms being used in an opera was undoubtedly Wozzeck by Schoenberg’s former pupil, Alban Berg. It was composed between 1914 and 1922 and first performed under Erich Kleiber in Berlin in 1925. Berg’s underpinning of the dramatic structure with instrumental forms from the baroque and classical periods (including a sonata movement, inventions, a pavane, a gigue, a gavotte with two doubles, etc.), and especially the highly stylized manner in which he does so, gives the work an undeniably neo-classical aspect. This is despite its dramatic immediacy, derived from Schoenbergian expressionism, and the fact that Berg’s exploration of the sensual and erotic ran directly counter to Busoni’s ideas for ‘young Classical’ opera: ‘sensual or “sexual” music . . . has no place here’, Busoni had written in 1921 ( 1983 , 126). Berg’s second opera, Lulu , also employs a host of old forms, from arietta and cavatina to rondo, embedded into an overall formal scheme even more constructivist in design than that of Wozzeck .
Hindemith, Orff and Weill
Stravinsky himself identified a further neo-classical ‘school’ besides his own and that of the Schoenbergians, namely that of Paul Hindemith. In his early twenties, Hindemith made a name for himself with three one-act operas in expressionist vein – Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Stuttgart, 1921) to a text by Oskar Kokoschka, Das Nusch-Nuschi (Stuttgart, 1921), a setting of a marionette play by Franz Blei, and Sancta Susanna (Frankfurt am Main, 1922), to a libretto of nuns and sex by August Stramm. Hindemith’s next opera, Cardillac , Op. 39, to a libretto in three acts by Ferdinand Lion after E. T. A. Hoffman’s Das Fräulein von Scuderi , adopted the neo-classical ‘aesthetic of abstraction’ to remarkable dramatic effect. The work caused a sensation at its first performance in Dresden on 10 November 1927, and within months had been taken up by a score of other opera houses. The plot tells of a master goldsmith named Cardillac who cannot bear to be parted from his creations, and so kills those who acquire them in order to steal them back. The opera ends with his murder by a mob. In its consideration of the artist’s place in society, Cardillac is in fact closely related to Pfitzner’s Palestrina , though its aesthetic could hardly be further removed from that work. The immediacy of the drama contrasts starkly with its musical treatment; thus, to give one example, the love scene between the Young Cavalier and the Opera Singer in the first act is accompanied by a decidedly unpassionate, detached, mock-Bachian duet for two flutes. A moment of silence ensues, during which Cardillac bursts in, murders the Cavalier, and exits swiftly. Only then does the orchestra erupt. This opera is comprised of individual numbers; as in Berg’s use of techniques taken from instrumental music in Wozzeck , Hindemith casts a large part of his final act as a passacaglia with 22 variations.
Hindemith’s Neues vom Tage (1928–9; libretto by Marcellus Schiffer) was an essay in the Zeitoper genre then at the height of its popularity. This work, first performed in Berlin on 8 June 1929, had unforeseen consequences, for Adolf Hitler (who apparently never actually saw it) took exception to an aria in it that was sung in a bath. As a result, Hindemith’s music was later banned in the Third Reich, and his opera Mathis der Maler (composed in 1934–5 to a libretto by Hindemith himself) had to be given its first performance outside Germany. The opera is set in Germany at the time of the Reformation and the ensuing religious wars. Its title figure is Matthias Grünewald, the painter of the famous Isenheim Altar. It, too, deals with the role of the artist in society, though here specifically with the ways in which Church and State impinge upon the artist and his work. The premiere of a symphony comprising music from this opera was planned by the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1934, and it was this that brought about that conductor’s first open argument with the Nazi authorities, leading to his forced removal from his posts. This is not a little ironic, for Mathis represents yet another attempt to compose a new, German ‘peoples’ opera’, and it is today common knowledge that Hindemith, although no supporter of Hitler, was in fact keen to find a modus vivendi with the Nazi regime in order to enable him to remain in the country. Grünewald was a painter beloved of Nazi art historians, and certain commentators see Mathis’s acquiescence in the opera to the will of Cardinal Albrecht as symbolic of Hindemith’s willingness to kowtow to the fascist state (Kater 1997 ). Others see Mathis’s plight as representing the ‘inner emigration’ of non-Nazi composers who remained in Germany, while yet others see elements of anti-Nazi protest in the work (for example, Jackson 2004 ). What cannot be denied, however, is that the composer here aims at pleasing a wide audience, for long stretches of the opera represent the neo-classical Hindemith at his most accessible. A wide variety of musical sources is employed, from Catholic hymns and Protestant chorales to mock-modal Gregorian chant, while the overture (named the ‘Engelkonzert’ or ‘Angels’ Concert’) – which opens demonstratively on a long G-major chord – even includes a chorale prelude on a German folk tune, with neo-baroque polyphonic figurations throughout. However, the Nazi authorities remained unbending, Hindemith exiled himself from his native land, and Mathis itself could not be performed on German soil. Like Berg’s Lulu a year before it (and for similar reasons), it was given its world premiere in Zurich, in 1938. A final irony is the fact that the conductor of both premieres, the Swiss Robert Denzler, was found after the Second World War to have been a member of the German Nazi Party and was hounded out of his post at the Zurich City Theatre.
Hindemith’s neo-classicism, which eschewed both Stravinskyan irony and the extremes of Schoenbergian dissonance, and managed to retain a populist aura, proved particularly influential in the 1930s and 1940s. This was especially the case in the German-speaking world, where the influence of Hindemith’s style permeated much contemporary music. Whole schools of composers now indulged in pseudo-modal, motoric concerti grossi and organ toccatas and fugues in what became a kind of musical lingua franca (see, for example, the oeuvres of Hugo Distler, Ernst Pepping, Willy Burkhard, Adolf Brunner, Hans Schaeuble and many others). In German, Swiss and Austrian opera of this time, the neo-classical influence is obvious amongst the most diverse figures, from Alexander von Zemlinsky’s Der Kreidekreis (Zurich, 1933), Werner Egk’s Die Zaubergeige (Frankfurt am Main, 1935), Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Des Simplicius Simplicissimus Jugend (composed in 1934; first performed in Cologne, 1948), Heinrich Sutermeister’s Die schwarze Spinne (first performed on Berne Radio in 1936) to Gottfried von Einem’s Dantons Tod (Salzburg, 1947). It is just as evident in twelve-tone operas from the wider Schoenberg circle, such as Das Opfer by Winfried Zillig (Hamburg, 1937) – a work depicting the final days of Scott’s Antarctic expedition, in which, however, the note of high tragedy is somewhat diminished by a singing and dancing chorus of malevolent penguins.
Figure 7.2 Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler (Zurich, 1938): costume design for Ursula by Jürg Stockar. (Via Chris Walton)
The combination of a Stravinskyan motoric drive, quasi-modal tonality and a talent for ‘folksy’ melodies provided a winning formula for Carl Orff. His earliest essay for the operatic stage had been a performing version of Monteverdi’s Orfeo (Mannheim, 1925), which was, as it happens, almost exactly contemporaneous with Gian Francesco Malipiero’s edition of the same work (published in London in 1923) – a reminder that the neo-classical movement coincided with, and fed off, the contemporary scholarly interest in pre-classical music, though in the case of Malipiero, that interest was not least a result of a flight from the present (Stenzl 1990 , 110–11). The pomp and harmonic stasis of the prelude to Orfeo find echoes in Orff’s scenic cantata Carmina burana (Frankfurt am Main, 1937), which the composer himself preferred in its stage version. Amongst the general public, this is probably the most popular piece of music written in the twentieth century, but it is also one of the most abhorred amongst the cognoscenti on account of its repetitive, primitivist (some have said: latently fascist) style. Nevertheless, Orff’s operas, such as Der Mond (Munich, 1939), while not eschewing a saccharine-sweet sentimentality (that opera ends with a cooing child accompanied by the sounds of a Bavarian zither) demonstrate his considerable dramatic and melodic gifts and ability to speak directly to his (German) audience – something to which Schoenberg and Hindemith had vainly aspired. The stylistic plurality of Der Mond is not least a debt to the neo-classical Stravinsky: the work even has a narrator, like Oedipus , though his is here a singing part. In his later operas such as Antigonae (Salzburg, 1949) and Oedipus der Tyrann (Stuttgart, 1959), Orff carried on the peculiarly Germanic twentieth-century tradition of writing operas on Greek Classical themes, a tradition that had begun with Richard Strauss, but which also took new impetus from the example of the neo-classical Stravinsky.
Neo-classicism was taken into the realm of popular music theatre by Kurt Weill, a former student of Busoni’s. For their Dreigroschenoper (Berlin, 1928), he and his librettist Brecht even took a specific eighteenth-century work as a model (John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera , which, incidentally, was also treated to a new version by Britten in 1948). Both the number format and the ironic use of popular music styles of the day place Weill’s work in close proximity to Stravinsky’s neo-classicism – a fact of which Stravinsky was himself aware (Craft 1982 , 224).
The Rake’s Progress
For what is generally accepted as the highpoint of neo-classicism in opera, we must turn once more to Stravinsky himself, who emigrated to the United States in 1939 and settled in California. The idea of composing an opera in English seems to have come to him soon afterwards. In 1947, he visited an exhibition in Chicago at which William Hogarth’s series of paintings ‘The Rake’s Progress’ was displayed. Stravinsky was struck by the operatic possibilities of the narrative they tell. At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley, W. H. Auden was engaged as librettist – soon to be joined by Auden’s lover, Chester Kallman. Auden and Kallman brought elements of the Faust legend into the tale and constructed it around three wishes of the work’s anti-hero – for money, happiness and the power to bring salvation to mankind – thereby imparting to this work, too, a certain ritual character.
Tom Rakewell comes into money, and forsakes his lover in the country, Anne Trulove, for the fleshly delights of London. He is accompanied all the while by his servant Nick Shadow who, as his name suggests, is the devil in disguise. Tom loses his fortune in a madcap scheme to turn stones into bread; Shadow claims his dues, and plays cards with Tom for the latter’s soul. But Tom’s faith in Love returns at the final moment, he gambles on the Queen of Hearts, and wins back his soul. As the vanquished Shadow descends into hell, his final act is to render Tom insane. The closing scene takes place in Bedlam, where Anne visits Tom one last time; he then dies, thinking himself Adonis to her Venus. The work ends with an epilogue in which the main characters offer an ironic commentary on the plot, after the example of Mozart’s Don Giovanni .
This epilogue is but a final nod to Mozart in a work that takes his music as its prime inspiration. The music, which is decidedly tonal, is full of references to him, in particular to Così fan tutte (ostensibly just about the only music Stravinsky would listen to while writing his opera). After the world premiere in Venice on 11 September 1951, Robert Craft, Auden and the composer’s wife even played ‘a tune-detection game of citing resemblances to other operas’ (Craft 1972 , 29). The libretto, replete with references to English literary styles of the eighteenth century, has clear-cut numbers: arias, ensembles and choruses (generally written in rhyme), and recitatives (in prose). Stravinsky kept these divisions, following eighteenth-century musical conventions by setting most recitatives to just harpsichord accompaniment, even employing eighteenth-century cadential formulae to ironic effect. The orchestra is small, comprising double woodwind, timpani, strings and two each of trumpets and horns. The Rake’s Progress has been criticized for Stravinsky’s indisputably unidiomatic setting of the English language, though in fact this merely heightens the alienating effect of the linguistic and musical allusions to the eighteenth century, and in performance seems entirely appropriate. The Rake , not least because of its stylistic approachability, has become one of the most frequently performed operas from the postwar period. However, that same approachability has provoked the ire of composers and musicologists alike, in a manner exceeded perhaps only by the vitriol reserved for Orff. Boulez has written of the Rake that ‘I find this kind of “pénible” imitation, also “trituration” of Mozart unbearable, simply unbearable. It is basically wrong, simply that. It is wrong because there is a composer who does not know what to do any more’ (Danuser 1997 , 331).
The Rake marks not just a culmination of Stravinsky’s neo-classicism, but his farewell to it. While the Cantata and the Septet that he wrote immediately afterwards (in 1952–3) still retain obvious elements of neo-classicism in their melodic and harmonic gestures, these works already display a tendency to a serial treatment of his material. Stravinsky’s first work based on a series, albeit only of five notes, was composed in 1954 ( In Memoriam Dylan Thomas ), his first twelve-note music just one year later (in the Canticum sacrum ). The Rake also marks a caesura in the fortunes of the neo-classical movement as a whole. The various forms of neo-classicism had been the only ‘modern’ music favoured or allowed by the European fascist dictatorships, whereas the music of the Second Viennese School had been ignored or banned – in Italy, for example, the two leading exponents of musical neo-classicism, Malipiero and Alfredo Casella, had allied themselves closely with Mussolini’s regime: Malipiero had even dedicated his opera Giulio Cesare , first performed in Genoa in 1936, to Italy’s latter-day ‘Caesar’ (see Stenzl 1990 , chapters 6 and 7 ). After the collapse of German and Italian fascism at the close of the Second World War, it was perhaps inevitable that neo-classicism should in certain circles seem tainted and ‘regressive’ (see the quotations from Adorno at the head of this chapter). The European avant-garde found its new heroes in the recently deceased Anton von Webern, whose Nazi sympathies were conveniently forgotten, and in the Darmstadt proponents of increasingly strict forms of serialism.
Nevertheless, the influence of neo-classicism – in particular, of Stravinsky – remained. It is well-nigh impossible to find an opera by any composer from the 1920s to the 1960s that does not bear some echo of the neo-classical aesthetic, down to Michael Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage (London, 1955) and Hans Werner Henze’s The Bassarids (Salzburg, 1966). Even Carlo Gozzi, the source of inspiration for several of the early neo-classicists, continued to fascinate into the postwar years. He provided the substance of Heinz Kramer’s libretto König Hirsch for Henze (composed from 1952 to 1955, and revised in 1962). Indeed, while it has been seen by many as an aberration, an artistic cul-de-sac diverting from the modernist path, the neo-classical movement can from today’s perspective be interpreted, conversely, as linking up with postmodernism as part of a largely unbroken aesthetic continuum from around 1920 to the present day in which it is the serialist experiment that can appear the cul-de-sac. However, the dodecaphonic/serial and the neo-classical – the progressive and the ‘traditional’, if one will – are perhaps best understood as existing in a dialectical relationship in which the one acquires its meaning not least through the other, with the resultant creative tension informing much of the finest work of the adherents of both parties (even Adorno in his later years diluted his vitriol towards Stravinsky’s neo-classicism; see 1978b , 382–409). The last word should perhaps be left to Henze, who has felt that tension keenly in his own work: ‘enslaved by one, enthralled by the other, I have tried ever since to sustain a double life, a contradiction, a dualism within myself, and to draw the aesthetic consequences’ (1996, 7).