negative, critical. It had to differentiate itself from the pluralism of bourgeois culture, which, as Salome demonstrated, had acquired its own avant-garde division.
The offensive against kitsch moved on all fronts. The critic Karl Kraus used his one-man periodical, Die Fackel, or The Torch, to expose what he considered to be laziness and mendacity in journalistic language, institutionalized iniquity in the prosecution of crime, and hypocrisy in the work of popular artists. The architect Adolf Loos attacked the Art Nouveau compulsion to cover everyday objects in wasteful ornament, and, in 1911, shocked the city and the emperor with the unadorned, semi-industrial facade of his commercial building on the Michaelerplatz. The gruesome pictures of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele confronted a soft-porn art world with the insatiability of lust and the violence of sex. Georg Trakl’s poetry meticulously documented the onset of insanity and suicidal despair: “Now with my murderer I am alone.”
If members of this informal circle sometimes failed to appreciate one another’s work—the bohemian poet Peter Altenberg preferred Puccini and Strauss to Schoenberg and his students—they closed ranks when philistines attacked. There would be no backing down in the face of opposition. “If I must choose the lesser of two evils,” Kraus said, “I will choose neither.”
The most aggressive of Vienna’s truth-seekers was the philosopher Otto Weininger, who, in 1903, at the age of twenty-three, shot himself in the house where Beethoven died. In a city that considered suicide an art, Weininger’s was a masterpiece, and it made a posthumous bestseller of his doctoral dissertation, a bizarre tract titled Sex and Character. The argument of the book was that Europe suffered from racial, sexual, and ethical degeneration, whose root cause was the rampant sexuality of Woman. Jewishness and homosexuality were both symptoms of a feminized, aestheticized society. Only a masculine Genius could redeem the world. Wagner was “the greatest man since Christ.” Strange as it may seem in retrospect, this alternately incoherent and bigoted work attracted readers as intelligent as Kraus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and James Joyce, not to mention Schoenberg and his pupils. The young Alban Berg devoured Weininger’s writings on culture, underlining sentences such as this: “Everything purely aesthetic has no cultural value.” Wittgenstein, who made it his mission to expunge pseudo-religious cant from philosophy, was quoting Weininger when he issued his aphorism “Ethics and aesthetics are one.”
The entire discourse surrounding the Viennese avant-garde demands skeptical scrutiny. Certain of these “truths”—fatuous generalizations about women, obnoxious remarks about the relative abilities of races and classes—fail to impress the modern reader. Weininger’s notion of “ethics,” rooted in Puritanism and self-hatred, is as hypocritical as anyone’s. As in prior periods of cultural and social upheaval, revolutionary gestures betray a reactionary mind-set. Many members of the modernist vanguard would tack away from a fashionable solidarity with social outcasts and toward various forms of ultranationalism, authoritarianism, even Nazism. Moreover, only in a prosperous, liberal, art-infatuated society could such a determinedly antisocial class of artists survive, or find an audience. The bourgeois worship of art had implanted in artists’ minds an attitude of infallibility, according to which the imagination made its own laws. That mentality made possible the extremes of modern art.
If the ethical justification of the modernist crusade rings false, composers did have one good reason to rebel against bourgeois taste: the prevailing cult of the past threatened their very livelihood. Vienna was indeed besotted with music, but it was besotted with old music, with the work of Mozart and Beethoven and the late Dr. Brahms. A canon was taking shape, and contemporary pieces were beginning to disappear from concert programs. In the late eighteenth century, 84 percent of the repertory of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra consisted of music by living composers. By 1855, the figure had declined to 38 percent, by 1870 to 24 percent. Meanwhile, the broader public was falling in love with the cakewalk and other popular novelties. Schoenberg’s reasoning was this: if the bourgeois audience was losing interest in new music, and if the emerging mass audience had no appetite for classical music new or old, the serious artist should stop flailing his arms in a bid for attention and instead withdraw into a principled solitude.
After seeing Salome in Graz, Mahler doubted whether the voice of the people was the voice of God. Schoenberg, in his worst moods, completely inverted the formula, implying, in effect, that the voice of the people was the voice of the devil. “If it is art, it is not for all,” he later wrote, “and if it is for all, it is not art.” Did the split between the composer and his public come about as the result of such ferocious attitudes? Or were they a rational response to the public’s irrational vitriol? These questions admit no ready answers. Both sides of the dispute bore some degree of responsibility for the unsightly outcome. Fin-de-siècle Vienna offers the depressing spectacle of artists and audiences washing their hands of each other, giving up on the dream of common ground.
Paris 1900
Schoenberg was not the first composer to write “atonal music,” if it is defined as music outside the major-and minor-key system. That distinction probably belongs to Franz Liszt, erstwhile virtuoso of the Romantic piano, latter-day abbé and mystic. In several works of the late 1870s and early ’80s, most notably in the Bagatelle sans tonalité, Liszt’s harmony comes unmoored from the concept of key. Triads, the basic three-note building blocks of Western music, grow scarce. Augmented chords and unresolved sevenths proliferate. The diabolical tritone lurks everywhere. These profoundly unfamiliar works puzzled listeners who were accustomed to the flashy Romanticism of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and other favorites. Wagner muttered to Cosima that his old friend was showing signs of “budding insanity.” But it wasn’t happening only in Liszt’s brain. Similar anomalies cropped up in Russia and France. The fabric of harmony was warping, as if under the influence of an unseen force.
Paris, where Liszt caused mass hysteria in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, was more or less the birthplace of the avant-garde as we now conceive it. Charles Baudelaire struck all the poses of the artist in opposition to society, in terms of dress, behavior, sexual mores, choice of subject, and style of delivery. The august Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé defined poetry as a hermetic practice: “Everything that is sacred and that wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery.”
The young Debussy took that attitude as gospel. To his colleague Ernest Chausson he wrote in 1893: “Music really ought to have been a hermetical science, enshrined in texts so hard and laborious to decipher as to discourage the herd of people who treat it as casually as they do a handkerchief! I’d go further and, instead of spreading music among the populace, I propose the foundation of a ‘Society of Musical Esotericism …’”
Debussy shared with Schoenberg a petit bourgeois background. Born in 1862, the son of a shop keep er turned civil servant, he studied at the Paris Conservatory, where he struggled for several years to write a cantata sufficiently dull to win the sinecure of the academically oriented Prix de Rome. He finally succeeded with The Prodigal Son, in 1884.
In his spare time, Debussy sampled the wares of Paris’s avant-garde scenes, browsed in bookshops stocked with occult and Oriental lore, and, at the Bayreuth festivals of 1888 and 1889, fell under the spell of Parsifal. He attended Mallarmé’s elite Tuesday gatherings from around 1892 on, and also delved into more obscure regions—cultish Catholic societies such as the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross and the Order of the Rose-Cross of the Temple and Graal. Alas, it does not seem to be the case, despite claims put forward in the bestselling books Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code, that Debussy served as the thirty-third grand master of the Prieuré de Sion, which, according to a fabricated legend, guarded the secret of the Grail itself.
All this was standard-issue post-Wagnerian mumbo-jumbo. But Debussy’s honest quest for an unblemished, truthful musical language soon led him to other, distinctly un-Wagnerian sources. Just before his second trip to Bayreuth, in 1889, he attended the Paris Universal Exposition, which imported exotic sights and sounds from around the world, courtesy of a network of oppressive colonial regimes. It was here
