Is Schoenberg Wagner’s future ?
(composer, professor at l’École
normale supérieure de Paris)
What do they have in common?
Analogies
Continuation
The interval
of time that separates them
Three steps
The twilight-Wagner
What is
twilight?
Resistance,
perfecting and prophecy in Wagner
Dawn-Schoenberg
What is it
[than] a dawn?
Second string
quartet as dawn
Musical dawn
The between Wagner-Schoenberg
The wagnerian
references in Schoenberg
In the second
string quartet
Distance
References
Before 1908,
during “the night”…
Transfigured
night?
The plot
Two nights
Romantic
night
Transfigured
night
The music
Small analysis
Parsifal
transfigured by Schoenberg?
What transfiguration?
Music doesn’t
think alone
Wagner and
the drama
Schoenberg
and the diagonal
french
institute alliance française
Wagner, our contemporary
IV - Wagner: Visionary or Gravedigger?
Monday,
May 1 at 8pm | Florence Gould Hall | In German
Enjoy a program of groundbreaking music; then decide for yourself about
Wagner’s position in the subversion of tonality at the turn of the 20th
century. The evening’s program includes Liszt’s Bagatelle Without Tonality and Wagner’s Dedication
for Piano.
LISZT – La lugubre
gondole & Romance sans paroles, for cello and piano
LISZT – Am Grabe
Richard Wagners, for string quartet and harp
WAGNER – Dedication, for piano (Bunte Blatter)
SCHOENBERG – Verklärte
Nacht, for string sextet
SCHOENBERG – Quartet No.
2, for soprano and string quartet
PRE-CONCERT LECTURE Is
Schoenberg Wagner’s Future?
François Nicolas, composer and professor at l’École normale supérieure de Paris
Monday, May 1, 6pm | Florence Gould Hall | In English
Beyond some shared personality traits, Wagner’s and Schoenberg’s compositions
are clearly dissimilar, as are their roles in the history of music. Indeed, Debussy
saw “dusk” in Wagner and Berg presented Schoenberg as “dawn.”
What is there to expect of the relationship between a crepuscular-Wagner and an aurora-Schoenberg? And how to imagine the “musical night”
that have separated them?
Is
Schoenberg Wagner’s future ?
What has happened between Wagner and Schoenberg ? What
kind of continuation, what breach
between the two
of them ?
“Between Wagner and Schoenberg”? This “between” should be taken in two ways:
·
as
what they could have in common,
·
as an
interval of time that separates them.
Therefore two questions:
- what is it that Schoenberg and
Wagner have in common?
- how does Schoenberg relate to the musical
problematic unfolded by Wagner?
What do they have in common?
Let’s do a list of common traits between the two men and their two Works.
Analogies
· They have both written the libretto
for their operas (see Moses and Aaron for Schoenberg).
· They both combined composition with
a theoretical activity.
· They both made a great effort to
surpass the works of their youth (see the rupture for Wagner around 1849 and
for Schoenberg around 1923).
· They both knew exile, being chased
out of their countries (as a banned revolutionary in the case of Wagner, as a
Jew in the case of Schoenberg).
· They both showed a close interest in
politics for some time and then stayed away from it (from 1849 to 1851 for
Wagner, from 1933 to 1938 for Schoenberg).
· They both were passionate about
love, the differences between sexes and largely composed on this theme (for example
Transfigured Night,
which we will listen to this evening).
· Neither of them showed any interest
in the science of their time.
· They were both emancipators of
dissonance and chromatism.
· They both bet on a renewed thematism
to emancipate themselves from other musical dimensions.
· They both set themselves up to
compose “music of the future”.
· They both have created their own musical
institutions: Bayreuth for Wagner, The society for private musical performances for Schoenberg.
· They both bet on the ratio of the
music to the distinctiveness of the prose and the voice to encourage music to
emancipate itself (characteristically for Schoenberg the second string quartet
that we will listen to this evening).
Continuation
Schoenberg is conscious of its closeness with
Wagner. He declares himself as following the footsteps of Wagner:
“From Wagner [I have learned]:
1. The way to make possible treating the
themes to obtain the maximum expression; the art to write to this effect.
2. The relationship between notes and
chords.
3. The possibility to treat themes and
motives […] in a way that would let us to superimpose them on a harmony without
worrying about the dissonances that would result.”
More specifically, Schoenberg is often regarded
as having constantly oscillated between Wagner and Brahms, between these two
great figures in the music of the second half of nineteenth century.
For example, according to Boulez:
“For Schoenberg the umbilical cord with
Wagner-Brahms will never be totally cut. A slow oscillation between the first
and the second of these predecessors will remain the most characteristic in his
long career.”
The interval of time that separates them
Let us look quickly at what covers the time
that separates them.
Let us recall certain dates:
· Parsifal is written in 1882 and Wagner dies
one year later, in 1883.
· The first significant work of
Schoenberg – the Transfigured Night – dates from 1899 (this is his opus 4,
preceded with three opuses consecrated to the lieder).
So, almost twenty years separates the end of
the work of Wagner and the beginning of that of Schoenberg, and I suggest that
you regard this as a kind of a night separating the twilight-Wagner and the dawn-Schoenberg.
In fact it was Debussy who started the idea of
Wagner as a twilight, and Zemlinski (and later Berg) the idea of Schoenberg as
a dawn.
There would be then between Wagner and
Schoenberg a night of almost a quarter of century if one considers that dawn-Schoenberg starts with his second string
quartet (1908) which we will hear this evening.
This is a
hypothesis that I suggest we examine: the connection of twilight-Wagner and dawn-Schoenberg, through a night which proves
itself transfigured.
Three steps
I will proceed in three steps, asking myself
successively:
1.
In
what way was Wagner a twilight?
2.
In
what way was Schoenberg a dawn?
3.
What
kind of juncture there is between such twilight and such dawn? In what way the oncoming
day Schoenberg
should be associated with the ending day Wagner via that night that should have been a pivot
between nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
The twilight-Wagner
For Debussy, associating the image of a
twilight with the Work of Wagner was a way of depreciating. For him, it was a
way to suggest that the music of Wagner was without future and its destiny
closed.
But in fact Debussy didn’t believe in this
diagnosis: to realize that, it suffices to discover how much his music is intimately
inspired by Tristan and Parsifal, especially in his masterpieces which are Pelleas and Jeux – in this respect, the book of
Robin Holloway (Debussy and Wagner) explains in detail how much the writing of
Debussy is closely inspired by Wagner’s.
If it’s true that Wagner was a twilight, I
would like here to raise the notion of twilight, demonstrating that a twilight is not
necessarily what Debussy suggests.
What
is twilight?
Twilight, in fact, is not always a moment of
renouncement; it’s not necessarily an instant of “no future”. On the contrary, a twilight could
be regarded - should be regarded – as a moment coupled intimately with resistance,
perfecting and prophecy.
· The twilight actually is resisting
the oncoming night rather than surrendering to it. According to René Char, “for
a dawn, it is the oncoming day that is a disgrace; for the twilight it is the
night that gobbles it up”. The twilight resists the menacing night; the twilight protects still
for some moments the day that is threatened. So, the twilight is not longing
for the night, because, as René Char writes, for the twilight the night is a
disgrace rather than an apotheosis or an opportunity.
· So, the twilight resists the
oncoming night while protecting the ending day till the last moment. How does
it protect it? By perfecting and putting the finishing touches to the day, by
carrying out the given tasks to its final conclusion, so that they will not
stay unfinished.
· Finally, the twilight forecasts, not
what there will be tomorrow, later – the twilight doesn’t know what will come
after the new and distant dawn – but what will remain of the day that the
twilight perfects; the twilight is a prophecy, not in the future tense but in
the future perfect: “that day would have been worthy of posterity, as this and
that would have been what this day hands down to posterity”.
Resistance,
perfecting and prophecy in Wagner
Wagner is a good example of twilight because
the Oeuvre-Wagner - particularly his last opus (Parsifal) - interlaces a resistance, a
perfecting and a prophecy.
· Firstly the work of Wagner resists
the superficial and frivolous concept of the music of his time, be it a simple
amusement or an academism that introspects on itself.
· Secondly the work of Wagner
perfects: it achieves what Wagner called “opera as a drama”, that means an affirmation that
the music can talk to the world and with the world, that it can be autonomic
without being autarchic.
· Finally the work of Wagner
forecasts: it foretells not the coming of chromatism (therefore Schoenberg) but
it foretells that what counts in his work will remain and stay able to question
the composers and creative artists of the next century (which means the twentieth
century). On this idea I have given a course of lectures (in École Normale
Supérieure on Ulm
street in Paris) which explains in what way Parsifal is a work of music for today and
not for the museums.
To see in twilight-Wagner not a museum piece but a musical
chance to hope, is, in a nutshell, what Charlie Chaplin tells us in his film The
great dictator: he
indicates that one should tear Wagner away from the hands of Hitler, and that
there is hope for a free future if following the directive “Listen to
Wagner!” (in this
instant: “Listen to the prelude of Lohengrin and what comes after!”)
It’s important to remark that this prelude from
Lohengrin that
concludes the film in a tonality of hope has previously accompanied the famous
dance of the dictator, playing with the balloon-globe, what underlines that
Charlie Chaplin wanted to take over the music of Wagner that Hitler wanted to
monopolize.
Dawn-Schoenberg
In what way, now, was Schoenberg a dawn?
What
is it [than] a dawn?
A dawn – what is it exactly?
This is what the french theatre tells us:
[The woman Narsès:] “What is it called, when a
day gets up, like today, when everything is a mess, everything is confused, but
one still breathes the air, when everything is lost, when the city burns, when
the innocents kill each other, but when the guilty agonize, in a corner of a
day that gets up?”
[Electra:] “Ask the beggar, he knows”.
[The beggar:] “It has a very beautiful name,
woman Narsès. It is called the dawn.”
Giraudoux (Electra, II.10)
The dawn, it’s an announcement that something
is coming after the dark, deaf and brutal night.
And a dawn, subjectively, is this:
“Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open
road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I
choose.”
Walt Whitman (Song of the Open Road; 1856 - Leaves of grass)
A dawn, it’s an enthusiasm of a new jump, it’s
an exaltation of appropriating a new territory in big stride.
Second
string quartet as dawn
The second string quartet, that you are going
to hear this evening, is clearly a such dawn, and more precisely, this type of
dawn that reveals itself since the fourth movement – Transport [Entrückung]
- from what
constitutes at the beginning a classical string quartet, witnesses a soaring
soprano that sings the following words:
“I
feel the air of another planet.
[…]
I see the hazy vapors lifting
Above a sunlit, vast and clear expanse
That stretches far below the mountain crags.”
Moreover, this dawn that declares the fourth
movement follows a third movement that is put clearly, by the poem Litany, under the sign of a desolate
night:
“Deep is the sadness that overclouds me.
[…]
Long was the journey, weak is my body,
[….]
Empty my hands, and feverish my mouth.
[…]
Lend me thy coolness […] send forth the light!”
Musical dawn
How does the fourth movement carry out
musically the dawn that the poem declares?
· First of all, by unexpected
irruption of a soprano in a string quartet that in itself suffices to “illuminate”
the whole work.
· Than, by atonality: this is the
first piece of music - first important piece because the ‘Bagatelle without
tonality’ of Liszt that we will hear this evening is a little one, without true
ambition, a curiosity, not a masterpiece, as the second quartet of Schoenberg -
to be without signature, that
means without sharps and flats at the clef, in other words without a defined
tonality. So, dawn takes here a form of a leave given to tonality.
*
What does or doesn’t this dawn owe to Wagner?
Would it be, like the dawn that was equally declared to be Debussy, a dawn
separated from the former twilight-Wagner, a new youth of the day oblivious of the
former day that is already definitely buried?
Shortly, between twilight-Wagner and dawn-Schoenberg, is there a bridge lanced over the
night that is separating them?
The between Wagner-Schoenberg
This opens two questions:
· Are the musical resources that
Wagner has enclosed in Parsifal in a certain way reactivated by Schoenberg?
· And in return, are the resources
mobilized by Schoenberg for his new day related to those that Wagner has mobilized
in his Work?
Let us begin by the second one.
The
wagnerian references in Schoenberg
In the second string quartet
We begin by examining the references to Wagner
in the second string quartet of Schoenberg.
Distance
It’s true that in this quartet there is a whole
part of dawn-Schoenberg that doesn’t owe anything to twilight-Wagner.
· So, the way Schoenberg progressively
refines his material – it’s enough to compare the means gigantic (precisely
wagnerian) of Gurrelieder with those of the string quartet – doesn’t derive at all from a
wagnerian gesture: Schoenberg needs this kind of economy of means to press hard
the new type of musical discourse that he will invent, keeping distance from
the security that until than was offered by tonality.
· The desire itself for atonality, for
music free, liberated from the tonal stress, doesn’t come from Wagner, always
solidly camped on the tonal architecture..
References
However this quartet stays pregnant with a
wagnerian harmonic perfume. Let me give two examples.
· One can notice that the quartet
starts under the sign of sequential work that Wagner has carried on a large scale:
thus all the first measures of the quartet repeat the same phrase, first in F
sharp minor, then in A major via a unison on C natural (to exploit the minor
thirds stacked up); in short, Wagner has never done differently at the
beginning of Tristan (A minor, then C minor…)
Examples
Schoenberg : beginning of the second
quartet
Wagner : beginning of Tristan
· Later, in the quartet, Schoenberg
puts his themes under a treatment that one could call leitmotivic since not only the first theme of
the first movement is taken again, varied like theme of the third movement –
cyclical logic - but it reappears superposed on its second part – logic equally
wagnerian, this time of weaving a polyphony from a thematic network.
Example (2° quartet)
the beginning of the third movement is build by
counterpoint of precedents themes :
So it’s true that the shadow of Wagner
continues to hang over the gesture of dawn.
But what had been of Wagner’s influence on
Schoenberg before his second string quartet? What had there been during the
“night” separating the twilight 1882 and dawn 1908?
Before 1908, during “the night”…
It’s striking that one more time Schoenberg
responds to it very explicitly since he composes a work that reveals itself
being a transfigured night!
So the program of today’s evening is
intelligently conceived since it will allow us to hear two works of Schoenberg
that not only illuminate musically the connection of Schonberg to Wagner but,
more so, they tell exactly what they do – two works that we could call “performative”:
telling what they do and doing what they tell – since one (the opus 4 of 1899)
declares to transfigure the night (meaning, as we will see, to liberate from
the post-romantic obscurity) and the other (the opus 10 of 1908) declares
passing from a night, hollow and weary (Litany), to a new day, open for the new horizons (Transport).
Transfigured night?
For Schoenberg, what is it than a transfigured night, what is
it his Transfigured Night [Verklärte Nacht] ?
The plot
Let us start off with the plot of this work,
however with no words to be sung, nevertheless very much referred to a poem by
Richard Dehmel.
This poem speaks of the night encounter of two
lovers. The heartbroken woman tells the man that she bears a child that is not
his. The man declares that his love will make this child of a stranger his own.
Two nights
Romantic
night
One can see how this condensed little drama
escapes the logic of a romantic night (of which Tristan sets an eternal model) where two
lovers unite under the horizon of professed death: the romantic night was in an
exemplary fashion without dawn.
Transfigured
night
The transfigured night surmounts this romantic
night since love is precisely not what unites a pair of lovers but what makes
true of its disjunction at the mercy of a child that circulates from one to the
other.
So the transfigured night is at the same time
an emancipation of love from its romantic fusing figure and an emancipation
from a romantic vision of the night like alpha and omega of the day that
precedes it. It’s the transfigured night that carries the child conceived by
the passed day towards the light of a new day that announces itself.
Why not to regard all of this as a transparent
allegory, especially as for Wagner the music was precisely a woman, a woman
impregnable by the poet? Why not regard the child born by a woman and adopted
by the lover as a work handed down by romantism – wagnerian work, to be precise
– that the music transmits into the new century?
The music
In what way the musical piece named Transfigured
night accomplishes
this program? What is it that it’s transfiguring, particularly of Wagner’s
music? In what way does it enter the retroactive composition with the second
string quartet and singularly with the dawn that constitutes the fourth
movement?
Small
analysis
Schoenberg himself guides us on this path when
he writes:
“My Transfigured night brings forward Wagner in its
thematic treatment of a cell developed on a changing harmony”.
This harmony was so new that the piece was
refused to be presented because of a chord not classified, a dissonance “not
cataloged”!:
Thus in 1898 Schoenberg strayed away quite a
bit from the paths guided by tonality. But, as indicated, it’s in 1908 when he
crosses over the Rubicon.
It’s easy to see that Schoenberg in fact has
just extended what Wagner has largely deployed in Tristan and equally in his Parsifal (what is less noticed), for example
in the second scene of the transformation, in the middle of the third act,
where the chromatism gets wild.
The musical transfiguration of Transfigured
night is associated
with the clearing brought by D major in the fourth part of the piece, in the
moment when the poem underlying the piece puts these words in the mouth of the
man:
“The child that you conceived,
let it be no burden to your soul;
oh, look, how clear the universe glitters!
There is a radiance about everything;
[…]
a special warmth glimmers from you
[…]
It will transfigure the strange child.
[…]
you have brought the radiance into me.”
In a certain way, one should recognize that
this piece announces rather a transfiguration than executes it musically: a
modulation from minor to major is in fact too conventional to be able to
constitute by itself a transfiguration, that means an appearance by
transparence of a new musical figure. This kind of modulation declares a
transfiguration without realizing musically what it’s talking about.
So one needs to wait for the second string
quartet of Schoenberg to succeed to transfigure Wagner.
Parsifal transfigured by Schoenberg?
In a way, one could in fact hear the last
movement of the second string quartet - the one where the soprano soars emerging
from the bosom of quartet for strings - as a transfiguration of Parsifal.
In fact, the absolute contrast of the forces
between the big wagnerian orchestra and a diagram of a string quartet constitutes
a frame adjusted to the principle of a reappearing idea under the new day, the
musical idea transfigured by its trimming to a new body.
What transfiguration?
What idea, inherited from Parsifal, is transfigured by the quartet of
Schoenberg?
What is this musical idea accomplished to
perfection by twilight-Wagner and now spurts up transfigured by dawn-Schoenberg?
Music doesn’t think alone
It seems to me that music doesn’t think alone;
music wouldn’t know to think lastingly all by itself. Music thinks with the
others thoughts, singularly with the poetic thought, especially when it comes
for the music to cross over to a new stage of its unfolding.
For the music, the way of thinking with the
poem happens through the voice.
In fact a force of the synthesis of which the
music disposes happens through the voice, because in the music it’s the same
voice which sings and which talks simultaneously.
So, the specific point that binds Schoenberg to
Wagner has to do here with using the voice and the text that it sings when it
comes for the music to reach the new laws.
When it comes to make a step to cross over the
void, either to take up a new world (what did J.-S. Bach with his Well tempered
keyboard) or to
open a door towards what will become a new world, when it comes to move the
musical frontier, to win for the music new sound territories – like an american
image of a “new frontier” that moves incorporating new land -, there the
musical treatment of a voice supported by the text can become a crucial agent.
Wagner and the drama
Wagner made the voice his principal agent of
the synthesis, particularly his dramatic agent since the word “drama” for
Wagner describes a synthesis of music, poem and theatre. To make this synthesis
work by the voice and around the voice, Wagner had broken down the old logic of
the aria and of the pretty melody and has invented “the unending melody”. Parsifal achieves this new musical logic to
perfection.
Schoenberg and the diagonal
In Transport Schoenberg transfigures this idea of the voice
as an agent of the new synthesis. He realizes this idea, and I would like to
conclude on this remark not under the form of an unending melody but under the
one that I suggest to call diagonal since the soprano voice traverses inside the
quartet, its harmony, its motives and its rhythm.
Thus Schoenberg creates a new agent of
synthesis – the diagonal - that revives, “transfigures” the operations materialized
at Wagner by the melody “without end”.
And here is an example.
Fourth movement (exposition :
transition between the two themes)
Far away,
we can see that the twist of voice results of quartet’s meshes
(see the
big notes in this example) :
I let you try to eventually recognize it during
the concert of this evening.
I will break now in this stage, waiting for the
concert this evening.
–––––––