Wagner went in several directions, but all roads ultimately led back to the anarchy implicit in the Tristan chord, featuring its harmonically unstable tritone, the âdevilâs interval,â in the bass. Debussy, trying to reject Wagner, fled straight into his arms, with Pelléas et Mélisande ; Schoenberg, edging away from tonality as fast as he could, wrote Verklärte Nacht , helpinghimself not only to the Wagnerian idiom, but to one of the composerâs favorite words and concepts, Verklärung (transfiguration). One of Richard Straussâs early tone poems, Tod und Verklärung ( Death and Transfiguration ), couldnât possibly be more Wagnerian if it tried.
Symphonically, Anton Bruckner took the huge Wagner orchestra and redirected it back toward the explicitly sacred, erecting gigantic âcathedrals in soundâ with his symphonies, and dedicating his final, unfinished Ninth Symphony to God. There is probably no greater spiritually triumphant moment in symphonic music than the closing measures of Brucknerâs Eighth Symphony, when the composerâs mighty orchestra dispels the doubts and clouds of illusion in a giant, wheel-of-the-world brass fanfare that proclaims the workâs essential thematic unity: St. Michaelâs victorious flaming sword, in music.
In the novel Doctor Faustus , Thomas Mann explicitly linked the twelve-tone system to the composer Leverkühnâs daemonic inspiration, brought on by a syphilitic infection contracted from a prostitute. The great novelist sensed there was something unholy about the methodâs egalitarianism, that in seeming to be the product of pure reason, it was monstrous. Schoenberg had moved in a careful musical progression from Romanticism to atonality (no fixed central key, inevitable after Tristan ), via Pierrot Lunaire , to outright dodecaphony, creating ever more ârationalâ music that became progressively uglier and unlovable. The system of ratiocination had come to outweigh the musicâs purpose; or, rather, the musicâs purpose had come to serve the system.
That Mann felt the need to address the issue is not surprising. A great Wagnerian musical streak runs throughout his work, from the short storiesâwhose number includes âTristanâ and âThe Blood of the Wälsungsâ â to the use of Wagnerian-style leitmotifs in The Magic Mountain .
The Magic Mountain , which takes place in a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium, was conceived around the time of World War I and published in 1924. It is a novel of ideas, but also of disease. ( Doctor Faustus is also about disease, this one venereal, the curse of the Ewig-Weibliche, or the Eternal Feminine.) Castorp, the novelâs holy fool, comes to Davos intending to stay a magical seven weeks; instead, he stays an enchanted, crippling seven years. Among Leverkühnâs compositions are Apocalypse and his magnum opus, The Lamentations of Doctor Faustus . On the cuspof performing it for the first time at the piano for a few selected friends, Leverkühn collapses into madness.
Mannâs works, in short, embrace all the salient elements and events of Central European history from the Kaiser to the birth of postwar Germany; very little escaped his attention. The members of the Frankfurt School may have thought they were modernists, moving beyond the culture, but in fact they were little more than perfect Wagnerians, their reason clouded by Klingsorâs bands of illusion. â Kinder, schafft Neues! â (âMake something new!â) wrote Wagner in an 1852 letter to Franz Liszt (nineteen months older than he and not yet his father-in-law). That they could not do so speaks of the Faustian bargain they had made: Thanatos without Eros, death without life, a world without love, and nothing new to show for their labors in the caves of Nibelheim.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE DESCENT INTO HELL
I n the Apostlesâ Creed, which dates from around 700
Symphonically, Anton Bruckner took the huge Wagner orchestra and redirected it back toward the explicitly sacred, erecting gigantic âcathedrals in soundâ with his symphonies, and dedicating his final, unfinished Ninth Symphony to God. There is probably no greater spiritually triumphant moment in symphonic music than the closing measures of Brucknerâs Eighth Symphony, when the composerâs mighty orchestra dispels the doubts and clouds of illusion in a giant, wheel-of-the-world brass fanfare that proclaims the workâs essential thematic unity: St. Michaelâs victorious flaming sword, in music.
In the novel Doctor Faustus , Thomas Mann explicitly linked the twelve-tone system to the composer Leverkühnâs daemonic inspiration, brought on by a syphilitic infection contracted from a prostitute. The great novelist sensed there was something unholy about the methodâs egalitarianism, that in seeming to be the product of pure reason, it was monstrous. Schoenberg had moved in a careful musical progression from Romanticism to atonality (no fixed central key, inevitable after Tristan ), via Pierrot Lunaire , to outright dodecaphony, creating ever more ârationalâ music that became progressively uglier and unlovable. The system of ratiocination had come to outweigh the musicâs purpose; or, rather, the musicâs purpose had come to serve the system.
That Mann felt the need to address the issue is not surprising. A great Wagnerian musical streak runs throughout his work, from the short storiesâwhose number includes âTristanâ and âThe Blood of the Wälsungsâ â to the use of Wagnerian-style leitmotifs in The Magic Mountain .
The Magic Mountain , which takes place in a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium, was conceived around the time of World War I and published in 1924. It is a novel of ideas, but also of disease. ( Doctor Faustus is also about disease, this one venereal, the curse of the Ewig-Weibliche, or the Eternal Feminine.) Castorp, the novelâs holy fool, comes to Davos intending to stay a magical seven weeks; instead, he stays an enchanted, crippling seven years. Among Leverkühnâs compositions are Apocalypse and his magnum opus, The Lamentations of Doctor Faustus . On the cuspof performing it for the first time at the piano for a few selected friends, Leverkühn collapses into madness.
Mannâs works, in short, embrace all the salient elements and events of Central European history from the Kaiser to the birth of postwar Germany; very little escaped his attention. The members of the Frankfurt School may have thought they were modernists, moving beyond the culture, but in fact they were little more than perfect Wagnerians, their reason clouded by Klingsorâs bands of illusion. â Kinder, schafft Neues! â (âMake something new!â) wrote Wagner in an 1852 letter to Franz Liszt (nineteen months older than he and not yet his father-in-law). That they could not do so speaks of the Faustian bargain they had made: Thanatos without Eros, death without life, a world without love, and nothing new to show for their labors in the caves of Nibelheim.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE DESCENT INTO HELL
I n the Apostlesâ Creed, which dates from around 700
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