39. Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology

Abstract

instrumental genres, Schoenberg's neoclassicism (and Webern's) quickly metamorphosed into technical research and tours de force, foreshadowing the fetishized professional discourse espoused by those who later donned the mantle of their authority. All of this was done, as Stravinsky would say, the stern auspices of order and discipline, which is to say, sub specie patris. is no coincidence Webern's most stringently constrained and dehumanized work, the String Quartet, op. 28, is the based on a series derived the B-A-C-H cipher, already impressively invoked in Schoenberg's Orchestral Variations.52 Et patriae: the immediate concern may have been the preservation of a precious heritage at a time of perceived crisis, but it was a heritage dogmatically viewed as supreme, and its was part and parcel of what had to be preserved.53 The neoclassicism of Schoenberg and Webern was thus tinged the outset with chauvinism; their Bach was a third a national as well as a universal figurehead, asserting nation's claim to ascendance and forestalling Latin and Slav hopes of hegemony.'54 It was mainly through J. S. Bach, Schoenberg alleged, that German music came to decide the way things developed, as it has for 200 years. And it was precisely Bach's elaboration of the technique of absolute music art, i.e., the art of producing every audible figure single one vouchsafed German domination.ss So, pace Dahlhaus, not even aesthetic autonomy is unpolitical. It, too, performs a function. Being utopian, it defines itself by what it excludes. Without making essentialist claims about predisposition, certainly can and should take note of the ease with which utopian formalists have on occasion been seduced by other manifestations of exclusionary politics. Webern's enthusiastic embrace of Hitler has become known by excruciating degrees, likewise the rabidity with which Schenker approved of brownshirt activities afar in the years before the Anschluf3.s6 But so could those who hankered after community fall easy prey to National Socialism's metaphysical organicism.57 Gemeinschaft metamorphosed by easy degrees into Volksgemeinschaft, until Krenek could assert the existence of unbroken line leading from the activist Wandervogel (Boy Scout), by way of Hindemith's concerto grosso style, to the Hitler youth, of whom it is told they give vent to their indomitable spirit of independence by secretly performing Hindemith's Spielmusik. With regard to the great Spielmann himself (by then, like Krenek, banned in REVIEW 52An essential document of Viennese Back-to-Bachianism is Webern's detailed analysis of op. 28, written at the request of Erwin Stein, the Boosey and Hawkes editor (who, however, did not see fit to publish it in Tempo). The essay places equal emphasis on the Quartet's congruence with established tradition, both generally contrapuntal and specifically twelve-tone, and on its successful extensions of traditional technique in both domains. Webern's comments on the derivation of the row, in particular, display the combination of pride in structural density and triumph at its concealment the uninitiated has become so familiar in the literature of postwar serialism. The essay, in Zoltan Roman's translation, is given as appendix 2 of Hans Moldenhauer (in collaboration with Rosaleen Moldenhauer), Anton Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Work (New York, 1979), pp. 751-56. 53Schoenberg's remark to Josef Rufer on the significance of his discovery of twelve-tone technique is by now so famous the word supremacy has surely brought it to every reader's mind: quotation is superfluous. The dogma of Germanic in the arts, and in music in particular, is very stimulatingly traced to its Romantic roots in an unpublished paper (On the Task of the Historian: The Myth of the Symphony after Beethoven) by Sanna Pederson, to whom I am grateful for letting me read it. 54National Music (1931), in Style and Idea, p. 173. --Ibid., pp. 170, 171. 56The Moldenhauers presented Webern's Nazism as warime hysteria (Anton Webern: A Chronicle, chap. 30 [Webern and 'The Third Reich'], pp. 515-32). Louis Krasner's memoirs of Webern show him a convinced sympathizer as early as 1936: Some Memories of Anton Webern, the Berg Concerto, and Vienna in the 1930s (as told to Don C. Siebert), Fanfare 11 (1987), 335-47. On Schenker, see William Drabkin, Felix-Eberhard von Cube and the NorthGerman Tradition of Schenkerism, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 111 (1984-85), 180-207, esp. the letter of May 1933 (quoted on p. 189) gives startling evidence of personal identification with Hitler. Common to these manifestations is the striking faculty of dissociation, the ability to ignore contradictions: Webern maintained good relations with Jews and even deplored Nazi anti-Semitism (though usually ascribing reports of it to anti-German propaganda); Schenker of course was himself a Jew. As Leonardo Sciascia has observed (in Open Doors) of the Italian population under Mussolini, they saw no need to confront the problem of judging Fascism as a whole. 57See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 30, 36.