Music and Decadence in European Modernism: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe (review)

Abstract

FIN-DE-SIECLE Music and Decadence in European Modernism: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe. By Stephen Downes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. [xiv, 371 p. ISBN 9780521767576. $95.] Music examples, tables, bibliography, index. Look up decadent on Google Images and what do you think pops up on page one? Orgies? Degradation? Immoral acts? Yes, those; but also (and mainly) hairdos, poached lobster, pastries, chocolate, quilts-and, to please the Stravinskian in me, one of Hogarth's Rake's Progress etchings showing our hero being fitted for a suit. That, at any rate, is what I found when I searched last Christmas day. I had just finished Stephen Downes's wonderfully detailed exploration of sundry musical debaucheries and was feeling, er, stimulated. It was no surprise. The common denominator linking serious amoral decadence with frivolous indulgence is of course sensory gratification, carried to excess. (Think of Wagner composing world-transforming music all day and then retiring to his bath oils and satins.) The association with hedonism is perhaps the one feature that all definitions of decadence share. And so and all through the book one turns from the mind-boggling to the ear-tickling as one tests the music examples at the keyboard. This is one book one really needs to read near a piano. Without what Stravinsky called contact with the matiere sonore, one misses everything. Look up decadent in the dictionary and one finds, as the author tells us, that it is Latin for fallen away. From what? From optimism, idealism, and heroism, mainly; often from health and sanity as well. To anyone likely to be reading this, the word will conjure up the so-called fin de siecle, roughly the period between the death of Wagner and World War I. To every century there is an end, but the term as such still refers, and will always refer, to the end of the nineteenth century, when not only artists but all culturally sensitive Europeans sensed and described the mood of moral dejection and retreat into the sensuous, using the D-word quite self-consciously about themselves, whether in self-censure (Croce, Spengler) or in self-congratulation (beginning with Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean and culminating in Wilde and Beardsley), so that applying it now is neither a judgment nor an anachronism. Thus the critic Richard Gilman's famous fulmination, already implicit in its title- Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979)- that the word was merely a turd slung at their betters by monkey-minds, is feckless. It was indeed that, at times; but just as often it was worn as a badge of honor. The historian's task is to report and account for the full range of its connotations and uses; and although that is probably an unattainable aim, Downes makes a valiant and absorbing attempt. One of the first to look at the phenomenon of decadence responsibly-that is, critically and historically-was Benedetto Croce, in his Estetica come scienza dell' espressione e linguistica generale (8th ed. [Bari: G. Laterza, 1908]). He thoroughly disapproved, sensing the return of an unwelcome cyclic phenomenon-the depression or cultural fatigue that follows historic disappointments or great strenuous achievements. As a remote predecessor he cited the poetry of Giambattista Marino (not of the true, but the gaudy, the witty, the curious, the clever), famously to modern scholars a letdown after the heights of the Renaissance and still the whipping-boy of the high-minded (among musicologists, think of Gary Tomlinson and the very Crocean strictures he levels at Marino's sensuality in Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance [Berkeley: University of Cali - fornia Press, 1987]). For Croce, as for Spengler, decadence portended the decline of Western civilization because it wantonly repudiated the sources of the West's moral and intellectual supremacy. No wonder the study of decadence has been a growth industry in cultural studies. …