Impressions of war
From Vaughan Williams to Schoenberg, the composers whose music was shaped by the horrors of war
Gramophone, July 2014
Buoyed by the unlikely success of Pierrot lunaire, Arnold Schoenberg was at home in Vienna working on a new 12-note symphony when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated while on an official visit to Sarajevo in June 1914. And just as it was the end of the road for the unfortunate archduke, the progress of Schoenberg’s symphony was also stopped dead in its tracks. The archduke’s murder would catapult Europe towards conflict and Schoenberg found himself sucked inside the ensuing breakdown of order, unable to finish anything to his satisfaction until long after the Great War had ended.
That opening paragraph, which probably leaves you feeling slightly queasy, was designed with your discomfort in mind. The callous juxtaposition of a composer’s abandoned symphony against the personal tragedy of a murder – albeit of a public figure carrying out official duties during an era when political assassinations were far from rare – does indeed sit uneasily. But how better to underline the idea that the certain world in which composers, and other artists, had hitherto existed was about to crumble? Marrying the inner world of their intellectual lives – a world over which they had complete control – with relentless and stark reports of extreme tragedy presented them with a disorientating and uncomfortable new reality.
Or perhaps not. The first time we encounter Schoenberg in 1913: The Year before the Storm, by German writer and historian Florian Illies, the composer is having palpitations about the forthcoming premiere of his blockbuster cantata Gurrelieder as Thomas Mann, reeling from the critical monstering his first play received in the Vienna press, is concerned that the new rug he purchased in all good faith to insulate his study might be of substandard quality. Alma Mahler, widow of Gustav, is having an affair with the painter Oskar Kokoschka, as fellow painter Gustav Klimt is trying to cross various erotic lines with his nude models. Meanwhile, James Joyce is teaching English to the Italian writer Italo Svevo, who in turn would become the model for Ulysses’s Leopold Bloom. The underlying message of Illies’s book: Europe’s intellectual elite were pursuing their carefree lifestyles as though it were business as usual, apparently indifferent to the mounting political unrest.
Impressions of war | gramophone.co.uk
Link: http://www.gramophone.co.uk/feature/impressions-of-war
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