This week’s theme is…Odd and Tragic Deaths! Death comes to us all. And most of the time death is pretty routine, run-of-the-mill. Not that death is ever easy, but usually it’s the result of “natural causes”, which is another way of saying “a chronic disease akin to that which most people die of, and not all that interesting”. But sometimes death is traumatic, unexpected and tragic. This week, we look at examples of composers who succumbed to causes such as these
Odd and Tragic Deaths, Day 3 – BONUS DOUBLE POST Violin Concerto by Alban Berg and Second Cantata by Anton Webern
The primary idea of Schoenberg’s innovation and legacy, the twelve-tone technique of composing music, also known as dodecaphony, is so simple and elegant that it is almost surprising that it was only formally asserted as a serious practice after more than a millennium of musical innovation in the West began. It is an idea that could only have found expression in Western music given its long-standing use of the octave divided into 12 equal intervals called half steps. Devotees of the Western music, I suspect, consider the systems with which it works, be they acoustical, harmonic, notational, theoretical, orchestrational, etc. to be superior to comparable systems which govern music created in other cultures of the world. This attitude may be harbored implicitly, or it may be expressed without reservation (not exactly a politically correct thing to do), and I tend to agree with it noting, among other things, that Western music tends to export well, transforming the cultures it touches, and not so much vice versa. While Western listeners may study the music of different cultures with fascination, even enjoyment, I imagine that it is rare not to have the impulse to judge most non-Western music as lacking in some kind of rigorous and systematic organization of structure and aesthetics. Again, I know it’s not exactly PC to assert that, but I also think it’s true. And, of course, this begins to evoke those pesky questions of cultural relativism which I have no desire to explore at this juncture.
The Western manner of dividing up the octave into twelve equal tones is ancient, tracing its origins at least as far back as the time of Gregorian Chant, given the modal basis of that monumental collection, and forms the theoretical basis for every single scale and chord which form the matrix of all music that we label as “classical”, “rock/pop”, “jazz”, and beyond (there are always new styles). Our Western sense of tonal grammar is thoroughly undergirded by our constant sense of 12 equal parts in each octave. And if you’re at all skeptical about that, have a listen to this piece, based on the concept of dividing the octave into 13 equal parts rather than 12 and see how it sits with you:
The American composer Easley Blackwood, who taught at the University of Chicago, composed one etude for each division of the octave from 13 to 24 equal parts. They all feel just a little off, like the walls are bending because the intervals aren’t the sizes we expect.
But even though the vast majority of the music we listen to works within a 12 tone octave, it’s almost always through a diatonic filter, which means that certain notes of the complete chromatic scale are given priority over others. So, when we hear a song that we would typically regard as pleasing, chances are that at any given time you are hearing 7 of the tones, with the other 5 either left out or added sparingly for some kind of colorful harmonic twist. We call these colorful twists “chromaticism”, derived from the Greek word for “color”. You can see this easily on a piano keyboard, which was designed to make concepts like this easier to understand:
In each octave there are 7 white keys and 5 black keys. In certain keys, the diatonic notes align with the white keys and so all the black keys become chromatic. Of course, there are other keys in which it’s not so simple, but the white and black keys serve as a convenient illustration. If you play a song on all white keys and throw in some of the black keys you will note how “colorful” or “spicy” they feel as you do so.
Every notable work by a competent classical composer will contain chromaticism of some kind, either spicing up the key you are in or serving to pull to a differing one. Music written without chromaticism or modulation (changing keys) quickly becomes bland and tedious, and so chromatic touches have been incorporated into Western music since the tonal system formed, right around 1600 or so. And much classical music is very chromatic, relying heavily on copious amounts of these spicy, colorful notes and shifting between keys quite frequently to achieve its effects. In fact, as time progressed from 1600 to about 1900, music tended to become more chromatic to the point that, around 1875 or so, Richard Wagner was composing music that could be hard to fit into a key with any tidiness (for more about Wagner see this post and this one). At this point it is almost accurate to say that the traditional hierarchies which cultivated the use of 7-note diatonic scales within the 12-tone octave were beginning to dissolve and it was only a short conceptual jump to declare them dissolved altogether, which was finally executed by Arnold Schoenberg right around 1920, half a century after Tristan. Here is one of Schoenberg’s first works using an authentically twelve-tone technique, that is, featuring episodes during which each of the twelve pitches of the octave is used in a way that that completely disrupts any grammar of hierarchy:
It’s hard to know whether the dodecaphonic technique flowed more from Schoenberg’s philosophical mission to give German music a continued basis for supremacy in the world of ideas, whether it provided the logical technical extension of the dissonant Expressionist aesthetic with which he had already been composing (seminal works like Pierrot Lunaire and Erwartung, while challenging, are Expressionistically atonal, not dodecaphonic), or a little of both. Either way, the reception to the music crafted by this technique was mixed, as it still is. While many critics and listeners were deeply discomforted by music which seemed to berate them, some musicians were fascinated and recognized an important idea when they heard it, responding to the propriety and surprising elegance and magnetism which resulted from executing Schoenberg’s techniques with precision and integrity. Arnold Schoenberg had many pupils (for a particularly colorful one, see this post), and more who felt his influence – Copland and Stravinsky went through serialist episodes toward the end of their composing careers – but two composers in particular found his mentorship to be particularly formative, both personally and musically. They were essentially contemporaries, born only two years apart, and proved to be students of the most rewarding kind, taking their teacher’s ideas and applying them in ways that were distinctive, not in mere imitation of their master. Oh, and they both met their ultimate fate in rather unusual and even tragic ways.
The younger of the two, Alban Berg, is remembered for having assimilated Schoenberg’s challenging approach and incorporating it, or tempering it, depending on your perspective, with a lush, even quasi-tonal, romanticism that evokes the spirit of Wagner and Mahler for many listeners. Berg’s music may seem to speak in the slightly less recent voice of the late romantics, but its density is still quite challenging for many listeners and his great operas Wozzeck and Lulu allowed him to bring to life some very dark stories. His untimely death interrupted the completion of Lulu (it was ultimately completed by others decades later, after a very long series of events). His last completed work, the Violin Concerto, perhaps the most dissonant work to be played with any regularity on contemporary symphony programs, was completed in the midst of work on Lulu and largely inspired by the death of an 18-year old girl named Manon Gropius to polio. Manon was the daughter of the great architect Walter Gropius and his wife Alma. Walter was Alma’s second wife, the first being the great composer Gustav Mahler (for more about Mahler, see this post). Berg dedicated the Violin Concerto “To the memory of an angel”, Manon, and in tribute embedded the melody for one of Bach’s Chorales, suggested by the tone row, into the last section:
If you want to hear that part, scroll to about 20:00 of the entire concerto which you can listen to here:
Berg wrote his Violin Concerto with uncharacteristic speed during a few months toward the middle of 1935, but he never got to hear it. Later that year, believed to be a response to an insect sting, he developed a painful carbuncle on his back. In a cautionary tale against DIY surgical operations, in order to save money, his wife attempted to remove it with a pair of scissors and the resulting blood poisoning ultimately caused his death on Christmas Eve of that year.
If there is one saving grace in the untimely death of the 50 year old Alban Berg, it is that he was saved from personally witnessing the global horrors of the Second World War, the aftermath of which was directly responsible for the death of Schoenberg’s other notable pupil, Anton Webern, just shy of a decade later. Where Berg infused Schoenberg’s rigorous harmonic techniques with a post-romantic lushness, Webern did as close to the opposite as can be conceived: he pressed Schoenberg’s approach into an even terser and more essential language that most listeners find exceptionally pointillistic and incredibly transparent. Webern’s works, often studies in miniature, give the impression of including absolutely no material extraneous to their central idea. Their expression is oddly compelling as the supreme logic of his execution is carried out in sound. Even Webern’s early works, more romantic in their language, seem to emanate this sensibility of extreme concision and clarity, a feature which became his trademark as he developed his approach over a small handful of surviving pieces.
You can hear Webern’s approach, developed as fully as it ever became, in his final work, his Second Cantata. He compared this 7-movement cantata, the longest piece he ever wrote with a running time of about 15 minutes, and also using a larger and more colorful orchestra than was typical of his manner by this time, to a Mass ordinary and embedded ingenious canonic techniques into certain movements much like the brainy Renaissance composers of half a century ago (for more about that, see this post) that rewards close and repeated listenings (for more about rewarding repeat listening, see this post).
Webern met his fate just a couple years after completing his Second Cantata and the story is particularly tragic. His son in law, a former officer of the SS, was involved in black market activities after the war. American soldiers approached their house to arrest him and Webern, who had stepped outside after curfew to smoke a cigar given to him by said son in law, was shot by mistake. The American soldier, a private from North Carolina, carried the remorse of this mistake with him for the rest of his life. It is a shame that we do not have more concise, flawless masterpieces from Webern’s pen; even if he had lived for two more decades we may expect to have in the neighborhood of five more works in his catalogue, so spare and exacting was his output, and you can bet they would have been sublime.
Schoenberg, just slightly the elder of this group of three composers who came to be known as the Second Viennese School (the First Viennese School is often invoked in reference to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven) survived both of his most significant students, dying in 1951 in Southern California, having emigrated to the United States to escape persecution by the Nazis on account of his Judaism. Schoenberg taught other students, but there is something special about the bond shared by him, Webern and Berg, exploring an exciting new style during the most formative decades of modern history. The three applied similar principles but in highly personal ways, forming a thought-provoking commentary on the intellectual and political currents which raged around them. I wonder if Schoenberg in his last years ever felt like a father who had outlived his children, himself surviving as his most precious pupils succumbed to poverty and war.
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