Modernism Expressionism

Question 1

Schoenberg’s Erwartung

Answer 1

Context

(1) Composed in 17 days
(2) 4-scene monodrama in which a nameless madwoman searches for her husband in a moonlit forest and eventually discovers his corpse, all while delivering a stream of conscious monologue

Apt case study for expression of ‘inborn, instinctive’ since it shows Schoenberg’s expressionism / Freudian influence at its most extreme

Carpenter: Pappenheim’s deeply symbolic libretto is heavily Freudian

(1) Woman’s character exemplifies Freud’s hysteria symptoms
(2) Strong parallels with dream recorded in Freud’s hysteria case histories printed 1908-9
(3) Argues the woman’s reaction to a traumatic/sexually-charged situation corresponds closely to hysteria symptoms
(4) Entire narrative corresponds to dream of a patient of Freud’s

(5) Employs specific imagery that Freud psychoanalysed as sexually symbolic:
(a) Pubic forest and walled garden
(b) Phallic mushrooms

Expressionistic elements

(1) Schoenberg (1930): in Erwartung the aim is to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour’

(2) Resembles musical ‘stream of consciousness’
(a) Unconstrained by formal pattern, thematic development or repetition
(b) Perennial changes of tempo/metre
(c) Held together only by formal instinct (Samson)

(3) Links to Kokoschka’s 1909 Murderer, the Hope of Women (widely deemed first expressionist drama)
(a) Unnamed protagonists, highly disturbing imagery
(b) Obsessive and surreal treatment of primeval themes of sex and death
(c) Kokoschka’s poster: 2D idiom, man/woman kill each other violently. Engraves initials onto man’s bicep: personal expression
(d) Reject use of conventional modes of expression:
- —- Erwartung’s music is entirely atonal/athematic
- —- Kokoschka’s speech is quasi a-dialogic: characters utter knifelike pithy, primitive, direct statements in archaic nonsensical language
- —- Characters articulated through appearances/actions
- —- Drama freed from literary language
(e) Schorske (1989): from Liebestod (love-death; transfiguration) to Liebestöten (love/murder inextricably bound)

(4) Blurring of internal and external elements in the text mirrored by music (Watkins)
(a) Woman vacillates between general feelings of fear, descriptions of bright moon/chirping crickets and impression of lover’s presence
- —- Outer/inner blurred: surroundings induce inner torment and torment conditions surroundings (through hallucination)
(b) Schoenberg’s music indiscriminately word-paints inner/outer
- —- Nature depicted timbrally: bright, gently oscillating celesta triplets interlock with harp sixteenths to evoke flickering moonlight; cricket’s love song depicts cello in singing treble-clef range
- —- Fourth/tritone -based harmonies colour depiction with overriding sense of dread: outer/inner has collapsed
(c) Kaleidoscopic circulation of different tone colours and rhythms reflects hypersensitivity associated with hysteria

Musical analysis

(1) Samson: describes it as “holding together only by the cohesive force of the composer’s musical imagination and formal instinct”, with no discernible patterning, suggesting an entirely subjective composition style
(2) Herbert Buchanan (1967): showed how Erwartung incorporates thematic material from the early Schoenberg song ‘Am Wegrand’ Op. 6/6 into its accompaniment; apparently justified by a textual correspondence and the theme of quests ending in frustration
(3) Richard Taruskin (2010): the piece is given an essential harmonic homogeneity through the use, in original and inverted form, of what he calls the “atonal triad” – a fourth and a tritone

Question 2

Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces Op. 19 (1911)

Answer 2

The end of pure expressionism (Ethan Haimo 2006)

Context: in August 1909, while negotiating with Busoni over the performance of the Op. 11 piano pieces, Schoenberg appears to have hit a fundamental break, calling in a letter for the “liberation from all forms”, from all “symbols of cohesion and logic”, from “motivic working-out” and “harmony as cement”; motivated by his belief that “it is impossible for a person to have only one sensation at a time. One has thousands simultaneously…”. He wishes his music to be “an expression of feeling, as our feelings, which bring us in contact with our subconscious, really are, and no false child of feelings and conscious logic”.

1. This letter came days after the completion of the first two Op. 11 pieces, both of which demonstrate intense motivic working-out and harmonic reference to past conventions; the view led to the radically different Erwartung just the next month.
   - —- Haimo therefore labels this the advent of Schoenberg’s ‘New Music’, the first point at which Schoenberg aimed to create a real break with the musical past
2. The Six Little Piano Pieces Op. 19 demonstrate both the realisation of principles in Busoni letter, and the strain beginning to show in them
   (1) On the one hand, they are extremely brief (total range 9-17 measures) and tend to avoid motivic repetition, representative of a “New Music”
   (2) Op. 11/4, however, integrates traditional structures: it can be divided into three phrases, the first ending at m. 5 with a rest and the second at m. 9 with a rest; the third phrase, despite its many changes in rhythm, register, dynamics etc., represents a varied reprise of the opening
   (3) It also shows evidence of motivic “working-out”, the opening motive being transformed in m. 2 and 7-8; Haimo argues that the pitch language is contrived to reinforce A, F, and B, introducing something of a harmonic “cement”
   (4) Schoenberg started Die glückliche Hand in 1910 in much the matter of Erwartung, but then stopped working on it. When he turned back to it in 1912, he started to reintroduce older ideas to it e.g. intricate counterpoint, thematic recurrence, and clear formal design

Question 3

Verklarte Nacht

Answer 3

Reconciled Brahms and Wagner:

1. Sonata form to reflect the structure of Dehmel’s text
2. Wagnerian harmonic devices such as avoiding the dominant which weakened sense of tonal centre

Question 4

Berg Op. 2/2 lieder (1910

Answer 4

hahaha

Question 5

Webern Op. 11 Drei kleine stucke (1914)

Answer 5

1. Appears a ‘marvel of non-linearity’ (Escot 1982): extremely terse utterances, constant shifts in register, interruptions and linear discontinuity
2. Forte: pre-Op.17, Webern’s music principally organised by octatonic scale, which serves as master superset [0,1,3,4]
3. Opening chord encapsulates superset [0,1,4,5] which binds the work together
4. Cello’s line at end of piece 3

Question 6

Conclusions

Answer 6

Vienna as intense representation/prefiguration of broader Western modernism

1. Hanàk 1993: Vienna ‘played a pre-eminent role in generating and propogating fin-de-siecle sentiments and modern twentieth-century Western culture’
2. Norman Stone 1983: ‘it was in Vienna that most of the twentieth-century intellectual world was invented’

Question 7

Schoenberg’s music: truly expressionist or not?

Answer 7

The precision/calculation of Schoenberg’s expressionist manner problematises its supposed spontaneity

1. Samson 1977: requirements of musical comprehensibility tempered expressionist ideal
2. Samson: vocal music important as formal prop and expressive catalyst: text determines structure and melodic-harmonic content
3. Ubiquity of rit…a tempo markings reflects need to feed methods of formal articulation instead of tonal cadence
   - —- Wagner’s structure articulated by PACs
4. Section lengths (often articulated by rit…a tempo markings) were limited, since each had to economically employ the total range of chromatic pitches to avoid semblance of tonality
5. Rhythm and timbre could exist independently
   —– Example: Schoenberg Op. 16/3
   • Klangfarbenmelodie
   • All based on a single chord and 2 transpositions: static
   • Colour as structuring principle
   • Avoids recognisable form
6. Schoenberg’s Op. 11/1 characterised by extreme motivic density, while Op. 11/3 is athematic
   - —- Op. 11/3: thematic/tonal contrasts of sonata form replaced by extreme textural/rhythmic/dynamic contrasts
7. Atonality resulted in increased structural importance of other parameters
8. Schoenberg Op. 19
   (1) No. 1: scattered motives that are transposed subsets of Aschbeg set (0,1,2,5 motive)
   (2) No. 2: ostinato G maj dyad sets up tonal expectations
   - —- Apparent I-iv-I progression
9. Samson: Webern and Berg’s early songs show word-painting, but Schoenberg’s often don’t
   - —- Schoenberg distinguished between the ‘surface layer of meaning’ and the ‘real content’ of poetry: a distinction typical of Expressionist thinking

Question 8

Schoenberg’s self-historicizing (Brian Simms 2000)

Answer 8

1. Schoenberg later framed his move to atonality from 1908 as an historical inevitability prefigured by Debussy’s use of chords without harmonic function and the radically extended harmonies of Richard Strauss

(1) He himself disliked the term “atonal”: it implies music with no connection to tone, whereas his music was better described as “polytonal”
(2) Saw atonality as process underway since Beethoven: ‘the erosion of the old order in music, the diatonic harmonic system’ (Schorske)
(3) Triad symbolised authority/stability/repose (the lost, old Vienna)

2. Schoenberg’s atonality initially derived from late Romantic harmonic extension and the accumulation of chromatic chords until a stable sense of key was lost
   - —- he held that every note of a piece forms a harmony, and this idea informed his early atonal harmonies based on “triadic tetrachords”, standalone chords made from diatonic triads with ornamental notes on them e.g. C-C#-E-G, C-D-E-G etc.
3. After experimenting in Das Buch and the first two Piano Pieces Op. 11 Schoenberg moved away from such chords towards harmonies with less relation to tonal practices
4. Presence of a text always a push to experimentation, esp. before 1908
   (1) Used term “schwebend” to describe a wavering definition of key
   (2) E.g. “Der Wanderer” Op. 6/8 (1905): overall plan from G minor to dominant and back obfuscated; typical features of later atonal works include ostinato in right hand; long passage of altered and “vagrant” chords with no consistent reference to any key; passages in which multiple keys referenced using embellished voice-leading, references to tonics and dominants only localised and redundant

Question 9

Expressionism and the occult

Answer 9

1. Schoenberg’s first foray into atonality linked with spirituality, not psychoanalysis
2. Kovach argues the prevalence and influence of occult philosophies in fin-de-siecle Vienna is overlooked by seminal accounts such as Schorske’s
3. Swedenborg’s heaven as described in Balzac’s Seraphita:

(1) No absolute directions
(2) Schoenberg’s emancipation of dissonance allows horizontal/vertical to be interchangeable and inversions functionally equivalent, unlike tonal music
(3) Schoenberg: just as the mind can reproduce objects ‘in the imagination in every possible position, even so a musical creator’s mind can operate subconsciously with a row of tones, regardless of their direction, regardless of the ways in which a mirror might show their musical relations’

4. Rudolf Steiner’s metaphysics of music (expanding on Schopenhauer’s)

(1) Toured Europe lecturing on Theosophy
- —- 1904: appointed leader of Theosophical Esoteric society for Germany/Austria
(2) Argued through ‘supersensory seeing’, we can transcend coarse physical realm and access finer/higher spiritual realms
(3) Steinerian sentiments in Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art (1912), which Schoenberg vindicated in a review
(4) Steiner’s 1906 lecture ‘The Inner Nature of Music’ builds on Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music, arguing ‘the Devachic world is given to [man] in music’, linking music to the Devachan, the realm of the soul above earth associated with emotions and instinctive will

5. Schoenberg’s Op. 10/4 directly associates tonality with Steinerian spiritual transcendence

(1) ‘I feel the air of another planet’ is musically depicted through upward flourishes rising through each instrument
(2) Flourishes constructed from transpositions of the ‘Aschbeg’ set: associating transcendence with Schoenberg’s ‘inborn’ identity

Question 10

Schoenberg’s links with expressionism

Answer 10

1. Christopher Hailey (1993 expressionism reassessed): ‘the appealing analogies that seem to link musical Expressionism to the other arts are at best superficial similarities’: critique this!
2. Schoenberg-Kandinsky epistolary correspondence

(1) Schoenberg: ‘Art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge, or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive.’
- —- Maximalisation of Romantic view that art’s purpose is to express unique human subjectivity
(2) Butler: shows a ‘common definition of an Expressionist aesthetic and their shared commitment to their visionary notion of the irrational, instinctive artist
(3) Kandinsky: ‘what we are striving for and our whole manner of thought and feeling have so much in common’
- —- Linked the anti-geometric, anti-logical approach of his paintings to Schoenberg’s use of dissonance
(4) Kandinsky’s Improvisations are most relevant: ‘a largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of inner character, the non material nature’
(5) Schorske: consonance belonged to same socio-cultural system as science of perspective in art
- —- both were organised, hierarchical, reflecting absolutism and Baroque status system

3. Schoenberg-Busoni (1909)

Letter negotiating performance of Op. 11:

(1) Called for ‘complete liberation from form and symbols cohesion and logic’
(2) Music ‘should be an expression of feeling, as if it really were the feeling, full of unconscious connections, not some perception of “conscious logic”’
(3) ‘Not built, but “expressed”’
(4) ‘it is impossible for a person to have only one sensation at a time. One has thousands simultaneously’
(5) ‘an expression of feeling, as our feelings, which bring us in contact with our subconscious, really are, and no false child of feelings and conscious logic’

4. Haimo therefore labels this the advent of Schoenberg’s ‘New Music’, the first point at which Schoenberg aimed to create a real break with the musical past

(1) Came days after completion of the first two Op. 11 pieces
- —- Both demonstrate intense motivic working-out and harmonic reference to past conventions
(2) View in letter embodied in radically different Erwartung the following month next month

5, Schoenberg’s style changed since Gurrelieder’s composition (1901) and eventual performance (1912)

• —- Disliked public appeal and public, extroverted orientation: distanced himself
• —- Emotions were Jacobson’s not his

6. Richard Gerstl:
   (1) Proto-expressionist
   (2) Read Freud, became obsessed with music
   (3) Excluded from artistic establishment due to rejection of Jugendstil style; sought company in Schoenberg’s musical circle
   (4) Invited on holiday with Schoenberg’s family to paint their portraits in 1907/8
   - —- Painted two works late July 1908 that may be termed ‘expressionistic’
   - —- Came in wake of Akademie rejecting his work’s exhibition and suspending him
   - —– Artistic features show subjective distortion of reality:
   (a) Broad, violent brushstrokes
   (b) Vivid colours
   (c) Harrowingly distorted depiction of subjects/background
   - —- Immediately before Schoenberg experimented with emancipating tonality in Opus 10/4
   (5) Gerstl had affair with wife Mathilde: discovered 24 Aug 1908
   (6) Examples:
   - —- Gruppenbildnis mit Schönberg, Gmunden, late July 1908
   - —- Nude self-portrait
   - —- Scratched surface with reverse end of paintbrush: interest in poietic
7. Schoenberg choreographs move to atonality with Op. 10/4
   (a) Bore dedication ‘Meiner Frau’, with other dedication torn off
   (b) Completed 3 weeks after affair: no biographical connection
8. Link in programme note of first performance of Five Pieces for Orchestra Op. 16 (1909): ‘the music seeks to express all that swells in us subconsciously like a dream’
9. Conclusion: plausible that Schoenberg’s 1911 letters retroactively rebranded his pre-war atonal music to fit contemporaneous zeitgeist
   - —- Fits pattern of Schoenberg’s subsequent concerted effort to portray his serial method as evolutionary

Question 11

Viennese expressionism

Answer 11

Art

1. Schoenberg’s atonality and focus on timbre has two-dimensionality that links with Klimt’s works
   - —- Meadow in Flower (1906)
2. Kokoschka’s psychological portraits 1908-15 (Schorske, Virgo)

(1) Conversed with subjects to forge inner link: resulting portrait was psychological document
(2) Blurring of psyche and corporeal reality
(3) Like Schoenberg, revolutionised through exploiting dissociative potential of traditional aesthetic forms
(4) Presents, rather than representing

3. Schiele’s Self Portrait, Standing (1910) links with Erwartung

(1) 1910: Schiele rejected Klimt’s sumptuous ornamental style in favour of intensely sexual/psychological depictions
(2) Fully naked body: shockingly raw/contorted/tortured, with muscle visible beneath translucent flesh
(3) Eyes and nipples burning red, mirroring Schoenberg’s Red Gaze
(4) Art arose ‘purely out of inward, emotional intensity’
(5) Landscapes depicted nature as reflection of psychological states

Literature

1. Schorske: Schoenberg shared with Hofmannsthal, Freud, Klimt, and Ernst Mach ‘a diffuse sense that all is flux, that the boundary between ego and world is permeable’
2. Kokoschka’s Dreaming Boys
   - —- Violent imagery; stream of consciousness
   - —- Used fashionable 2D idiom to portray tortured puberty
3. Schnitzler: literary landscapes of the soul rooted in Freud’s insights

Question 12

Expressionism and Freudian psychoanalysis

Answer 12

1. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899): unprecedented scientific exploration of the unconscious mind

(1) Gained mass popularity within a decade after publication
(2) Theory: self is comprised of unconscious animalistic desires, repressed due to being socially unacceptable, but released in dreams’
- —- Schoenberg’s view of art mirrored Freud’s view of dreams: a vehicle through which the otherwise intangible unconscious could be rendered

2. Freud viewed the barbaric, elemental destructive instinct in the soul as ineradicable
3. Carpenter (2010): while there is no evidence that Freud and Schoenberg ever met, their circles did cross in significant ways e.g. Berg and Webern both underwent psychoanalysis and wrote to Schoenberg about it

(1) In a 1909 letter to Feruccio Busoni and in his Harmonieliehre Schoenberg affirmed his belief that consciousness has little influence on creative activity
(2) Lewis Wickes (1989): Schoenberg’s frequent and specific use of terms like “instinct” and “unconscious” circa. 1910-11 indicate a “basic knowledge of contemporary psychoanalytic modes of thought”

Question 13

Viennese pre-WWI context (Le Rider 1993)

Answer 13

Fin-de-siècle: end of history

1. Zweig (1942) wistfully depicts golden-age of 19thC prosperity: stability, security and progress for bourgeoisie
   - —- Deep-rooted upheaval was particularly sudden/painful
2. Technological changes
    Came late: more sudden/shocking
3. Artistic culture

(1) 19th C: conservative, insular
(2) Secession: ‘To every age its art, to every art its freedom’
- —- Liberating art from conservatism (Klimt banned)
- —- ‘ver sacrum’ [sacred spring]: art capable of redeeming/saving humanity
(3) Otto Wagner (architect/urban planner): ‘New human tasks and views called for a change or reconstitution of existing forms’

4. Monarchy embodied power/wealth that symbolised Austria’s imperishability
   (1) 1889: crown prince committed suicide/killed wife
   (2) Sisi assassinated 1898
5. Unstable political landscape: insecurity
   (1) Mixed ideologies of liberalism, anti-liberalism, nationalism and anti-Semitism
   (2) Social changes resulting from 1848 revolutions
6. Crumbling façade of prosperity/stability: preoccupation with dismantling inner/outer
   (1) Karl Kraus’s linguistic analyses dismantled external façade of morality over inner moral corruption

(2) Adolf Loos’ pamphlet Ornament and Crime (1910) lamented lack of separation between exterior/interior in architecture and fashion
- —- Harmonielehre: all ornaments should contribute to changes in harmonic/melodic structures; integration of ornaments linked to emancipation of dissonance
- —- In atonal Schoenberg, the difference between ornament and structure breaks down, reproducing collapse of external and internal states pursued elsewhere

(3) Zweig’s Eros Mattinus: pernicious effects of complete public suppression of sexuality
- —- Prostitution ‘constituted a dark underground vault over whihch rose the gorgeous structure of middle-lass society with its faultless, radiant façade’

(4) Georg Simmel (Germany)
—– Urban subject experiencing unrelenting flux of ‘outer and inner impressions’ (Watkins)
• Notion that outer and inner should be kept separate otherwise the latter would lose all character
—– Similar concerns in Vienna: previously traditionalist character meant its late modernistation and concomitant social changes enacted shockingly widespread and rapid change

7. Insecurity about national identity in German cultural orbit: notorious cultural conservatism coupled with lack of intellectual culture relative to the many libraries, universities in Germany
   (1) Persistent theme of Vienna as regressive/oppressive to its modernists
   (2) “Scepticism of action”: intolerance of disorder, emphasis on the comfortable and popular; cult of nature as a store of immutable laws
8. Sense of loss, of the inevitability of fate, of imminent collapse; Viennese modernists were rarely confident that modernism offered any solutions to modern problems
9. Triumph and crisis of individualism, distrust of rationalism

Question 14

What is expressionism?

Answer 14

1. Expressionist art concerned with direct expression of personal, intuitive inner feelings and ideas, often through the subjective distortion of objective reality
2. Retrospective label describing a style that flourished in the art/literature of Germany and Austria from 1905-20
3. Art should be borne of ‘inner necessity’ and form from the ‘shaping spirit of the imagination’
4. Kahnweiler: ‘a violation of form in favour of expressiveness’
   • Gordon (1966):
   o Retrospectively defined movement rather than label
   o French expressionism (representation conditioned by pictorial logic and determined by subjective perception)
   o German expressionism = emotionalism: the art of emotional expression
   • Schoenberg’s atonal (pantonal) pieces (op. 11-22, pinnacle Erwartung) can be termed epressionist
   • Hinton 1993: musical expressionism as perpetual negation of accepted musical language and convention: necessarily formed from moment of crisis
   • Adorno: Schoenberg’s expressionism as expressing true state of modern industrial society as a community of alienated individuals
   • Taruskin (2010): maximalisation of romantic subjectivity
   • Simmel: “the essence of the modern is psychologism, the experience and interpretation of the world according to the reactions of our inner selves, as if in an inner world; it is the dissolving of all stability in subjectivity”