Reading adapted from the Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin.

Please also listen to some of https://youtu.be/yhT6afzke-c

MAXIMALISM
CHAPTER 1 Reaching (for) Limits
MUSIC IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
Richard Taruskin

Within the period 1890–1914, and especially in the German-speaking lands, modernism chiefly
manifested itself in the manner to which Pound drew attention in the passage that heads this
chapter as an epigraph: as a radical intensification of means toward accepted or traditional
ends (or at least toward ends that could be so described). That is why modernism of this early
vintage is perhaps best characterized as maximalism. The cultural phase we are about to
embark upon was called the fin de siècle not only because it happened to coincide with the end
of a century, but also because it reflected apocalyptic presentiments—superstitious
premonitions of ultimate revelation and possible catastrophe—such as attend any great
calendrical divide. The acceleration of stylistic innovation, so marked as to seem not just a
matter of degree but one of actual kind, requiring a new “periodization,” looks now, from the
vantage point of the next fin de siècle, to have been perhaps more a matter of inflated rhetoric
than of having new things to say.

What were the traditional ends given radically intensified or maximalized expression? Pound
has already mentioned emotional expression, one of the prerequisites of romantic art. Another,
from the very beginning of romanticism, was a sense of religious awe in the presence of the
sublime. A third, sometimes an ally of the other two but potentially a subversive diversion
(hence the most essentially “modernist”) was sensuality.

What were the intensified means? One involved the two dimensions in which musical works
exist, the temporal and the sonorous, both of them already maximalized to a degree by
Wagner. Turning musical works into awe-inspiring mountains—by extending their length,
amplifying their volume, and complicating their texture—became an obsession. Another way of
amplifying the sense of musical space, as Wagner had also demonstrated, was to increase the
range and maneuverability of “tonal navigation,” that is, the range of key relationships. Yet
another area in which Wagner had set a benchmark to be emulated and, if possible, exceeded,
was the sheer level of tolerable (or at least tolerated) dissonance, and even more important,
the postponement of its resolution. The former maximized the representation of emotional
tension, the latter maximized the listener’s participation in it.

The “Brahms line” could also be maximized. Here the benchmark could be described as “motivic
saturation”—the loading of the texture with significant motifs to be kaleidoscopically
recombined. By thus maximizing its “introversive reference”—the profusion and density of
significant internal relationships—the musical texture was made ever more pregnant with
potential meaning. That meaning could be harvested either in the domain of transcendence (in
which nothing was specified, the imagination left free to organize the received impressions
according to its own subjective criteria of relevance) or in the domain of “extroversive
reference,” where motifs are invested (as in the case of leitmotives) with paraphrasable
connotations.

At its peak, the maximalizing tendency in fin-de-siècle or early modernist music gave rise to a
body of works to which the German music historian Rudolf Stephan gave the name
Weltanschauungsmusik5—roughly, “music expressive of a world outlook,” or even “philosophy-
music.” Such works, always of hugely ambitious dimensions, attempted, through all the devices
broached in the foregoing paragraphs, to deal with and resolve the metaphysical issues—
questions that cannot be answered on the sole basis of sensory experience or rational thought
—that had preoccupied philosophers (especially German philosophers) throughout the
nineteenth century. The belief that music, in its word-transcending expressivity, was the only
medium through which eschatological matters—matters of “ultimate reality”—could be
adequately contemplated impelled the early modernists on their quest for new horizons.

Schoenberg, Webern, and Expressionism; Atonality

Art is the cry of distress uttered by those who experience at first hand the fate of mankind.Who
are not reconciled to it, but come to grips with it….Who do not turn their eyes away, to shield
themselves from emotions, but open them wide, so as to tackle what must be tackled. Who do,
however, often close their eyes, in order to perceive things incommunicable by the senses, to
envision within themselves the process that only seems to be in the world outside. The world
revolves within—inside them: what bursts out is merely the echo—the work of art.
—Arnold Schoenberg (1910)

Schoenberg’s whole career was fraught with ironies, contradictions, and ambiguities, beginning
with the paradox that one of the outstanding academic music theorists and composition
teachers of the twentieth century was himself self-taught. By the time he wrote Erwartung the
Vienna-born Schoenberg had had little musical instruction beyond the violin lessons, starting at
age eight, that were typically thrust on middle-class Jewish boys. Later he taught himself cello
and played in amateur quartets and orchestras. His early composing consisted of imitating the
violin duos he was assigned as a child, and arranging pieces to play with his companions. He had
some informal instruction in harmony from one of his playing partners, but when it came to
composing in “classical” forms, he had to look them up in an encyclopedia.

In 1895, Schoenberg, then working as a bank clerk, showed some of his early efforts to
Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871 – 1942), a young conservatory-trained composer who was
conducting one of the amateur orchestras in which Schoenberg played. Zemlinsky gave his
friend a few lessons in counterpoint and some general advice, and that was the extent of
Schoenberg’s “formal” training. A string quartet that Schoenberg wrote while consulting with
Zemlinsky (who later became his brother-in-law) was accepted for performance in 1897.With
that, lessons came to an end. Zemlinsky having declared him an equal, from then on
Schoenberg lived the life of a professional, albeit usually unemployed, composer.

He earned his living over the next several years by conducting amateur choruses and
orchestrating operettas (never having had any official instruction at all in conducting or
orchestration), and in his spare time composed two works that are now recognized as
masterpieces. One was Verklärte Nacht, op. 4 (“Transfigured night,” 1899), a tone poem scored,
unusually, not for orchestra but for string sextet, as if Schoenberg were deliberately casting
himself as heir to both the “New German” tradition of programmatic composition in the spirit
of Liszt,Wagner, and Strauss, and the “Classical” chamber-music tradition of Brahms.

Its program followed the plot of a narrative poem by Richard Dehmel, the same poet who
wrote the text of the song Erwartung. Vienna’s leading “decadent,” Dehmel enjoyed a
reputation for daring subject matter and Verklärte Nacht was no exception. It tells of a
magnanimous man who forgives the woman he loves illicitly for becoming pregnant by her
lawfully wedded but unloved husband. In Schoenberg’s musical interpretation, the man’s
promise to accept the child as his transforms the anguished mood of the tone poem’s D-minor
beginning into a radiant D major that gleams with the starlight of natural and artificial
harmonics.

Though certainly up-to-date, the music of Verklärte Nacht was in no way ahead of its time.
Nevertheless, it achieved a scandalous reputation when the very conservative Wiener
Tonkünstlerverein (Vienna Musicians’ Club), which had sponsored the performance of his early
quartet, rejected the tone poem for containing what its jury considered to be a compositional
error (Ex. 6-1): a chord that might arguably be analyzed as a dominant-ninth chord in “fourth
inversion” (ninth in the bass), but which is better justified as the product of voice leading by
semitones in all voices in contrary motion.

ex. 6-1 Offending passage from Arnold Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht

At least Schoenberg claimed that the score was rejected for this reason, in an essay he wrote
almost half a century later (from which the example, asterisk and all, was taken).2 It seems at
least as likely that it was rejected because of its risqué subject matter. But whatever the reason
for it, this experience seems to have equipped Schoenberg with the resentment and the sense
of alienation that a modernist giant needs. From then on, in a transformation that dated almost
precisely from the turn of the century, it became a point of pride and principle with Schoenberg
and his pupils (like Berg, whose early aggregate harmony was discussed in Chapter 4) always to
be pushing the envelope of stylistic and technical innovation.

Even so, like any “maximalist’s,” Schoenberg’s expressive aims remained those of his forebears,
and were readily recognizable as such even when his stylistic and technical means were self-
consciously advanced. That is why the other masterpiece of his early years, a vast cantata called
Gurrelieder (“Songs of Gurre”) for five solo voices, a speaker, three male choruses, a double
(eight-part) mixed chorus, and an orchestra containing four flutes, four piccolos, five oboes,
seven clarinets, three bassoons, two contrabassoons, ten horns, seven trumpets, seven
trombones, four harps, twelve percussionists, and strings to match, was such a great success
when it was finally performed.

Based on a volume of poems by the Danish romantic writer Jens Peter Jacobsen that purported
to retell a set of Nordic myths like the ones in Wagner’s Ring (but in a “decadent” erotic manner
reminiscent of Tristan und Isolde), the work was composed over the course of a single year
(March 1900–March 1901). The orchestration took much longer. Schoenberg worked on it until
1903, when, despairing of ever getting the work performed, he turned to other projects. He did
not return to it until 1910, by which time his reputation had grown to the point where a
performance could be secured. He completed the scoring in 1911, and the work was finally
heard the next year.

It was received with amazement and delight by a public already used to Mahler and Strauss.
The self-taught composer exhibited astounding mastery of every branch of compositional
technique, not excluding counterpoint (for the gigantic final chorus is cast as a double canon).
Having put himself so thoroughly through the mill, he now appeared to many as virtually the
miller-in-chief. One who thought so was Richard Strauss, who had exerted his influence on
Schoenberg’s behalf after seeing the first orchestrated excerpts from Gurrelieder as early as
1901. He secured a government stipend to see the younger man through the task of scoring the
colossal work, and then got Schoenberg his first teaching job (the first of many) at a private
conservatory in Berlin.

But by 1912, Schoenberg’s style had undergone a remarkable metamorphosis, and he no longer
thought Gurrelieder a representative (or a particularly valuable) composition. He famously
refused to acknowledge the audience’s applause, preferring alienation to acclaim. He offended
his erstwhile benefactor Strauss as well, publicly chiding him for failing to make a comparable
stylistic advance. His intransigent stance became a modernist paradigm. Combined with his
awesome technical command and his increasingly prestigious teaching posts, it invested
Schoenberg with a moral authority that made him influential out of all proportion to the
frequency with which his music was ever performed.