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Автор Алекс Росс
This is a chapter from Alex Ross's groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music,
It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you're attending concerts in the episode Here Comes the 20th Century.
Alex Ross, music critic for the
DOCTOR FAUST
Schoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality
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Contents
About the Publisher
Schoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality
One day in 1948 or 1949, the Brentwood Country Mart, a shopping complex in an upscale neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, was the scene of a slight disturbance that carried overtones of the most spectacular upheaval in twentieth-century music. Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of the émigré novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, was examining grapefruit in the produce section when she heard a voice shouting in German from the far end of the aisle. She looked up to see Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonal music and the codifier of twelve-tone composition, bearing down on her, with his bald pate and burning eyes. De cades later, in conversation with the writer Lawrence Weschler, Feuchtwanger could recall every detail of the encounter, including the weight of the grapefruit in her hand. “Lies, Frau Marta, lies!” Schoenberg was yelling.
“You have to know, I never had syphilis!”The cause of this improbable commotion was the publication of Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Thomas Mann, a writer peculiarly attuned to music, had fled from the hell of Hitler’s Germany into the not-quite paradise of Los Angeles, joining other Central European artists in exile.
The proximity of such renowned figures as Schoenberg and Stravinsky had encouraged Mann to write a “novel of music,” in which a modern composer produces esoteric masterpieces and then descends into syphilitic insanity. For advice, Mann turned to Theodor W. Adorno, who had studied with Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg and who was also part of the Los Angeles émigré community.
Mann self-confessedly approached modern music from the perspective of an informed amateur who wondered what had happened to the “lost paradise” of German Romanticism. Mann had attended the premiere of Mahler’s Eighth in 1910. He had briefly met Mahler, and trembled in awe before him. Some three decades later, Mann watched as Schoenberg, Mahler’s protégé, presented his “extremely difficult” but “rewarding” scores to small groups of devotees in Los Angeles. The novel asks, in so many words, “What went wrong?”
