Thursday 30 April

John Adams
Harmonielehre
¹⁹⁸⁵

1  First Movement
2  The Anfortas Wound
3  Meister Eckhardt and Quackie

_{Note by John Adams}

Harmonielehre is roughly translated as ‘the book of harmony’ or ‘treatise on harmony.’ It is the title of a huge study of tonal harmony, part textbook, part philosophical rumination, that Arnold Schoenberg published in 1911 just as he was embarking on a voyage into unknown waters, one in which he would more or less permanently renounce the laws of tonality. My own relationship to Schoenberg needs some explanation. Leon Kirchner, with whom I studied at Harvard, had himself been a student of Schoenberg in Los Angeles during the 1940s. Kirchner had no interest in the serial system that Schoenberg had invented, but he shared a sense of high seriousness and an intensely critical view of the legacy of the past.

Through Kirchner I became highly sensitised to what Schoenberg and his art represented. He was a ‘master’ in the same sense that Bach, Beethoven and Brahms were masters. That notion in itself appealed to me then and continues to do so. But Schoenberg also represented to me something twisted and contorted. He was the first composer to assume the role of high-priest, a creative mind whose entire life ran unfailingly against the grain of society, almost as if he had chosen the role of irritant.

Despite my respect for and even intimidation by the persona of Schoenberg, I felt it only honest to acknowledge that I profoundly disliked the sound of twelve-tone music. His aesthetic was to me an over-ripening of 19th-century individualism, one in which the composer was a god of sorts, to which the listener would come as if to a sacramental altar. It was with Schoenberg that the ‘agony of modern music’ had been born, and it was no secret that the audience for classical music during the 20th century was rapidly shrinking, in no small part because of the aural ugliness of so much new work being written.

It is difficult to understand why the Schoenbergian model became so profoundly influential for classical composers. Composers like Pierre Boulez and György Ligeti have borne both the ethic and the aesthetic into our own time, and its immanence in present day university life and European musical festivals is still potent. Rejecting Schoenberg was like siding with the Philistines, and freeing myself from the model he represented was an act of enormous willpower.

Not surprisingly, my rejection took the form of parody … not a single parody, but several extremely different ones. In my Chamber Symphony, the busy, hyperactive style of Schoenberg’s own early work is placed in a salad spinner with Hollywood cartoon music. In The Death of Klinghoffer, the priggish, disdainful Austrian Woman describes how she spent the entire hijacking hiding under her bed by singing in a Sprechstimme to the accompaniment of a Pierrot-like ensemble in the pit.

My own Harmonielehre is parody of a different sort, in that it bears a ‘subsidiary relation’ to a model (in this case a number of signal works from the turn of the century like Gurrelieder and Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony), but it does so without the intent to ridicule.

Hector Berlioz
Symphonie fantastique
¹⁸³⁰

1 Daydreams – Passions: Largo – Allegro agitato e appassionato assai
2 A Ball: Waltz – Allegro non troppo
3 Scene in the Country: Adagio
4 March to the Scaffold: Allegretto non troppo
5 Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath: Larghetto – Allegro – Dies Irae – Ronde du sabbat

With all its innovations – including the introduction of instruments, textures, rhythms and gestures new to symphonic music – the Symphonie fantastique has its roots in other music, past and present. It was influenced by the music of Gluck and Spontini, which was for several years Berlioz’s main diet and whose melodic style he absorbed into his innermost being when he first came to Paris in 1821, a boy of 17 who had never heard an orchestra. A few years later, the discovery of Weber, and, still more, of Beethoven at the Conservatoire concerts in 1828 (paralleling the impact of Goethe and Shakespeare) had an even more profound effect upon the young musician, who had, until then, been reared on French Classical opera. The Symphonie fantastique is unthinkable without Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ and Fifth, and without Weber’s Der Freischütz. Above all, the revelation of the symphony as a dramatic form par excellence, and of the orchestra as an expressive instrument of undreamed of richness and flexibility, opened before Berlioz a new world, which he must at all costs enter and inhabit.

It became the springboard for a leap into unknown territory. The influence of Beethoven could only be general, not specific; it was a matter of inspiration, not imitation. So, though Berlioz is deeply concerned with issues of musical architecture, he works out his own salvation. Though he will learn from Beethoven’s technique of thematic transformation, he will not use it as a model. He composes in melodic spans rather than in motifs. The work’s recurring melody, the idée fixe, is 40 bars long and its repetition two-thirds of the way through the first movement represents not a sonata reprise but a stage in the theme’s evolution from monody (a solo line) to full orchestral statement.

No one had composed symphonic music or used the orchestra like this before. As music critic Michael Steinberg wrote:

‘No disrespect to Mahler or Shostakovich, but this is the most remarkable First Symphony ever written.’

It was typical of Berlioz’s boldness and freedom of spirit that his first major orchestral work should comprise a mixture of genres analogous to what the Romantic dramatists were attempting after the example of Shakespeare, and that in doing so he should override the normal categories of symphonic discourse and, in response to the demands of the musical drama, create his own idiosyncratic version of Classical form and bring the theatre into the concert hall.

_{LISTENING GUIDE}

Daydreams – Passions
Slow introduction; sadness and imagined happiness, creating an image of the ideal woman, represented (Allegro) by the idée fixe: a long, asymmetrically phrased melodic span, first heard virtually unaccompanied, then gradually integrated into the full orchestra. The melody, in its alternate exaltation and dejection, forms the main argument. At the end, like a storm that has blown itself out, it comes to rest on a series of solemn chords.

A Ball
The beloved is present. Waltz, at first dream-like, then glittering, finally garish. Middle section with the idée fixe assimilated to the rhythm of the dance.

Scene in the Country
A shepherd pipes a melancholy song, answered from afar by another. Pastoral scene: a long, serene melody, with similarities of outline to the idée fixe and, like it, presented as a simple melody by flute and first violins, then in progressively fuller textures. Agitated climax, precipitated by the idée fixe, which later takes on a more tranquil air (without its characteristic sighing fourth). Dusk, distant thunder. The first shepherd now pipes alone. Drums and solo horn prepare for:

March to the Scaffold
The artist imagines he has killed the beloved and is being marched through the streets to his execution. The dreams of the first three movements are now intensified into nightmare and the full orchestral forces deployed: massive brass and percussion, prominent and grotesque bassoons. The idée fixe reappears forlornly on solo clarinet, but is cut off by the guillotine stroke of the whole orchestra.

Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath
Strange mewings, muffled explosions, distant cries. The executed lover witnesses his own funeral. The beloved melody, now a lewd distortion of itself, joins the revels. Dies irae, parody of the church’s ritual of the dead. Witches’ Round Dance. The climax, after a long crescendo, combines round dance and Dies irae in a tour de force of rhythmic and orchestral virtuosity.

_{Note by David Cairns
David Cairns won the biography category of the Whitbread Prize and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction for his second volume biography on Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness. Working alongside Sir Colin Davis since the 1950s, their Berlioz reputation goes before them: ‘Cairns and Davis made Berlioz not just acceptable, but almost normal, a patient, rational craftsman, a great composer like any other’ (Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times).}