The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
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The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century Details
Review “The Rest Is Noise is a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand 'more seeingly' in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly.” ―Geoff Dyer, The New York Times Book Review“[A] Brilliant, hugely enjoyable cultural history.” ―The Christian Science Monitor“Ross is a surpremely gifted writer who brings together the political and technological richness of the world inside the magic circle of the concert hall, so that each illuminates the other.” ―Lev Grossman, Time“It would be hard to imagine a better guide to the maelstrom of recent music than Mr. Ross, who worked on this book for a decade. He has an almost uncanny gift for putting music into words.” ―The Economist“The Rest Is Noise is a long and thrilling ride. . . . [Ross] writes about music in vivid language humming with intelligence. He tells great stories about musicians' lives and illuminates their work with the light of his own experiences.” ―Kevin Berger, Salon.com“The best book on what music is about--really about--that you or I will ever own.” ―Alan Rich, LA Weekly Read more About the Author Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism, a Holtzbrinck Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, a Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre, and a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for significant contributions to the field of contemporary music. The Rest is Noise is his first book. Read more Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One THE GOLDEN AGE Strauss, Mahler, and the Fin de Siécle When Richard Strauss conducted his opera Salome on May 16, 1906, in the Austrian city of Graz, several crowned heads of European music gathered to witness the event. The premiere of Salome had taken place in Dresden five months earlier, and word had got out that Strauss had created something beyond the pale—an ultra- dissonant biblical spectacle, based on a play by an Irish degenerate whose name was not mentioned in polite company, a work so frightful in its depiction of adolescent lust that imperial censors had banned it from the Court Opera in Vienna. Giacomo Puccini, the creator of La Bohéme and Tosca, made a trip north to hear what "terribly cacophonous thing" his German rival had concocted. Gustav Mahler, the director of the Vienna Opera, attended with his wife, the beautiful and controversial Alma. The bold young composer Arnold Schoenberg arrived from Vienna with his brother- in- law Alexander Zemlinsky and no fewer than six of his pupils. One of them, Alban Berg, traveled with an older friend, who later recalled the "feverish impatience and boundless excitement" that all felt as the evening approached. The widow of Johann Strauss II, composer of On the Beautiful Blue Danube, represented old Vienna. Ordinary music enthusiasts filled out the crowd—"young people from Vienna, with only the vocal score as hand luggage," Richard Strauss noted. Among them may have been the seventeen- year- old Adolf Hitler, who had just seen Mahler conduct Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in Vienna. Hitler later told Strauss’s son that he had borrowed money from relatives to make the trip. There was even a fictional character present—Adrian Leverkühn, the hero of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the tale of a composer in league with the devil. The Graz papers brought news from Croatia, where a Serbo-Croat movement was gaining momentum, and from Russia, where the tsar was locked in conflict with the country’s first parliament. Both stories carried tremors of future chaos—the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, the Russian Revolution of 1917. For the moment, though, Europe maintained the facade of civilization. The British war minister, Richard Haldane, was quoted as saying that he loved German literature and enjoyed reciting passages from Goethe’s Faust. Strauss and Mahler, the titans of Austro- German music, spent the afternoon in the hills above the city, as Alma Mahler recounted in her memoirs. A photographer captured the composers outside the opera house, apparently preparing to set out on their expedition—Strauss smiling in a boater hat, Mahler squinting in the sun. The company visited a waterfall and had lunch in an inn, where they sat at a plain wooden table. They must have made a strange pair: Strauss, tall and lanky, with a bulbous forehead, a weak chin, strong but sunken eyes; Mahler, a full head shorter, a muscular hawk of a man. As the sun began to go down, Mahler became nervous about the time and suggested that the party head back to the Hotel Elefant, where they were staying, to prepare for the performance. "They can’t start without me," Strauss said. "Let ’em wait. "Mahler replied: "If you won’t go, then I will—and conduct in your place. " Mahler was forty- five, Strauss forty- one. They were in most respects polar opposites. Mahler was a kaleidoscope of moods—childlike, heaven- storming, despotic, despairing. In Vienna, as he strode from his apartment near the Schwarzenbergplatz to the opera house on the Ringstrasse, cabdrivers would whisper to their passengers, "Der Mahler!" Strauss was earthy, self- satisfied, more than a little cynical, a closed book to most observers. The soprano Gemma Bellincioni, who sat next to him at a banquet after the performance in Graz, described him as "a pure kind of German, without poses, without long-winded speeches, little gossip and no inclination to talk about himself and his work, a gaze of steel, an indecipherable expression." Strauss came from Munich, a backward place in the eyes of sophisticated Viennese such as Gustav and Alma. Alma underlined this impression in her memoir by rendering Strauss’s dialogue in an exaggerated Bavarian dialect. Not surprisingly, the relationship between the two composers suffered from frequent misunderstandings. Mahler would recoil from unintended slights; Strauss would puzzle over the sudden silences that ensued. Strauss was still trying to understand his old colleague some four decades later, when he read Alma’s book and annotated it. "All untrue, "he wrote, next to the description of his behavior in Graz. "Strauss and I tunnel from opposite sides of the mountain, "Mahler said. "One day we shall meet." Both saw music as a medium of conflict, a battlefield of extremes. They reveled in the tremendous sounds that a hundred- piece orchestra could make, yet they also released energies of fragmentation and collapse. The heroic narratives of nineteenth- century Romanticism, from Beethoven’s symphonies to Wagner’s music dramas, invariably ended with a blaze of transcendence, of spiritual overcoming. Mahler and Strauss told stories of more circuitous shape, often questioning the possibility of a truly happy outcome. Each made a point of supporting the other’s music. In 1901, Strauss became president of the Allgemeiner deutscher Musikverein, or All- German Music Association, and his first major act was to program Mahler’s Third Symphony for the festival the following year. Mahler’s works appeared so often on the association’s programs in subsequent seasons that some critics took to calling the organization the Allgemeiner deutscher Mahlerverein. Others dubbed it the Annual German Carnival of Cacophony. Mahler, for his part, marveled at Salome. Strauss had played and sung the score for him the previous year, in a piano shop in Strasbourg, while passersby pressed against the windows trying to overhear. Salome promised to be one of the highlights of Mahler’s Vienna tenure, but the censors balked at accepting an opera in which biblical characters perform unspeakable acts. Furious, Mahler began hinting that his days in Vienna were numbered. He wrote to Strauss in March 1906: "You would not believe how vexatious this matter has been for me or (between ourselves) what consequences it may have for me." So Salome came to Graz, an elegant city of 150,000 people, capital of the agricultural province of Styria. The Stadt- Theater staged the opera at the suggestion of the critic Ernst Decsey, an associate of Mahler’s, who assured the management that it would create a succès de scandale. "The city was in a state of great excitement," Decsey wrote in his autobiography, Music Was His Life. "Parties formed and split. Pub philosophers buzzed about what was going on... Visitors from the provinces, critics, press people, reporters, and foreigners from Vienna... Three more- than- sold- out houses. Porters groaned, and hoteliers reached for the keys to their safes."The critic fueled the anticipation with a preview article acclaiming Strauss’s "tone- color world," his "polyrhythms and polyphony," his "breakup of the narrow old tonality," his "fetish ideal of an Omni- Tonality. " As dusk fell, Mahler and Strauss finally appeared at the opera house, having rushed back to town in their chauffeur- driven car. The crowd milling around in the lobby had an air of nervous electricity. The orchestra played a fanfare when Strauss walked up to the podium, and the audience applauded stormily. Then silence descended, the clarinet played a softly slithering scale, and the curtain went up. In the Gospel of Saint Matthew, the princess of Judaea dances for her ste Read more
Reviews
Every page of this incredibly vivid guidebook to music requires that you read a subchapter and then spend a day or two just listening and then reread the subchapter. While that might sound like an unpleasant homework assignment to Some for those of us who are truly obsessed with the joys music provides it is the most profound pleasure. Many composers who I thought I knew and liked for the right reasons I have learned so much more about (some unpleasant-as in Virgil Thompson's casual racism) the chapter on how Shostakovich negotiated making art under Stalin is deeply complex and Sympathetic. This is a life changing book in that my experience of music will be enriched by Alex Ross unforgettable storytelling, deep research, willingness to explore the politics of the time and great descriptive musical analysis.
