At intermission during Die Soldaten an old friend of mine, a sculptor I’ve known on and off for (can it really be?) 40 years broke into a conversation I was having to ask an urgent question. She’s not a classical music person, and had read in the program book that the score is 12-tone music. And what she asked was: Is this 12-tone thing the reason why the piece is so horribly bad?
Well, no, it’s not, but I was grateful for my old friend’s honesty (and her curiosity and sense of fairness), because the opera — for all its great prestige, and despite the advance excitement for this production at the Lincoln Center Festival — really is bad, at least in this production. Laughable, in fact, I thought. To call it obvious would be like calling Bush a bad president, something so plain that it should hardly need to be said. The story shows us our corrupt society — despicable soldiers who seem to live to corrupt women, a woman who of course is duly ruined, abusive family life, scathing hierarchies of social class.
Nothing new there, and nothing painted in anything but the plainest colors, without a hint of nuance, depth, or character. The score (despite all kinds of compositional complexities) mostly screams “LOOK HOW HORRIBLE IT ALL IS!!!!!” though from time to time it quiets down, to as if to say, “Well, here’s a tender moment, but you see it’s all STILL very horrible.”
Possibly we weren’t hearing how the opera really goes. Because of the complex production (more on that below), there were monitors throughout the space, showing the conductor, Stephen Sloane,, so the singers could see him, and as I watched the monitors (anything for some relief from what was happening on stage), I saw Sloane conducting beats, not mood or phrasing (or, in a word, music), which may have simplified the job of keeping the complex score together,, but wasn’t helpful for giving it shape or character. Harry Curtis, the “stage conductor” (as he was billed in the program book) conducted a smaller ensemble on the opposite side of the space, and on the monitors he did seem to be conducting music, with sensitive and fluid movements of his hands, though I’ll grant that his job seemed vastly easier than Sloane’s.
But to get back to the piece: The silliest, most obvious moment was the ending. The ruined woman (and I have to ask: does the opera really make us sympathize with her, or is there, in spite of the composer’s professed point of view, an element of male voyeurship as we watch her getting raped and ruined) is reduced to begging in the streets. She meets her father, who doesn’t recognize her. The pain and irony of that is underlined and underlined and underlined, while it’s going on. And then we have a long and deafening barrage of cruel percussion, and then — the cherry topping off the sundae — an orchestral scream.
I was reminded of the ending of M. Night Shyamalan’s recent dud, The Happening, which also ends with something so obvious it’s laughable — laughable above all because it’s a kind of ending that I’ve seen countless times in horror films (the horror isn’t over! here it comes again!), but this time presenting at such ponderous and clueless length that you’d swear Shyamalan had no idea that others had done the same thing many times before him. But at least, when I saw the film, the audience did laugh, not just at the ending, but pretty much throughout.
(I also was reminded of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which much like Die Soldaten sets out to portray decadence, but so cluelessly that it falls completely flat.)
My wife, Anne Midgette, reviewing Die Soldaten in the Washington Post, says much the same thing as I’ve saying, though I hasten to note that everything I’m writing here is my opinion, and not necessarily hers. I felt in the end that I was seeing (and above all hearing) a living example of Adorno’s famous take on atonal music, but now reduced to parody. Adorno said (especially in The Philosophy of New Music) that the dissonance in atonal music represented frozen pain, and that this was good, because the pain was the pain of living in the world around us, a world so horrible that pain (along with rage) would be the only sane reaction anyone could have to it. Which then would mean — as Adorno strongly says — that atonal music is the only proper music anyone could write. Die Soldaten really did seem to be a parody of this, the pain exposed as all there is in life, masking even any subtlety in how we might react to it. It’s as if someone rewrote Adorno’s complex, probing, sometimes even playful prose in words of one syllable.
I also wondered if the opera has such great prestige in part because it’s 12-tone — though by now you’d think we just could treat 12-tone music as part of history, something we can like or not (I’m for it, myself), without treating it with any special respect.
As for the production, which used a huge performing space, and put both audience and orchestra(s) on platforms set on huge, expensive tracks, so the orchestra and audience could move — every penny spent on it was wasted, if you ask me. The production, first of all, was terribly conventional (see Anne’s review for her detailed explication of that), its few attempts at non-realistic evocation (the soliders entering with curling movements on the stage, holding chairs above their heads) looking pretty silly if they’re compared with truly innovative staging, of the kind I’ve seen (to cite just one example) in Meredith Monk’s big theater pieces, like Quarry.
But mainly I thought the production reified the piece — made it stiff and motionless, a monument erected to itself. This, in a work that to start with takes itself far too seriously, isn’t helpful. Much was made, in the program book, of the chance to make the opera intimate, by moving the audience close to certain scenes on stage, but at best that would have seemed voyeurlike, not intimate, and in practice only served to show us unmistakably how conventionally operatic the staging was. The only hope for Die Soldaten, I thought, would be to put it on the stage as simply as possible, with real emotion (instead of monumental simulations of emotion), so that any spontaneity in the piece, anything honest and original, could find its place, and maybe even touch us.
(The title of this post, “Terminal Prestige,” comes from a famous essay by Susan McClary, the musicologist, about the one-time dominance of atonal music among American composers.)
You really are a joke, you’re so utterly predictable I knew the basic outlines of what you were going to write before I even clicked on the link at Lisa Hirsch’s place. Thanks for not disappointing!
12-Tone Music or serial music and other artificial systems are usually employed by composers who after many years of academic study successfully aquire their Doctorate degrees along with academic prominence and a long list of prestigious accomplishments.
This enabels them to have an opportunity to have their works performed by major players in the music world starved for something new .The caveat however is that they are usually missing a very important and key ingredient.The talent to compose music. This is rare gift given to a select few. It can be developed, however it really cannot be learned. “So hey, why not try 12-tone?”
Music, on the other hand, must evolve over time. Trying to artificially rush this process with these systems and with music that is academically correct but boring will just allianate concert goers and keep them away when new music is on the program.
Your review and your wife’s work wonderfully well together, yours with its insightful allusions to recent movies, hers with its dutiful mention of who wrote the opera and when. But again, the women do the scut work.
Greg, do you think think music evolves over time? If so, how? If not, why not? I find the concept of evolution very interesting and a common trope in modernist aesthetics.
I would like to know who proclaimed Schoenberg and Webers pieces as masterpieces? The academic community? How often are their works performed for the general music loving public who attend concerts and pay the bills. How often are their works requested? I have often heard the comments of people planning to attend concerts and avoiding certain performances including works of these composers however limited that may be.
There are two basic components to any performance.The music and how it is performed. After a performance of one these composers works, I heard a comment from a gentleman that summed it up. The instuments and tones they produced were gorgious but the music they had to play @#$%&.The genuis of Schoenberg and Weber is the fame they attained with just average music ability.
The thing about opera for me is, with all these people screaming their guts out on stage, you must have a director and conductor who understand the necessity of establishing an oppositional, distilling subtext of great power. Otherwise hamminess, obviousness and emptiness prevail, more often than not.
I am not a particular fan of the 12-tone style, but there are indeed varying levels of how the row is used throughout the past several decades. I have played solo works with the row, but also concerti. Two friends, Keith Emerson (in his Concerto no. 1) and Lowell Liebermann (in his more recent Concerto no. 3) disguise the row in a melodic pattern, which permeates a work, or section, which develops into a more recognizable neo-Romantic palette. I like this way of utilizing the row, so it makes sense to those who are appalled by the use of the row.
I don’t understand the vehenmence directed toward 12-tone music. Yes, some (perhaps much) of it is crap, but so is some (perhaps much) tonal music. I think it has been drummed into people’s heads that 12-tone music is merely cold, cerebral, sterile, emotionless, academic writing, and thus they dismiss it before ever really hearing it. Joyce once said the Homerian framework for his Ulysses was mere scaffolding that he used to create the work, and that it wasn’t necessary for the reader to understand every parallel or allusion in order to enjoy the book. I think of 12-tone music the same way now. Like the scaffolding a builder uses to help build a beautfiul building, the 12-tone system is the scaffolding used as a means to help the composer reach his desired end; once the work is complete, the only thing that matters is how it sounds, not what method the composer used to create the sounds.
I must concur with Greg on the Berg, Schoenberg and Webern pices mentioned above. For a long time I avoided anything by them, or other 12-tone composers, but now I agree they are masterpieces, by any standard. I would include Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto (recently newly recored by the wonderful and lovely Hilary Hahn), his chamber symphonies, his string quartets, and many of his Lieder in that category also. As for Berg, his Lyric Suite, Three Orchestral Pieces, Wozzeck, and Violin Concerto are truly masterworks also. I defy anyone to listen to Berg’s Violin Concerto (dedicated to Manon Gropius, daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius, who died at 18) and call it sterile, emotionless, academic music! Ditto Wozzeck – a truly powerful and disturbing (in a good sense) work.
Greg, are you sure that Die Soldaten can be good in another production? I remember watching it a few years on video, and being in pain the whole time. I particularly remember one moment when I believe Marie is singing what is supposed to be a love aria. I was sitting there thinking that Zimmermann was giving the listener a moment of repose, but I was as on edge the entire time. Any and every emotion during that opera was abject pain, even when it was not supposed to be. Maybe the staging did not help, but I consider most of its problems due to Bernd Alois Zimmermann.
I have always found that listening to
recordings of 12 tone music, and any kind of
complex music can be very helpful. With repeated hearings, the music often starts to
make much more sense,and is no longer so
perplexing.
As a performing musician myself, I once
played a performance of the Webern”Six Pieces
for Orchestra”. As the rehearsals progressed,
this thorny music actually began to sound
melodious!
I haven’t heard Die Soldaten on CD or seen
a production, but woulld certainly like to.
I believe there is a new recording conducted
by Michael Gielen, an acknowledged master of
difficult music like this; I don’t remember
the label. And Anthony Tommasini in the NY
times gave the recent production from
Germany a more favorable review than you did,
Greg.
You may be interested to read David Byrne’s review.
Well, I’m clearly late to this party, but wanted to congratulate you on another convincing contrarian post. The oversimplification that you describe in this opera — bleakness laid on thick, without nuance or meaningful contrasts or tensions — reminds me of the exaggerated, self-satisfied “darkness” we’ve seen in many widely-praised plays and films of recent years (Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore leap to mind, as does the indie hit American Beauty, which struck me as overwrought rather than poetic). Even our sharpest critics seem to be seduced by this stuff, buying into the facile equation of bleakness with a sophisticated world-view. Look at Ed Rothstein’s review of the 1991 City Opera production of Die Soldaten, or the respectful-to-laudatory notices the new production is getting (Anne and Clive Barnes being exceptions, although Barnes seems to have no problem with the work itself, just the production). In each case, there’s a legitimate layer of sophistication — in this case the formidable serial score and the industrial scale of the production; in McDonagh’s plays the ironic humor; in American Beauty the visual stylization and artful voiceovers — that serves to mask the fundamental obviousness of what’s going on. But it’s that overriding “LOOK HOW HORRIBLE IT IS!” attitude that somehow makes otherwise sophisticated critics and audiences see art instead of melodrama. Your critique exposes a vein of middlebrow taste that runs through our nominally highbrow classical music world. Heavy-handed and simplistic are fine as long as the work is “serious,” and obviously it’s serious because it’s about suffering. Certainly the Soldaten example reinforces your argument (pace Steven Johnson) that high culture has no monopoly on subtlety and complexity. From what you and Anne have written, it sounds like this opera — especially in this production — lacks those qualities in both theatrical and musical terms.
My question is whether the simplicity of Zimmermann’s dramatic vision here is somehow linked, as a creative mindset or disposition, to the orthodox serialism of the score. You write that it doesn’t really matter that Die Soldaten is a 12-tone piece, and I fully agree with your point there. But from another angle, might there be some commonality between the embrace of a totalizing system like 12-tone composition and the embrace of a totalizing dramatic idea like “society is a brutalizing force”? One could argue that both are potentially too easy, too tidily pre-ordained as solutions to an artistic challenge, at least if one follows them rigidly. Ditto for Zimmermann’s decision to cast each scene in a particular musical form, which could be seen as an a priori, formalist gimmick that relieves the composer of the responsibility of being “in the moment” as he creates the musical drama. Don’t we need a little more messiness, spontaneity, and contradiction to make an artwork deeply human? Of course, if you follow the “rules” of tonality or sonata form too rigidly you come to the same place; no algorithm is likely to write good music. As you say, a piece of music has to work for the listener as music, whether or not we know a lot about the methodological, formal, or dramatic ideas underlying its construction. But we have good reason to be impatient when we come across an artwork that feels like it could be reduced to those underlying ideas. All of which means that the 12-tone method isn’t to be privileged over any other, nor disparaged: it’s just another set of tools for making what had better be, in the end, good music.
Yet this equanimity raises several questions: Why is it important to defend the method (e.g., by reference to particular masterpieces) or discuss it at all when we’re reviewing a piece or writing program notes? (Maybe Webern was right to be so taciturn with his performers.) Why are we still so exercised about it a century after its invention, as the comments to this post attest? Why has it, as a method, failed to find much of an audience outside professional musicians — again, with the exception of Lulu and a few other works that have nudged their way into the repertory? Why does it seem off-limits in many circles to discuss what seems to be, in hindsight, the intrinsically negative nature of the method: its aims of avoidance (of tonal hierarchies and the satisfactions associated with them) and rejection (of the historical development of musical grammar)? I don’t know the answers, but I’m fascinated by the latent tension in this conversation between the very sensible idea that we don’t have to know what’s going on in 12-tone music in order to enjoy it as music — sensually, affected by melody and harmony etc. — and the equally sensible idea that we have to listen to it carefully and over sufficient time in order to get what’s going on in it, which will somehow unlock our enjoyment.
Now I’ll go order Hilary Hahn’s Schoenberg concerto.