Chapter One
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 a British 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 Bohème 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-six, 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 high-flown 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 stepfather, Herod, and demands the head of
John the Baptist as reward. She had surfaced several times
in operatic history, usually with her more scandalous
features suppressed. Strauss’s brazenly modern retelling
takes off from Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play Salomé, in which the
princess shamelessly eroticizes the body of John the
Baptist and indulges in a touch of necrophilia at the end.
When Strauss read Hedwig Lachmann’s German translation of
Wilde-in which the accent is dropped from Salomé’s name-he
decided to set it to music word for word, instead of
employing a verse adaptation. Next to the first line, “How
beautiful is the princess Salome tonight,” he made a note
to use the key of C-sharp minor. But this would turn out to
be a different sort of C-sharp minor from Bach’s or
Beethoven’s.
Strauss had a flair for beginnings. In 1896 he created what
may be, after the first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, the
most famous opening flourish in music: the “mountain
sunrise” from Thus Spake Zarathustra, deployed to great
effect in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The
passage draws its cosmic power from the natural laws of
sound. If you pluck a string tuned to a low C, then pluck
it again while pinching it in half, the tone rises to the
next C above. This is the interval of the octave. Further
subdivisions yield intervals of the fifth (C to G), the
fourth (G to the next higher C), and the major third (C to
E). These are the lower steps of the natural harmonic
series, or overtone series, which shimmers like a rainbow
from any vibrating string. The same intervals appear at the
outset of Zarathustra, and they accumulate into a gleaming
C-major chord.
Salome, written nine years after Zarathustra, begins very
differently, in a state of volatility and flux. The first
notes on the clarinet are simply a rising scale, but it is
split down the middle: the first half belongs to C-sharp
major, the second half to G major. This is an unsettling
opening, for several reasons. First, the notes C-sharp and
G are separated by the interval known as the tritone, one
step narrower than the perfect fifth. (Leonard Bernstein’s
“Maria” opens with a tritone resolving to a fifth.) This
interval has long caused uneasy vibrations in human ears;
medieval scholars called it diabolus in musica, the musical
devil.
In the Salome scale, not just two notes but two key-areas,
two opposing harmonic spheres, are juxtaposed. From the
start, we are plunged into an environment where bodies and
ideas circulate freely, where opposites meet. There’s a
hint of the glitter and swirl of city life: the debonairly
gliding clarinet looks forward to the jazzy character who
kicks off Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The scale might also
suggest a meeting of irreconcilable belief systems; after
all, Salome takes place at the intersection of Roman,
Jewish, and Christian societies. Most acutely, this little
run of notes takes us inside the mind of one who is
exhibiting all the contradictions of her world.
The first part of Salome focuses on the confrontation
between Salome and the prophet Jochanaan: she the symbol of
unstable sexuality, he the symbol of ascetic rectitude. She
tries to seduce him, he shrinks away and issues a curse,
and the orchestra expresses its own fascinated disgust with
an interlude in C-sharp minor-in Jochanaan’s stentorian
manner, but in Salome’s key.
Then Herod comes onstage. The tetrarch is a picture of
modern neurosis, a sensualist with a yearning for the moral
life, his music awash in overlapping styles and shifting
moods. He comes out on the terrace; looks for the princess;
gazes at the moon, which is “reeling through the clouds
like a drunken woman”; orders wine, slips in blood,
stumbles over the body of a soldier who has committed
suicide; feels cold, feels a wind-there is a hallucination
of wings beating the air. It’s quiet again; then more wind,
more visions. The orchestra plays fragments of waltzes,
expressionistic clusters of dissonance, impressionistic
washes of sound. There is a turbulent episode as five Jews
in Herod’s court dispute the meaning of the Baptist’s
prophecies; two Nazarenes respond with the Christian point
of view.
When Herod persuades his stepdaughter to dance the Dance of
the Seven Veils, she does so to the tune of an orchestral
interlude that, on first hearing, sounds disappointingly
vulgar in its thumping rhythms and pseudo-Oriental exotic
color. Mahler, when he heard Salome, thought that his
colleague had tossed away what should have been the
highlight of the piece. But Strauss almost certainly knew
what he was doing: this is the music that Herod likes, and
it serves as a kitschy foil for the grisliness to come.
Salome now calls for the prophet’s head, and Herod, in a
sudden religious panic, tries to get her to change her
mind. She refuses. The executioner prepares to behead the
Baptist in his cistern prison. At this point, the bottom
drops out of the music. A toneless bass-drum rumble and
strangulated cries in the double basses give way to a huge
smear of tone in the full orchestra.
At the climax, the head of John the Baptist lies before
Salome on a platter. Having disturbed us with unheard-of
dissonances, Strauss now disturbs us with plain chords of
necrophiliac bliss. For all the perversity of the material,
this is still a love story, and the composer honors his
heroine’s emotions. “The mystery of love,” Salome sings,
“is greater than the mystery of death.” Herod is horrified
by the spectacle that his own incestuous lust has
engendered. “Hide the moon, hide the stars!” he rasps.
“Something terrible is going to happen!” He turns his back
and walks up the staircase of the palace. The moon, obeying
his command, goes behind the clouds. An extraordinary sound
emanates from the lower brass and winds: the opera’s
introductory motif is telescoped-with one half-step
alteration-into a single glowering chord. Above it, the
flutes and clarinets launch into an obsessively elongated
trill. Salome’s love themes rise up again. At the moment of
the kiss, two ordinary chords are mashed together, creating
a momentary eight-note dissonance.
The moon comes out again. Herod, at the top of the stairs,
turns around, and screams, “Kill that woman!” The orchestra
attempts to restore order with an ending in C minor, but
succeeds only in adding to the tumult: the horns play fast
figures that blur into a howl, the timpani pound away at a
four-note chromatic pattern, the woodwinds shriek on high.
In effect, the opera ends with eight bars of noise.
The crowd roared its approval-that was the most shocking
thing. “Nothing more satanic and artistic has been seen on
the German opera stage,” Decsey wrote admiringly. Strauss
held court that night at the Hotel Elefant, in a never-to-be-repeated
gathering that included Mahler, Puccini, and
Schoenberg. When someone declared that he’d rather shoot
himself than memorize the part of Salome, Strauss answered,
“Me, too,” to general amusement. The next day, the composer
wrote to his wife, Pauline, who had stayed home in Berlin:
“It is raining, and I am sitting on the garden terrace of
my hotel, in order to report to you that ‘Salome’ went
well, gigantic success, people applauding for ten minutes
until the fire curtain came down, etc., etc.”
Salome went on to be performed in some twenty-five
different cities. The triumph was so complete that Strauss
could afford to laugh off criticism from Kaiser Wilhelm II.
“I am sorry that Strauss composed this Salome,” the Kaiser
reportedly said. “Normally I’m very keen on him, but this
is going to do him a lot of damage.” Strauss would relate
this story and add with a flourish: “Thanks to that damage
I was able to build my villa in Garmisch!”
On the train back to Vienna, Mahler expressed bewilderment
over his colleague’s success. He considered Salome a
significant and audacious piece-“one of the greatest
masterworks of our time,” he later said-and could not
understand why the public took an immediate liking to it.
Genius and popularity were, he apparently thought,
incompatible. Traveling in the same carriage was the
Styrian poet and novelist Peter Rosegger. According to
Alma, when Mahler voiced his reservations, Rosegger replied
that the voice of the people is the voice of God-Vox
populi, vox Dei. Mahler asked whether he meant the voice of
the people at the present moment or the voice of the people
over time. Nobody seemed to know the answer to that
question.
The younger musicians from Vienna thrilled to the
innovations in Strauss’s score, but were suspicious of his
showmanship. One group, including Alban Berg, met at a
restaurant to discuss what they had heard. They might well
have used the words that Adrian Leverkühn applies to
Strauss in Doctor Faustus: “What a gifted fellow! The
happy-go-lucky revolutionary, cocky and conciliatory. Never
were the avant-garde and the box office so well acquainted.
Shocks and discords aplenty-then he good-naturedly takes it
all back and assures the philistines that no harm was
intended. But a hit, a definite hit.” As for Adolf Hitler,
it is not certain that he was actually there; he may merely
have claimed to have attended, for whatever reason. But
something about the opera evidently stuck in his memory.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Rest is Noise
by Alex Ross
Copyright © 2007 by Alex Ross.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC
Copyright © 2007
Alex Ross
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-24939-7
