Essay: Wagnerism and Stockhausen Syndrome

Wagnerism and Stockhausen Syndrome

On the Concert Program

“[Felix] Mendelssohn has shown us that a Jew can have the richest abundance of specific talents, be a man of the broadest yet most refined culture, of the loftiest, most impeccable integrity and yet not be able—not even once, with the help of all these qualities —to produce in us that deep, heart-seizing, soul-searching experience that we expect from art.”1 These words were published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik2 (“New Journal of Music”) in 1850 as part of an article called Das Judentum in der Musik (following Davon Conway’s convention: “Jewry in Music”). The article, signed by K. Freigedank (“K. Freethought”), is now considered a watershed moment in the history of German anti-Semitism.

It may strike contemporary readers as strange that an article published in a music magazine—whose circulation never exceeded 2,000 subscribers—would now be seen as a landmark precursor to the racist nationalism that gripped Germany in the 20th century. But the attack on Mendelssohn was also aimed at the inclusive and liberating nationalism of the late Enlightenment Vormärz, the period of German history which preceded the failed revolution of 1848. Mendelssohn, born into a highly prominent Jewish family and baptized Christian at age seven, was a leading force of German music in the 1840s. His position reinforced that socially and culturally prominent Jews were so incorporated into German culture that they, as in the case of Mendelssohn, could also be enthusiastic cultural nationalists. Felix Mendelssohn—whose grandfather was the Jewish enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn— launched the revival of public interest in Bach through a performance of the Matthäus-Passion and was the composer of Paulus, an oratorio which begins with the stoning of St. Stephen by the Jews.

Freigedank outed himself in 1869 as Richard Wagner, with a somewhat toned-down republication of the essay. For Wagner, something

in Mendelssohn’s music betrays his “Jewishness”: Mendelssohn’s choice of Bach as cynosure as opposed to Beethoven, whose musical language, claims Wagner, “can be spoken only by a whole, entire, warm-breathed human being”; Mendelssohn’s preference for oratorio, which Wagner describes as “sexless opera-embryos,” over opera;3 Mendelssohn’s supposed inability to write anything more than superficial music save for his solo piano pieces, for which Wagner feigned a genuine emotional response, as the pieces are—to Wagner’s ears—emblems of Mendelssohn’s own realization of his racial inferiority.

Das Judentum in der Musik is a stunningly repugnant piece of writing. As you read it, you can feel a burning animosity, a personal hatred, spurning the author on. Wagner wrote the article in 1850, living in forced exile in Switzerland following his participation in the doomed Dresden uprising of 1849. His scorn of the recently deceased and ubiquitously admired Mendelssohn, a fellow native Leipziger, is blatant; his writing mixes anti-Semitism with intense private envy. And it is often forgotten, due to the nature of Wagner’s career—he was a late bloomer in comparison to the stunning young prodigies of 19th-century music—that the composer was only a few years younger than those commonly thought of as belonging to an earlier generation: Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin, and, Wagner’s eventual father-in-law, Franz Liszt. Wagner’s anathema of Mendelssohn has had enormous staying power; it is a malediction that hangs over us to this day, as Tom Service points out: “The tragedy is that Wagner’s critique has become—minus most of the racism—the default position when it comes to Mendelssohn. His technical facility, the driving force behind his music, is seen as shallow academicism; the commercial success he enjoyed is seen as proof that he wrote only to please his public.”4

Making the case against Mendelssohn’s “shallow academicism” is his String Quartet in E Minor Op. 44 No. 2. With some hints of the composer’s later violin concerto, which shares the same key, Mendelssohn’s quartet has heft and substantial emotional development. The first movement is witness to outbursts of lied-like material integrated into a tautly composed contrapuntal structure. The second movement, a scherzo, is playful and dizzying. Though recently disparaged in a program note at the Los Angeles Philharmonic as having “those characteristic scampering elves again—it wouldn’t be Mendelssohn without them,”5 the scherzo is structurally ingenious, with a ternary ABA form interpolated into a sonata rondo. The

third movement recalls Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte (“Songs without Words”) in its condensed sonata form, and the final movement is a stirring masterclass in changing compositional texture.

Twenty-two years after Mendelssohn’s death, Richard Wagner wrote Siegfried-Idyll, an unusual work in the composer’s output. It was composed as a chamber-symphonic tone poem and presented as a birthday gift to his wife, Cosima, after the birth of their son Siegfried. By this time, Wagner’s days of revolutionary struggle were a thing of the past. The composer had secured the patronage of Ludwig II of Bavaria, premiered Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and was deep into composing his Ring cycle. His status was all but assured, summed up pithily by Carl Dahlhaus as “the uncrowned king of German music.”6

Siegfried-Idyll premiered on Christmas morning in 1870 when a small ensemble, conducted by Wagner, performed the piece at the composer’s villa in Tribschen, Switzerland. Cosima Wagner recounts the birthday surprise, writing, “when I woke up I heard a sound, it grew even louder, I could no longer imagine myself in a dream, music was sounding, and what music!”7 Originally titled “Tribschen Idyll, with Fidi’s8 Bird-song and Orange Sunrise, presented as a Symphonic Birthday Greeting to his Cosima by her Richard, 1870,” Siegfried-Idyll was meant to be a private piece, for family consumption only. Though some of the music made it into the Ring—the main theme of Siegfried-Idyll is sung by Brünnhilde in Act 3 of Siegfried to the words “Ewig war ich…” (“I was always…”)—financial pressure forced the composer to expand the piece to 35 players and sell it to the publisher Schott in 1878. No longer a private piece, we can certainly hear it as an attempt toward domestic Wagnerian bliss.

In 1974, English composer Cornelius Cardew published a critique of German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and American composer John Cage entitled Stockhausen Serves Imperialism. Cardew, an erstwhile student of Stockhausen, sharply denounces the post–World War II musical avant-garde as being commercially co-opted and commodified by the bourgeois class, writing: “Salesmen like Stockhausen would have you believe that slipping off into cosmic consciousness removes you from the reach of the painful contradictions that surround you in the real world. At bottom, the mystical

idea is that the world is illusion, just an idea inside our heads. Then are the millions of oppressed and exploited people throughout the world just another aspect of that illusion in our minds? No, they aren’t. The world is real, and so are the people, and they are struggling towards a momentous revolutionary change. Mysticism says, ‘everything that lives is holy,’ so don’t walk on the grass and above all don’t harm a hair on the head of an imperialist.”9

Though Cardew’s writing carries some disillusionment, his caustic assessment can be understood within a larger historical-cultural framework. Following the 1968 protests, Stockhausen’s music, at the cutting-edge of the experimental and avant-garde, was decried as elitist, the composer seen as out of touch.10 His universalist composition Hymnen, realized from 1966–67 and added to in 1969, was written right when these cultural forces were coming to the fore.

Conceived of in four parts, each titled by Stockhausen as a “Region,” Hymnen is a piece for electronic music, musique concrète,11 and orchestra, based on national anthems from around the world. Region II was initially realized as electronic and concrète music with live instrumental performance; Stockhausen withdrew this version, turning it into a montage of purely electronic and concrète music. Dedicated to fellow avant-gardist Belgian composer Henri Pousseur, Region II is based on four “anthemic” centers: the German national anthem; the opening of the Russian national anthem; a group of national anthems from African countries;12 and a “subjective center” that uses as its source a moment during the piece’s realization in the electronic music studio. This “subjective center” is, effectively, the philosophical crux of the piece. Stockhausen describes it as a moment “in which the present, the past and the pluperfect become simultaneous.”13

Stockhausen sees Hymnen as a metaphor for international cooperation, even universal cooperation: that is cooperation with the stars and other celestial beings. Much as Wagner demanded absolute devotion from his followers, Stockhausen became something of a spiritual guru in the late 20th century. But unlike Wagner, whom Richard Taruskin describes as “an artist of the greatest and most unshakeable stature… [who became] so great and unshakeable a problem,”14 Stockhausen’s problems, such as his controversial comments following the September 11 attacks,15 can be excused as artistic inanity or political naïveté and do not seem so unshakeable.

—Prof. Dr. Mena Mark Hanna

1 Wagner, Richard: “Jewry in Music” [1850], cited in Magee, Bryan: Aspects of

Wagner, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1968, p. 24. 2 The Neue Zeitschrift für Musik was co-founded in Leipzig by composer Robert

Schumann, his future father-in-law, Friedrich Wieck, and pianist and composer

Ludwig Schuncke. Its first issue was circulated on April 3, 1834, and from 1835 to 1843, Schumann was the magazine’s editor. The magazine is still in circulation today, published by Schott Music. 3 Wagner, Richard: Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft [1849], in Wagner, Gesammelte

Schriften und Dichtungen Bd. 3., Siegel, Leipzig 1907, p. 101. 4 Service, Tom: “Clash of the Composers,” in The Guardian, May 5, 2009, https:// www.theguardian.com/music/2009/may/05/felix-mendelssohn-richard-wagner-classical-music (last retrieved September 16, 2021). 5 https://www.laphil.com/musicdb/pieces/4884/string-quartet-no-4-in-e-minorop-44-no-2 (last retrieved September 16, 2021). 6 Dahlhaus, Carl: Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas, trans. by Mary Whittall, Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge 1979, p. 4. 7 Wagner, Cosima: Cosima Wagner’s Diaries 1869–1877 Vol. 1, ed. Martin Gregor-

Dellin and Dietrich Mack, trans. Geoffrey Skelton, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

Inc., New York 1977. p. 312. 8 Fidi was a pet name for Siegfried Wagner, Richard and Cosima’s son. 9 Cardew, Cornelius: Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, published on ubu.com: http://www.ensemble21.com/cardew_stockhausen.pdf (last retrieved September 16, 2021), pp. 49–50. 10 I suppose being cast as out of touch is not such a far cry, considering Stockhausen has claimed, variously and multiple times, that he was born or educated on Sirius, a star system that is 2.64 parsecs from our Solar System. 11 Musique concrète is music that uses recorded sounds as the source of composition. 12 The specific African nations whose anthems are used are rarely specified in descriptions of the piece, although, through a bit of detective work, I have determined them to be: Guinea, Mali, South Africa, Ethiopia, Gambia, Liberia,

Sierra Leone, Niger, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, the Republic of Upper Volta (now

Burkina Faso), and the Republic of Dahomey (now Benin). Stockhausen can certainly stand accused of globalizing the south, or perhaps othering Africa, by grouping them together as minor entities and composing them into a larger whole. 13 Stockhausen, Karlheinz: Texte zur Musik Bd. 3 1963–1970, ed. Dieter Schnebel,

Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1971, p. 96. 14 Taruskin, Richard: The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 3: Music in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005, p. 481. 15 At a press conference in Hamburg on September 16, 2001, Stockhausen described the September 11 attack as “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos,” admiring further the tragedy saying, “people practice like crazy for 10 years, totally fanatically, for a concert, and then die.” He mounted a defense on his website, saying he had meant his comments to be metaphorical and that they were misinterpreted. (https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/arts/music-the-devilmade-him-do-it.html)

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