Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) Music of His Time Sumptuous but somehow unsettling, Klimt's images are unique in the history of art. As for ranking them on a scale...
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)
Music of His Time
Sumptuous but somehow unsettling, Klimt's images are unique in the history
of art. As for ranking them on a scale of greatness, we are no closer to agreement
than his contemporaries. Profound or pretentious? The dying spasms of a hedonistic
society or the stirrings of a new and liberated consciousness? Is the gorgeous
decorativeness of the surface anything more than a dazzling cloak which fails
to hide the essential triviality of their content?
The unchallenged centre of the artistic universe at that time was Paris, where
the current flowed strongly in the direction of modernism and away from naturalistic
representation. Viewed from there, Austrian painting was backward-looking, still
trapped by historical narrative and the ideas of symbolism. Worse, the geographical
position of Vienna itself was a worry to many critics, for it had always been
a natural gateway facing east towards the Slavic peoples, Turkey and beyond.
How could any artist preserve his national integrity in the midst of such a
racial mix? 'For Europeans, Klimt is an outsider,' wrote one sympathetic observer
shortly after the painter's death. 'He is conceivable only in Vienna, better
still in Budapest or Constantinople. His spirit is entirely oriental.'
Race and nationalism were the great issues of the day, infecting every kind
of judgement. Another obsession was gender. Klimt's fascination with feminine
sexuality hinted at a garden of sin where all manner of temptations might flourish
- evidence of a degeneration in moral values, or a reversion to primitivism.
For the Italian Futurists, this was a particularly Germanic kind of barbarism
which required purging; they urged the need for a more virile conception of
art, given visible shape in the clean strength of modernism. An alternative
argument held that exotic ornamentation and a languid female sexuality were
signs of an over-refined and neurotic sensibility, brought about by the overstimulation
of modern industrial society.
Amongst the inhabitants of Vienna itself, city of luxury and pleasure, there
arose a strong sense that their old world was passing. The sense of decay was
almost tangible as a great empire slowly crumbled around them for want of any
political determination to save it. But, paradoxically, the underlying mood
of quiet despair seemed to act as a powerful stimulus to the intellectual and
artistic life of the capital, which witnessed an extraordinary flourishing of
creative endeavour. Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Zweig, Mahler, Schoenberg, Kokoshka,
Schiele, Loos, Freud, Mach, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: for the space
of 20-odd years Vienna turned into a nursery for brilliant writers, musicians,
painters, scientists and philosophers.
Klimt
Despite the controversy that sometimes surrounded his works, Gustav Klimt was
never a rebellious figure. A certain coarseness of manner, even boorishness,
seems to have been cultivated mostly as a defence against unwanted curiosity
rather than any wish to challenge the norms of society. Although he never showed
any interest in marrying any of the women (mostly studio models) who allowed
him to father upwards of a dozen children, he was otherwise content to follow
a perfectly bourgeois routine, working long, regular hours and preferring the
familiar comfort of his own hearth to the unpredictable attractions of society
or travel. He went to considerable lengths to protect his inner world from any
kind of scrutiny. When asked to expand on his aims and ideas, he would insist
that he was not an interesting person and had nothing of value to contribute.
The son of a gold engraver, from a lower middle-class background, Klimt was
trained at Vienna's School of Applied Arts, whose aims were more practical and
broadly based than the grander Academy of Fine Arts. For ten years, with his
brother Ernst and their fellow ex-student Fritz Matsch, he worked diligently
and profitably on decorative commissions for public buildings, helping to fill
large expanses of wall and ceiling with the kind of allegorical and historical
paintings that were still in favour, using a style that showed some affinities
to pre-Raphaelite painting and the seductively decorative works favoured by
the judges of the Paris Salon. A similar kind of commission, in this case from
a private patron, lay behind Schubert at the Piano, designed as one of two paintings
to fill the panelling above the doors of a music room. Klimt has rejected any
idea of accurate reconstruction, choosing instead to clothe the women in contemporary
dress; their forms are blurred in the candlelight and only Schubert himself
(Klimt's favourite composer) stands out sharply.
In Paris itself, the French Impressionists had initiated a powerful drive to
abandon grand historical and mythological themes and concentrate on present-day
reality. No such movement had yet arisen in Austria, and in 1894 Klimt, partnered
by Matsch, was eager to fulfil a commission from the Ministry of Education which
required them to paint a series of allegorical panels in the great hall of the
University, illustrating the realms of Philosophy, Medicine, Jurisprudence and
Theology. The result was a decade of bureaucratic suspicion and public vilification,
arising most immediately from Klimt's inclusion of nudes in a variety of poses
that seemed inappropriate for such an august institution. The adverse reaction,
repeated each time one of the paintings was first shown in public, left him
angered and frustrated, until he eventually withdrew from the commission and
bought back the paintings for himself.
The professors of the University had been strongly in favour of canceling the
contract (against the wishes of the Ministry of Education, which continued to
reaffirm its approval of Klimt's designs). Nor was their attitude a simple product
of blind traditionalism. Not only had the two artists diverged stylistically
so far that their respective panels were now an incongruous mixture, but Klimt's
paintings displayed a fundamental pessimism completely at odds with the ideals
of any normal university. Inspired by the beliefs of Schopenhauer, he depicted
mankind trapped in a cycle of misery, in bondage to desire, grief and pain.
No help comes from the cold, stiff figures of Knowledge, Health and Justice:
humanity, as one critic wrote, remains 'no more than a tool in nature's hands,
exploited only for her immutable purpose, that of procreation'. Small wonder
the professors were not pleased.
To its credit, the imperial bureaucracy took a generally enlightened view of
progressive movements in art. After a group calling itself the Secession had
formed in 1897, in reaction against the conservative Co-operative Society of
Austrian Artists, many of its members were swiftly given key posts in the various
academies, the Court Opera and the Arts Council. The Emperor visited the first
Secession exhibition and state money was used to buy a number of the exhibits.
Klimt, as one of the acknowledged leaders, benefited from this official patronage,
and he was also in demand by rich private patrons wanting portraits of their
wives. In several instances these pictures display an amalgam of styles. Faces
and bodies rendered in a precisely naturalistic manner are entirely surrounded
by the most opulent ornamentation, with swirls, spirals and other geometric
patterns in a variety of brilliant colours. At one stage in his career, gold
and silver paint were much in abundance, an eloquent tribute to the medieval
mosaics of Ravenna which Klimt loved. Persian vase decorations and oriental
rugs also provided inspiration. The more austere judges of 'high' art may have
looked down their noses, accusing Klimt of an 'arts and crafts' mentality. But
the effect is undeniably dazzling.
Music of the Time
Whatever the claims of Paris to overall cultural supremacy, Vienna was indisputably
Europe's musical capital at this time. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert
were all long dead, but their fame continued to glorify the city which had provided
all of them with a home. These most celebrated children, of course, had not
escaped rejection or neglect during their lifetimes, and this was to remain
a noble Viennese tradition.
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) settled in Vienna for good in 1868, six years after
he first visited the city. It would be natural to suppose that it was this move
eastwards from his native Hamburg that sparked his interest in Hungarian music,
but history had so arranged things that Hamburg was the favoured port of departure
for refugees on their way to the United States after the failed Hungarian uprising
of 1848. One of these refugees, on his return from America in 1850, persuaded
the twenty-year-old Brahms to accompany him on a concert tour. The flavour and
rhythms of the gypsy tradition were adapted for western ears in four books of
Hungarian Dances for piano duet: No.1 (track 1) is one of three that Brahms
himself orchestrated.
The brilliance and prosperity of Viennese society in the second half of the
nineteenth century found their perfect expression in the waltzes and polkas
of Johann Strauss the younger (1825-1899). His father, Johann senior, though
himself a successful composer, had directed his eldest son towards a career
in banking, but in the end the lure of the dance floor proved too strong. For
year upon year during the chief ball season at carnival time, the dancers were
propelled into action by the irresistible rhythms of the 'waltz king' .The genius
of Strauss lay in his handling of the orchestra, and he lacked a sure feel for
word-setting and the operatic stage, but Die Fledermaus (track 2) was
one of his rare dramatic triumphs, transplanting Offenbachian wit into a Viennese
context in a score of enduring charm.
Though his childhood was spent in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), at the
age of fifteen Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) went to the Conservatory in Vienna
to study piano and composition. For all his adult life the main source of his
income was conducting, and only in the summer months could he apply himself
to his own compositions for long periods at a stretch. Mahler's reputation rests
on the nine great symphonies which form his main musical legacy, but he began
with hopes of writing a great symphonic poem in the manner of his contemporary
and friend Richard Strauss. His first attempt was a work in five movements,
written during 1885-88 and given its first performance in 1889 in Budapest.
Later, however, Mahler turned away from programmatic design and towards pure
symphony; he abandoned the original second movement and revised the remaining
four, thereby creating his First Symphony (track 3).
In 1897 Mahler returned to Vienna as conquering hero, widely recognised as
one of the great conductors of his time. His own interpretations of Mozart,
Wagner and Beethoven were hailed as revelatory, and now, as director of the
Hofoper, he had general artistic control over one of the world's great opera
houses. His influence was profound and far-reaching. By demanding from his performers
utter dedication, he imposed on all around him the very highest musical standards;
and his ability to conceive a production in its totality made possible the kind
of integration that is all too seldom realised on the stage. Marriage in 1901
proved decisive in this respect. His wife Anna was the daughter of the painter
Anton Schindler, and through her he came into regular contact with the artistic
fraternity, including the Secession group. Understandably, Mahler appears to
have kept his distance from Klimt, a former lover of Anna, but he joined in
the Max Klinger exhibition of 1902, for which Klimt painted the great Beethoven
Frieze, and went on to forge a powerful partnership with Alfred Roller.
In Roller he found a stage designer of genius, in complete sympathy with his
own ideas, who assisted him in mounting a series of memorable productions.
Artistic success was one thing, but public acceptance was quite another. Two
factors weighed heavily against Mahler. One was his failure to make himself
generally liked by singers and orchestral players, who resented his authoritarian
ways. The other was anti-Semitism. A sizeable proportion of Viennese high society
was never going to be reconciled to having a Jew in charge of their opera house,
and would welcome any opportunity to get rid of him. Complaints that Mahler
spent too much time promoting his own music finally had the desired effect:
in 1907 the composer resigned and took up a post at New York's Metropolitan
Opera. The same summer one of his two daughters died from scarlet fever, and
the fragility of human life was underlined by the diagnosis of a serious heart
condition. Mahler had already begun sketching ideas for setting texts from Die
chinesische Flöte, a volume of Chinese poems in translation. The eventual
result was Das Lied von der Erde (tracks 9-11), a seven-movement symphony
which celebrates the evanescent loveliness of the world before bidding it an
aching farewell.
The sense of a world passing away was reflected in the very language of music.
The entire classical system of harmony, with its commonly understood functional
relationships between chords and tonal centres, was breaking apart. Listeners
were no longer led by familiar paths from one secure resting place to another;
they found their expectations constantly frustrated, as though the ground beneath
them was perpetually shifting. The process of change can be traced through the
series of Preludes -almost ninety in total - composed by Alexander Scriabin
(1872-1915), exquisite miniatures for piano which avoid the mystic grandiosity
of his more ambitious projects. The sound-world of Op. 22 (tracks 4 and 5, from
1897) still recognisably derives from Scriabin's hero Chopin; by 1905 (tracks
7 and 8) he has already gone most of the way towards abandoning key centres
completely.
By these standards, the Second Symphony of Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942)
is a traditional work (track 6), but by the time of its composition in 1897
Zemlinsky was already a close friend of Arnold Schoenberg, who later described
him as the only regular teacher of composition he ever had. Together, in 1904,
they became the chief standard bearers for new music in Vienna: their chosen
champion was Mahler, who had no desire to lead or teach anyone but was generous
with his support and financial help.
Another of Mahler's keenest admirers was Anton Webern (1883-1945), a young
man of an intensely intellectual turn of mind who had begun studying composition
with Schoenberg. The lessons continued until 1908, when as a kind of graduation
exercise he presented his teacher with the completed Passacaglia (track 12).
Many of Webern's later works are remarkable for their extraordinary brevity
- little wisps and flurries of sound, tiny gestures, sudden climaxes overtaken
by silence. They represent his own unique solutions to the problem of how to
create formal structures in music once the standard organising principle, traditional
harmony, has been abandoned. The Passacaglia, however, still retains roots in
the past, with a tonal centre (D minor) fixed within the strict logic of the
unfolding variations on an eight-bar theme, first heard on plucked strings.
When Schoenberg (1874-1951) began composing, it was within a framework of conventional
harmony, but even in early works such as Verklärte Nacht this framework
was already being stretched to breaking point in the pursuit of ever more expressive
chromaticism; it seemed there could be nowhere further to go in that direction.
Schoenberg's strong spirit of self-reliance, paradoxically assisted by the lack
of any formal training, drove him to experiment with tonality in ever more radical
fashion, to the point where dissonant sounds no longer found any resolution
in major or minor triads and the ear was allowed no secure resting place. Thus,
in the years just before 1910, atonality was born. It was met with almost universal
incomprehension; furthermore, as a Jew Schoenberg had to endure increasingly
bitter personal attacks on racial grounds.
During these years of artistic crisis, perhaps as some kind of compensation
for the destruction of all his familiar musical landmarks, Schoenberg tumed
to painting. In Vienna he already had contact with Oskar Kokoshka, and after
mounting a one-man exhibition in 1910 he received support from Kandinsky, who
had founded the Blaue Reiter group in Munich. Despite his technical deficiencies,
Schoenberg found it easier in painting to follow the promptings of his imagination
in an immediate way, following a purely expressionistic path, while he was still
struggling to find a coherent way of organising structures in music. Three Piano
Pieces, Op. 11 and Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16, both from 1909, included
ground-breaking attempts to take an undiluted expressionism as his sole foundation
for composition, forgoing any kind of exposition or motivic development. Two
years later, in the Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19 (tracks 13-18) Schoenberg
subjected his ideas to the most intense compression, producing a set of miniatures
in which fragments of sound are formed and dissolved with bewildering rapidity.
While Schoenberg was exploring territory which remained utterly inaccessible
to many listeners, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) continued to be acclaimed as
Germany's most significant composer of progressive music. The great success
of Don Juan in 1889 had been matched by a variety of tone poems written
over the next decade, and these were followed by the operas Salome and
Elektra, in which style and content were shocking enough to draw in audiences
without actually alienating them irreversibly. Elektra, in particular, was uncompromisingly
modem in its harmonic language; but rather than progressing even further towards
atonality Strauss took one step back, or perhaps two, and produced Der Rosenkavalier.
With its eighteenth-century Viennese setting, its witty, tender and sentimental
Hofmannsthal libretto, its feast of melody dominated by waltz rhythms, it can
almost rival the operas of Puccini for popularity. The Waltz Sequence (track
19) is an arrangement made in 1944 by Strauss himself which knits together music
from Acts I and II with added thematic development.
The composer whose aesthetic ideals most closely matched those of Klimt was
Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937). Polish by extraction, he became fascinated by
the cultures of Byzantium and the Islamic world, inspired by visits to Sicily
and north Africa as well as purely literary influences. In his settings of Love
Songs of Hafiz, dating from 1914, he presented verses of the fourteenth-century
Persian poet in the fashionable versions of Hans Bethge, whose translations
of Chinese poems had also served Mahler for Das Lied von der Erde. Szymanowski
had no interest in literal imitation of oriental scales or melody simply for
colouristic effect. His intention was to recreate the spirit of Arabic and Persian
music in a more profound sense, capturing their characteristic expressive qualities
of ecstasy and fervour through a variety of techniques: coloratura vocal patterns,
recurring melodic, harmonic and rhythmic shapes, chromatic sequences to mirror
the emotive effect of micro-intervals.
The opera King Roger is a reworking of the Apollo/Dionysus conflict,
a theme which owed its revival in popularity to the writings of Nietzsche -
though its influence was eventually disseminated most effectively through the
theories of Freud. Repressed desires, and the workings of the unconscious mind,
form the undercurrent of the plot. Queen Roxana of Sicily embraces the new religion
brought from the east by a mysterious shepherd, and learns to worship ecstatically
the Dionysian power which pervades all of nature: her evocative song (track
20) forms the emotional climax of the work. King Roger, trapped inside the limits
of his reason, rejects the newcomer (who is really Dionysus in disguise) and
imprisons him. But King Roger escapes the fate of Pentheus, who in the original
Greek myth spied on the worshipping maenads, was discovered by them, and torn
to pieces. In this modem version, gentleness prevails: Roger grows in moral
stature as the action progresses and ends the opera singing a paean of thanksgiving
to the sun in token of his acceptance.
Hugh Griffith
Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde
[9] Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde
Schon winkt def Wein im gold'nen Pokale,
Doch trinkt noch nicht, erst sing' ich euch
ein Lied!
Das Lied vom Kummer soll auflachend in die
Seele euch klingen.
Wenn def Kummef naht, liegen wüst die
Gärten der Seele,
Welkt hin und stirbt die Freude, der Gesang.
Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod.
Herr dieses Hauses!
Dein Kellef birgt die Fülle des goldenen
Weins!
Hier, diese Laute nenn' ich mein!
Die Laute schlagen und die Gläsef leeren,
Das sind die Dinge, die zusammen passen.
Ein voller Becher Weins zur rechten Zeit
Ist mehr wert, aIs alle Reiche dieser Erde!
Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod.
Das Firmament blaut ewig, und die Erde
Wird lange fest steh'n und aufblüh'n im
Lenz.
Du aber, Mensch, wie lang lebst denn du?
Nicht hundert Jahre darfst du dich ergötzen
An all dem morschen Tande dieser Erde!
Seht dort hinab! Im Mondschein auf den
Gräbern
Hockt eine wild-gespenstische Gestalt.
Ein Aff' ist's! Hört ihf, wie sein Heulen
Hinausgellt in den süßen Duft des Lebens!
Jetzt nehmt den Wein! Jetzt ist es Zeit,
Genossen!
Leert eufe gold'nen Becher zu Grund!
Dunkel ist das Leben, ist def Tod!
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Hungarian Dance No. 1 - 3:01 
