Daniel Albright

Kurt Weill as Modernist

literature. What is modernism? To me, there are two chief features. First, a tendency to extremes, a testing of the limits of aesthetic construction—if nineteenth-century art often seeks a safe center where the artist and the audience can be comfortable together, modernist art often seeks the freakish peripheries of the artistic experience, regions of discomfort and confrontation. Jean Cocteau liked to say that tact in audacity was knowing how far to go too far; but much modernist art consists of tactless aggression, aggressive overload of the sense organs, aggressive transgression of taboos, aggressive density of event, aggressive technicality, aggressive monotony, aggressive matter-of-factness, even (in the case of Satie) aggressive reticence.1 Second, a certain sense of dwelling inside paradox, since aesthetic extremes tend to converge: when T. S. Eliot, in 1921, first heard Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, he wrote that the music seemed to “transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motorhorn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric noises of modern life.”2 In other words, the most upto-date factory noises were audible within an evocation of pagan Russia: the australopithecine and the man with the jackhammer inhabit exactly the same acoustic space, make the same sort of cry. Twentieth-century music is full of convergences of opposites: the line between excessively expressive and excessively sachlich music can be thin; it is even true that music generated by purely random procedures can sound similar to music generated by the most rigorous precompositional system. The aged Stravinsky complained that “What I cannot follow are the manicMODERNISM / modernity

Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette: Symphonic metamorphoses on a theme by Shakespeare

Abstract Berliozs Symphonie dramatique (as he called Roméo et Juliette, 1839) represents an attempt to intensify the symphonic nature of the symphony: Berlioz tried to write a work that was to Beethovens Ninth (1824) what Beethovens Ninth was to the earlier symphonic tradition, the next level of achievement. Just as Beethovens ninth ranges freely across the whole universe of music, from percussion jokes to long‐breathed melodies to Turkish marches to full operatic glory, so Berliozs symphony ranges across all musical genres, from solo song to choral procession to grand opera, to explore the possibilities for symphonic integration of material so scattered and diverse that it threatens to fly into pieces. But Berliozs work is not only a symphony but also a critique of opera. Berlioz not only adapted to strictly instrumental purposes some of the most advanced operatic devices of his time, such as the overlay principle used by Cherubini and Spontini, but also illustrated the moving but faintly meretricious nature of opera by providing a thrilling operatic conclusion to his symphony in the form of a cliché, an Oath Scene. The operatic beginning and ending of Roméo et Juliette, in B minor and major respectively, rest uneasily with the symphonic middle section, in F major; by separating symphony from opera by the span of a tritone, Berlioz illustrated the resistance of grand opera to full assimilation into the still grander world of the symphony.

Berlioz's Faust: The funeral March of a Marionette

Abstract Berliozs La Damnation de Faust realizes certain submerged potentialities in Goethes Faust—potentialities contrary to Goethes intention to depict Faust as a figure of blind energy groping toward salvation. Berlioz constructed a nihilistic Faust, vehement but empty, a conventional operatic figure that exposes the shabbiness, the unreality of its own conventions. Indeed Berliozs Faust struggles in vain to join in the symphonic texture of the music that “accompanies” him—like Harold in Berliozs Harold en Italie he is exiled to a private plane of musical discourse.

The Fool by the Pool

In 1934 Samuel Beckett announced that poems are written in the empty space between the poet and the world of objects, a world forever beyond the poet’s reach. Beckett used Yeats as an example of a modern poet facing this crisis, “the breakdown of the object”: At the centre there is no theme. … And without a theme there can be no poem, as witness the exclamation of Mr. Yeats’s “fanatic heart”: “What, be a singer born and lack a theme!” (“The Winding Stair”). But the circumference is an iridescence of themes — Oisin, Cuchulain, Maeve ….1