THE ANXIETY OF LISTENING

This chapter is about what happens, according to Adorno, to the production of music under the modern condition of oppressed or improper listening and why he locates resistance to this condition in an aesthetic or dialectic of loneliness [Dialektik der Einsamkeit]. I present two models of musical listening: Arnold Schoenberg's, then Adorno's. Each is motivated, not by acoustic or physiological studies of the ear, but as a response to the charge that music of a dissonant character, particularly Schoenberg's, is unlistenable. So motivated, these models of listening are better conceived as models of reception, and of the reception particularly of what Adorno calls New Music.

The chapter has two parts: first, a presentation of the two models; second, a detailed expansion and commentary on Adorno’s model. I set Adorno’s model in detail and dialectically (as Adorno did himself) against a sketch of Schoenberg’s.My interest is in Adorno and why he focused on Schoenberg. To explain this, we must immerse ourselves in Adorno’s general philosophical engagement with music. My first objective is to show that there is nothing isolated or merely preferential about Adorno’s focus. He uses Schoenberg to articulate his own profound pessimism regarding the condition of his times and the response his own philosophy can have to it. He sees New Music’s radical task to be at one with his philosophical task, namely, to challenge what we take in experience to be most self-evident. He uses Schoenberg to show how we rationalize and traditionalize our listening habits and deal with the music that challenges them.

'[T]he unity of the system derives from unreconcilable violence. Satanically, the world as grasped by the Hegelian system has only now, a hundred and fifty years later, proved itself to be a system in the literal sense, namely that of a radically societalized society. Adorno' That Adorno entitled his major work of theoretical philosophy Negative Dialectics is enough, all by itself, to indicate the pervasive nature of the presence of Hegel in his thought. While Hegel is occasionally the object of Adorno's thought, most notably in “World Spirit and Natural History: An Excursion to Hegel,” a chapter of Negative Dialectics, and in Hegel: Three Studies, he is more routinely and emphatically present as its orientation, its method, approach, style, or conatus.

Although the name Franz Liszt (1811–86) is associated mainly with keyboard and symphonic compositions, in the writing of Lieder one finds some of his most progressive and finely wrought expressions. Within song's intimate setting, Liszt was able to convey musical thoughts and gestures often found to be problematic in his larger works: here he was not always the public figure leading the New German School and devoting himself to the “Music of the Future,” champion of often unpopular compatriots, such as Richard Wagner. The Lieder were a compositional testing ground, not unlike the way in which Beethoven treated his piano sonatas as harmonic and formal experiments for other genres. More tellingly, in Lieder, Liszt found it possible to convey the very complex soul of the devoted but absent father, impatient lover, often tortured and unhappy but generous man of the world, and, finally, resigned mystic.

There are eighty-seven songs for voice and piano, and sixteen for voice and orchestra, and he perhaps was the first nineteenth-century composer to conceive of orchestral Lieder for the concert hall: his orchestration of Die Vätergruft was the last composition on which he worked in the days before his death on 31 July 1886. But in reality, there are many more songs, because he was an artist who continually rethought his compositions, revising them several times after their initial state had been achieved, yielding multiple readings of the same musical text.

Of the many kinds of music to which composers from German-speaking lands have turned their attention, the Lied, or art song, is surely the most paradoxical. Among those who have fallen under the genre's spell, it is easy to discern fervent if not fanatical zealousness. Among those who have not, it is just as easy to detect bemused bewilderment as to how a musical rendering of a German poem is capable of inducing so profound a response. Suffice it to say, the Lied's fortunes seldom have been static.

The paradoxes do not end here. While Lieder often are thought of as diminutive, given that a great many last but a short time when compared to sonatas, concertos, symphonies, or operas, both the history of German song and the density of expression encountered in many works comprising the genre belie that characterization. Even in some of the most evanescent examples, such as Schubert's Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, the timelessness that Goethe compresses into his poem combined with the music underscoring it yield an expansiveness precisely because the song is so short: succinct yes, diminutive no! At once the most private yet universalizing of art forms, the Lied, less than a century ago, stood at the forefront of late Romanticism. Together with orchestral and various types of instrumental music, and later the music dramas of Richard Wagner, it formed part of a Teutonic musical juggernaut widely regarded as without peer. On the eve of World War I, at the peak of the genre’s popularity, song settings of German poetry were to be encountered almost everywhere. In Berlin alone, between 1900 and 1914, according to a recent tally, public song recitals, or Liederabende, averaged some twenty a week and invariably were sold out. The Lied was equally ubiquitous in private performances, especially those sponsored by the artistic, intellectual, and economic elite. As one witness has recalled, “Lieder fitted particularly well into the atmosphere of . . . intimate social gatherings. The poem was generally read before each setting was sung. One could easily lose oneself in the mood produced.”

After reading 1,200 reviews and 200 articles and book chapters on Mamet for David Mamet: A Resource and Production Sourcebook, our sense is that reviewers, and many scholars as well, have misunderstood Mamet - from his first productions to the present. By Mamet, we mean the playwright/director David Mamet, not the playwright alone. Most reviewers fault Mamet's direction of his own plays. It certainly is possible to fault a playwright as director, but the objection is that his theory of drama is at fault in his directing. But it is the same theory which underlies the construction of the plays. What is at issue is the idea of realism which critics expect in Mamet's plays, but which he seems not to deliver.

In “Mamet vs. Mamet” Todd London argues, in American Theatre, that Mamet the theorist and director is Mamet the playwright’s “own worst enemy.” The argument is straightforward – Mamet is a realist, but he refuses to direct his plays realistically. London’s words provide a good starting point on realism: “Whereas many of the playwrights of the ’60s and early ’70s experimented with fluid characters who transformed before our eyes, Mamet’s creations have always been essentially fixed beings, defined by their actions, limited by their native tongue” (18).

When David Mamet began writing, the urgencies of the 1960s seemed to have been put to one side. The protest over Vietnam was abating. The radical experiments of Off and Off Off Broadway, which had seen the emergence of a new generation of young writers and the development of a number of theatre companies emphasizing the actor over the writer and improvisation over the text, seemed to have run their course. There appeared to be a move from the public to the private realm. Those who had made their reputations before the 1960s had largely fallen silent. The theatre itself, which had provided a ruling metaphor for a decade fascinated by the performing self, no longer seemed on the cutting edge of social, political, or aesthetic concerns, even if the opening of new theatres across America suggested a counter-current. It is true that the women's movement was having its effect and that women writers were beginning to be heard but there was no sense, as yet, that drama would play an important role in this.

The exception to what was beginning to seem like the marginalization of theatre, perhaps, was the growing recognition of Sam Shepard, who, in 1970, opened Operation Sidewinder, while out in the mid-west the importance of Chicago as a theatrical center was an increasingly badly kept secret.

This was the world, this the theatre, into which a new young writer emerged. Raised in Chicago, but educated, as far as university was concerned, in Vermont, he had watched the improvisational comedy at Chicago’s Second City and was an admirer of Beckett and Pinter. Briefly a child actor, he confessedly spent most of his university years in and around the theatre department, before teaching theatre and trying his hand at writing scenes for his acting classes.

In the last third of the eighteenth century Germany blossomed from a marginal participant in European letters to the dynamic center of the movement now called Romanticism – the age that would encompass Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Kleist, Hölderlin, and Goethe. As the story is almost always told, the German art song begins in the next generation – 19 October 1814, to be exact – when Schubert composes the first of his great Goethe settings, Gretchen am Spinnrade. The logic of this narrative makes the flowering of German poetry, or even of Goethe himself, solely responsible for the emergence of the Lied. Given that there was a flourishing market in books of songs with keyboard accompaniment for domestic use by greater and lesser known composers in the mid-eighteenth century, the conclusion does not do justice to the genre's history. Furthermore, the development of the Lied since the eighteenth century does not follow that of German lyric poetry closely: the historical relation between poetry and song is rather more complex.

Hence to begin this volume with a survey of German poetry is not to assert that the development of poetry drives the genre's development – or vice versa. Goethe is profoundly important for the Lied because he was the most original, most influential, and most representative poet of a period in which poetry and song were closely related and expressions of the same cultural concerns. Rather than ask how poetry results in the Lied or what poetry is best suited to musical treatment, it makes more sense to explore what new or changing cultural attitudes are manifest both in German song and in the poems that composers chose to set. In other words, what made this partnership suddenly thrive and become a major musical genre in the nineteenth century? Because poetry operates with language, it is simpler to chart social and cultural change in poetry than in music. In this fashion – and only in this fashion – can German poetry be understood as a “beginning” for the Lied.

The Lied has a kind of double nature, born of the interaction of poetry and music. This is scarcely an original observation; indeed, it is a truism so familiar that it would not bear repeating if not for its relevance to another sort of double life, one that has far less frequently received consideration: throughout its history, the Lied has existed both as an artistic genre and as a class of commodity, an object for sale in the marketplace. To be sure, this does not by itself set the Lied apart from many other forms of art within capitalist societies – and as we will see, the Lied's existence is closely bound up with a specific phase of capitalist production. That double life, however, is particularly revealing in the case of the Lied, whose status as a genuinely artistic genre long was contested precisely because its status as an all-too-viable commodity appeared to threaten its standing as art. Because of the Lied's location on the border between high art and popular music, a consideration of the ways in which it has circulated can reveal much, not only about the Lied per se, but also about the shifting nature of that border, which is less certain at the beginning of the twenty-first century than it has been since the boundary between high and low came into existence in the minds of the advocates of high art.

“The noble simplicity of song”

Song is such an inborn, seemingly straightforward inclination that it is easy to forget it sometimes has engendered controversy. This especially is the case if the subject is the eighteenth-century Lied. That this is so is something of an anomaly, for the very qualities praised during the genre's heyday are what latter-day critics have most decried: tuneful preeminence, diatonic clarity, strophic design, unaffected simplicity, and directness of appeal. Charles Rosen, a writer who lately has done much to advance understanding of Classical and Romantic music, dispenses with the Lied before Schubert in no uncertain terms: “a despised form, unfit for serious consideration.” The opinion is by no means exceptional. Edward T. Cone, who has written with discernment on Schubert's Lieder, describes those from the century before as so many “tuneful trifles.” For Lawrence Kramer, the achievement of Schubert's predecessors adversely compares with his unrivalled success. “In Schubert's hands the German Lied became the first fully developed genre of Romanticism in music” in contrast to the “anemic chords and arpeggios” filling out the songs of a Reichardt or Zelter. Nor is Kramer the first to suggest that Schubert had to vanquish the lyric efforts of his forerunners. As Eric Sams states in the 1980 New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Schubert's song facility was “practically without ancestry.” Rosen makes the point even more emphatically. After Schubert's “first tentative experiments, the principles on which most of his songs are written are almost entirely new; they are related to the Lieder of the past only by negation: they annihilate all that precedes.”

David Mamet's theatrical ventures throughout the 1990s reveal some surprising shifts in tone, theme, and dramatic form. Experimenting with various literary genres and historical venues, he defies stereotypes that confine him to the aggressively masculine world of such previous plays as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross. The impressive number of essays, novels, screenplays, and films that Mamet has produced and directed since 1990 might, at first, suggest a movement away from writing expressly for the stage. It is during these years, however, that he crafts some of his most enigmatic and politically engaging plays to date. These were years of transition for Mamet as a playwright: he continued to revise such earlier tropes as the confidence man, precarious states of language and power, the art of teaching, homecomings and goings, and the picaresque. Yet throughout the 1990s and into this century, Mamet expanded his scope to include such controversial topics as sexual harassment, child abuse, lesbian estrangement, and ethnic identity. In his most recent plays, he is more willing than ever to provoke and unsettle, refusing to provide the comforting closure of transparent morals and simple resolutions.

Many song historians might hesitate before presenting C. P. E. Bach (1714–88), Haydn (1732–1809), Mozart (1756–91), or Beethoven (1770–1827) as landmark composers in the development of the German Lied. Some would argue any place for them in such a narrative would depend on their towering achievements in instrumental music or opera, rather than on the value of their songs themselves. These composers’ engagement with song is often taken as a sign of the inclusive nature of their musical ambitions, rather than their interest in the genre for its own sake. In retrospect, Viennese Classicism has become parceled up with the notion of an all-embracing “style” which spread from Italian comic opera to the genres of sacred and instrumental music, a generalization that leaves little room for the Lied. Indeed theories of the Lied, as they emerged through the eighteenth century, demanded a specific stylistic justification from composers, a conscious choice of style based on their individual response to a poetic text. Some theorists reinforced this distinctiveness by denying song composers recourse to instrumental or operatic idioms at all. Yet ideals of stylistic simplicity are less significant perhaps than the broader aesthetic notion that the starting point for a composer's style should be a poem or a poet. For better or for worse, subservience to poetry seems to run counter to the achievements that these four masters of Classicism represent.

“Revolutionary upheaval and conservative retrenchment both move in the same direction”

For those who would concern themselves with music's meaning, the ending of Strauss's Im Abendrot, from his Vier letzte Lieder, prompts any number of questions. Many stem from Eichendorff's text. The poem tells of two individuals walking hand in hand at twilight's glow; the last line asks, “ist dies etwa der Tod?” (is this perhaps death?). Intentionally equivocal – the clause restlessly hinges on the word “etwa” (perhaps) – the poet leaves the matter open-ended. Strauss's music seems less ambiguous. Once the poetical question is sounded, the eighty-four-year-old composer quotes from a work of his written a half century earlier, Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration, 1889). A literal echo of Strauss's own past, the gesture provides compelling evidence of a person facing mortality with undiminished faith in the tenets of Romanticism. The song's retrospective sound world, a quality it shares with the three others with which it traditionally is grouped, has incited many to speculate that Strauss intended the set as a farewell to the Lied. For Paul Griffiths, “Strauss could reasonably have thought his Vier letzte Lieder … bore their epithet for the genre.” Or, as Edward F. Kravitt would have it, “Strauss's return late in life to the Lied – when it was of minor importance in the modern world – is further evidence of his conservative nostalgia for things past.” Moreover, “this yearning reminds one also of the past significance of the Lied.” But does Strauss really intend Im Abendrot as a panegyric to an art form that had had its day and expired?