The Rest Is Noise Series: Brave New World: The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties
he said, “I would not consider the danger of resembling tonality as tragically as formerly.” Schoenberg disowned Adorno’s attacks on Stravinsky (“One should not write like that”) and found little more to like in the theorist’s panegyrics to atonality (“this blathering jargon, which so warms the hearts of philosophy professors”). Schoenberg probably had both Adorno and Leibowitz in mind when he made a note to himself that the influence of the “Schbrg clique” would have to be broken before his music could gain a proper hearing. He repeated a remarkable prophecy that he had delivered back in 1909: “The second half of this century will spoil by overestimation, all the good of me that the first half, by underestimation, has left intact.”
In his seeing-through-walls way, Schoenberg had mapped out the coming era. He understood that he was being elevated as the patron saint of a newly militant avant-garde mentality, with whose premises he did not agree. While he remained fiercely loyal to the nontonal language that he had pioneered at the beginning of the century, he was no longer so quick to condemn his rivals. Better than Adorno, Schoenberg understood the master dialectic of musical history, the back-and-forth between simplicity and complexity. “I cannot deny the possibility,” Schoenberg once wrote, “that as often in the musical past, when harmony has developed to a certain high point, a change will occur which will bring with it entirely different and unexpected things.”
Radical Reconstruction: Boulez and Cage
The avant-garde era may be said to have begun a few years early, on a cold winter night in 1941, when Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time had its first performance, at the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag VIII A.
A composer of advanced ideas and strong religious feeling, Messiaen had been serving as a medical orderly when the Germans invaded France in 1940. He was captured near Nancy with two other musician-soldiers, the cellist Étienne Pasquier and the clarinetist Henri Akoka. While the three were being held with other French captives in an open field, Akoka played through a newly composed Messiaen piece titled “Abyss of the Birds”—a clarinet solo that took the form of precise yet disconnected gestures, slow, trancelike chanting lines intertwining with rapid runs and squawks and trills. When Messiaen was sent with his musician friends to Stalag VIII A, near Görlitz, Germany, he set about composing seven other movements for the unusual combination of clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, those being the instruments that he and his fellow inmates played. At the head of the finished score he wrote an inscription alluding to the book of Revelation: “In homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who lifts his hand toward heaven, saying, ‘There shall be time no longer.’”
Stalag VIII A was staffed by several officers who lacked true devotion to the Hitler regime. As Rebecca Rischin reveals in a book about the Quartet, one of the guards, Karl-Albert Brüll, advised French-Jewish prisoners not to try to escape, on the grounds that they were safer in the camp than they would be in Vichy France. Brüll also took up the cause of Messiaen’s music, giving the composer pencils, erasers, and music paper with which to work. The prisoner was relieved of his duties and placed in an empty barracks so that he could compose in peace, with a guard posted at the door to turn away intruders.
The premiere of the Quartet took place on January 15, 1941. Several hundred prisoners of many nations crowded into the camp’s makeshift theater, with the German officers sitting up front. The work bewildered much of the audience, but a respectful silence prevailed. Messiaen returned to France shortly thereafter, Brüll having connived in the forging of documents in order to speed his release.
By this point in his career, Messiaen had worked out an idiosyncratic musical language, with an especially compelling conception of rhythm. The biblical phrase “There shall be time no longer” turned out to have a strict technical meaning: music would no longer keep to an unvarying meter. A steady beat, Messiaen liked to say, had no life in it; there had been enough of the old one-two-three-four during the war. For inspiration, he looked to The Rite of Spring, with its irregular, ever-changing rhythmic schemes, and also to the talas, or rhythmic patterns, of Hindustani Indian music. He showed how rhythmic cells—a simple telegraphic pulse of long-short, for example—could take on the character of musical themes, as the cells multiplied (long-short long-short long-short) or mutated (long-short-short-short). This, in essence, is the beat of Stravinsky’s “Danse sacrale”—the sound of “implacable destiny,” Messiaen said.
Such ideas won the respect of Messiaen’s sharp-witted students at the Paris Conservatory, several future celebrities of postwar music among them. When the Quartet was played, they were impressed by the novel way it moved through time, in a succession of self-contained moments. What they tended to ignore, however, was the end point of the narrative: sweetly ringing chords in the key of E major. Like Britten in The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Messiaen responded to the mechanized insanity of the Second World War by offering up the purest, simplest sounds he could find.
A few weeks after Allied forces landed at Normandy, a new student, nineteen years old, knocked at Messiaen’s door. “M. Boulez (pupil of Pierre Jamet) at my house at 9:30,” he wrote in his diary. “Likes modern music,” he added. It was the understatement of the century. Pierre Boulez went on to become the perfect avatar of the postwar avant-garde, the one who permitted “no compromise, no concession, no half-way, no consideration of values,” to quote Mann’s story “At the Prophet’s.”
At first glance, Boulez was a kind of intellectual dreamboat, elegant in manner and dress, charming to men and women alike—“like a young cat,” said the actor Jean-Louis Barrault, for whom Boulez worked as musical director from 1946 to 1956. Yet, in feline fashion, he could turn ferocious in an instant, mastering the put-down as a way of ending arguments. He was a brilliant politician, equally skilled at persuasion and attack. At all times he seemed absolutely sure of what he was doing. Amid the confusion of postwar life, with so many old truths discredited, his certitude was reassuring. As Joan Peyser notes in her biography of Boulez, an early admirer was the literary socialite Suzanne Tézenas, formerly the companion of the novelist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. Drieu had been an ardent fascist and had committed suicide shortly before the end of the war. Tézenas greeted Boulez as her new artist savior. She had no particular interest in music, but she liked the way the young man talked.
Unlike so many others of his generation, Boulez suffered little during the war. He was fifteen years old when Germany invaded, and was therefore too young to fight in France’s brief war against Hitler. According to Peyser, he actually welcomed the infusions of German culture that were administered by the Nazi authorities. “The Germans virtually brought high culture to France,” he was quoted as saying. The son of a prosperous factory engineer, he studied higher mathematics before turning to music. Upon enrolling in the Paris Conservatory, he made his presence felt almost immediately. “When he first entered class,” Messiaen recalled, “he was very nice. But soon he became angry with the whole world. He thought everything was wrong with music.” Messiaen also said that Boulez was “like a lion that had been flayed alive, he was terrible!”
In the spring of 1945, French radio organized a seven-concert survey of Stravinsky’s works at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where the fabled premiere of The Rite of Spring had taken place more than thirty years before. On March 15 a group of young composers, all of them students from the conservatory, disrupted a performance of Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods by booing, shouting, whistling, and, according to one report, banging with a hammer. A second demonstration followed, with Boulez among the participants.
Afterward, the French musical world struggled to make sense of the episode. Francis Poulenc, a longtime Stravinskyite, wrote an article for Le Figaro titled “Vive Strawinsky,” in which he lashed out against the “imitation Left” of “youths” and “pseudo-youths” who had insulted his hero. In a letter to Darius Milhaud, Poulenc described the troublemakers as a “fanatic sect” of “Messiaenistes.”
By this time Boulez was a Messiaeniste no longer. Messiaen had proved insufficiently ruthless in his methods, his sentimentality embarrassingly on display when, in a response to the Stravinsky booing affair, he decried “dry and inhuman” tendencies in contemporary