The Rest Is Noise Series: City of Nets: Berlin in the Twenties. Alex Ross

named Fritz decides to abandon his middling career and his adoring fiancée in order to find a new style—a “mysterious distant sound,” a “high, sublime goal.” He produces a work that people call “something really new,” “spine-chilling.” It causes a Schoenbergian scandal, replete with stamping and whistling. Meanwhile, Grete, Fritz’s fiancée, sinks low in the world, ending up as a prostitute. In the opera’s final scene they meet again, and Fritz, dying of an unspecified illness, tragically realizes that the sound he has been seeking has been around him all this time, in the multifarious textures of modern life, and in Grete’s voice.

      The magic of Schreker’s opera is that from the first bars we have been hearing the music that Fritz cannot grasp—buoyantly lyrical vocal writing, more Italian than German in style; a golden blur of orchestral sound, more Debussy than Wagner in timbre; a cosmopolitan sensualism, incorporating, in the “grand bordello” sequence of Act II, Gypsy bands, barcaroles, and choral serenades.

      Jonny tries to replicate Schreker’s achievement, but with more modern means. The title character is a Negro jazz violinist on a Europe an tour, a sort of Austrian cartoon of Will Marion Cook. He crows in triumph: “Across the sea comes New World brilliance / Inheriting old Europe with dance.” The cast also features a composer named Max, who, at the beginning of the opera, is seen sitting at the side of a grim glacier, which he addresses as “Du schöner Berg” (“you beautiful mountain”). Like Fritz in Der ferne Klang, Max cannot forgo the pursuit of a distant sound, presumably of the Schoenbergian variety. The subtext becomes amusingly obvious when Max says of the glacier, “Everyone loves it once they have got to know it,” as if quoting from propaganda literature of the Second Viennese School. The glacier eventually instructs Max, through the medium of an invisible choir of women’s voices, to “return to life.” In a climactic railway-station scene Max catches up with his beloved Anita as she rides off into the unknown. Jonny jumps up on top of the station clock and the chorus reprises his song of triumph. According to Krenek’s original notes, the opera was to have ended with the image of a 78-rpm recording spinning on a phonograph, the composer’s name inscribed upon it.

      The entire plot was autobiographical. Before discovering a taste for jazz and other popular materials, Krenek had gone through his own wild-eyed semi-atonal phase, with Schoenberg and Bartók his guides. In writing Jonny, he was trying to live out Max’s epiphany, exposing his own glacier world to the warmth of Jonny’s violin. Furthermore, the character of Anita was based on Anna Mahler, Gustav and Alma’s daughter, to whom Krenek was briefly and tempestuously married. Not long after the relationship ended, the composer went to see Sam Wooding’s jazz revue Chocolate Kiddies, which was the rage of Europe in the mid-twenties, and he seized on Wooding’s polite jazz arrangements as a lifeline that would lead him out of the abysses of Central European despair. Interestingly, the revue contained at least one early Duke Ellington song, “Jig Walk,” and that tune bears a slight resemblance to Jonny’s big number. Alas, Krenek’s engagement with African-American music went about as deep as the blackface painted on the singer playing Jonny.

      Zeitoper drew sharp criticisms from both ends of Weimar’s hyper-extended political spectrum. The Nazis attacked it as degenerate art. The Communist composer Hanns Eisler, meanwhile, wrote of Jonny in Die Rote Fahne: “Despite the infusions of chic, this is exactly the same mushy, petit bourgeois stuff that other contemporary opera composers produce.” Eisler was equally unkind to Hindemith’s “music for use,” dismissing it as a “relative stabilization of music” (a wry echo of German economic lingo). All modern music lived a Scheindasein, an illusory existence bereft of meaning or community. In 1928 Eisler wrote: “The big music festivals have become downright stock exchanges, where the value of the works is assessed and contracts for the coming season are settled. Yet all this noise is carried out in the vacuum of a bell glass, so to speak, so that not a sound can be heard outside. An empty officiousness celebrates orgies of inbreeding, while there is a complete lack of interest or participation of a public of any kind.”

      What Germany needed, Eisler said, was music that told deeper truths about human society. Open the window when you compose, he instructed his colleagues. “Remember that the noise of the street is not mere noise, but is made by man … Discover the people, the real people, discover day-to-day life for your art, and then perhaps you will be re discovered.” By that time, the revolution had begun; The Threepenny Opera was playing to packed crowds at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.

      Gestic Music

      Kurt Weill’s schoolmates probably never imagined him as the cynosure of a decadent city. The son of a Jewish cantor in the town of Dessau, about seventy miles from Berlin, Weill grew up a shy, serious boy, devoted to music. Like Krenek, he admired Schoenberg in his youth, and yearned to study with the Master himself in Vienna, but the family’s limited finances prevented him from going. Instead, in the last weeks of 1918, Weill journeyed to revolutionary Berlin, where he ended up enrolling in Busoni’s master class at the Prussian Academy of Arts.

      His first reactions to Weimar culture were skeptical. After a visit to the 1923 Frankfurt Chamber Music Festival, he reported to Busoni that “Hindemith has already danced too far into the land of the fox-trot.” Yet his ears were opening to a broader gamut of sounds: Mahler’s catchall symphonies, Stravinsky’s pop-tinged Histoire du soldat. The latter work appeared on the Frankfurt programs, and Weill was moved to admit—his snobbery was on the wane—that its “pandering to the taste of the street is bearable because it suits the material.”

      As Krenek followed Schreker’s path out into the wider world, Weill followed Busoni, a magus-like musician who hovered over the early twentieth century like a spider in his web. A Tuscan of Corsican descent, a resident variously of Trieste, Vienna, Leipzig, Helsinki, Moscow, New York, Zurich, and Berlin, Busoni was a cosmopolitan in a nationalist age, a pragmatist in an era of aesthetic absolutism. In 1909, Busoni reprimanded Schoenberg for rejecting the old while embracing the new; as Busoni saw it, you could do both at once, and in the Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music he called simultaneously for a reinvention of the “tonal system” and for a return to Mozartean, classical grace. Like so many Romantics and modernists before him, Busoni idolized the figure of Faust, but he delighted more in the science of magic than in the theory of heaven and hell. Doctor Faust, his unfinished operatic masterpiece, circumnavigated the globe of musical possibility, incorporating diatonic, modal, whole-tone, and chromatic scales, Renaissance polyphony, eighteenth-century formulas, operetta airs, and flurries of dissonance.

      Perhaps the most effective lesson that Busoni imparted to Weill was a single sentence: “Do not be afraid of banality.” For a young German who had been raised to think that “banality” included almost everything Italian and French, this advice had an enlightening effect. Busoni showed how the great operas of Mozart and Verdi interwove naive tunes and sophisticated designs. He talked about the Schlagwort, the “hit word” or catchword, which can sum up in one instant an intricate theatrical situation—for example, the scalding cry of “Maledizione!” (“The curse!”) in Verdi’s Rigoletto. In a 1928 essay, “On the Gestic Character of Music,” Weill elaborated the related idea of Gestus, or musical gesture. The literary critic Daniel Albright defines Gestus as the dramatic turning point “in which pantomime, speech, and music cooperate toward a pure flash of meaning.” Bertolt Brecht, Weill’s principal literary collaborator, would give the concept of Gestus a political cast, describing it as a revolutionary transfer of energy from author to audience. For Weill, though, it always had a more practical meaning, one to which politics might or might not be attached.