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NY Times September 11, 1988
MUSIC VIEW; REACTIONARY MUSICAL MODERNISTS
By John Rockwell
The most fascinating bit of musical journalism in recent weeks is
an article by Richard Taruskin in the Sept. 5 New Republic
entitled ''The Dark Side of Modern Music.'' Ostensibly a review of
Harvey Sachs's book ''Music in Fascist Italy,'' it lays out
biographical evidence indicating the Fascist, or at least
authoritarian, tendencies of Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Webern.
Mr. Taruskin, who is preparing a book on Stravinsky, cites two
letters not included in Robert Craft's collection of the
composer's correspondence. In 1930 Stravinsky asserts: ''I don't
believe that anyone venerates Mussolini more than I do. To me he
is the one man who counts nowadays in the whole world . . . He is
the savior of Italy and - let us hope - of Europe.''
In another letter written shortly after Hitler took power in 1933,
Stravinsky queries his German publisher: ''I am surprised to have
received no proposals from Germany next season, since my negative
attitude toward communism and Judaism - not to put it in stronger
terms - is a matter of common knowledge.''
Mr. Taruskin sees parallels between such attitudes and
Stravinsky's retreat from Romanticism into his neo-Classicism of
the 1920's, and quotes Arthur Lourie's description of the composer
as ''the dictator of the reaction against the anarchy into which
modernism degenerated.''
Schoenberg, too, in a well-known quotation, sought with his
formulation of the 12-tone system in the early 20's not just to
bring order to anarchy but also to make ''a discovery thanks to
which the supremacy of German music is ensured for the next 100
years.'' Mr. Taruskin is not the first to suggest connections
between the ordering principles of Serialism and an authoritarian
sensibility.
But he goes further, citing a 1924 letter in which Schoenberg
writes of ''the fairest, alas bygone, days of art in which a
prince stood as a protector before an artist, showing the rabble
that art, a matter for princes, is beyond the judgment of common
people.'' Mr. Taruskin also alludes to Anton Webern, who eagerly
welcomed the Nazi Anschluss of Austria in 1938.
What are we to make of all this? Mr. Taruskin lumps it together as
indicative of the ''anti-democratic legacy of modernism.'' He also
points out that after Webern was silenced and Stravinsky and
Schoenberg had found haven in America, they changed their tunes,
at least in part.
And yet the juxtaposition of this information remains highly
charged. Do these (and other nonmusical) cases support the notion
of an inherent antidemocratic bias to modernism? Was Schoenberg's
aristocracy of the spirit (or even his leanings toward a literal
aristocracy) on the same order of evil as Stravinsky's fervent
pro-Fascism and anti-Semitism?
A consideration of the right-wing aspects of modernism reminds us
- as Will Crutchfield pointed out recently in these pages - of the
tangled links between an abstract art like music and the political
beliefs of composers and performers.
But it also encourages us to question the unthinking assumption
that anything the Nazis disdained has to be morally sympathetic.
Because the Nazis attacked ''Cultural Bolshevism,'' we assume that
what they attacked was left-wing. Indeed, despite his conservative
leanings, Schoenberg did have his fervent leftist champions. But
many of them agreed with him about a hierarchy of artistic worth.
The political implications of Stravinsky's neo-Classicism and
Schoenberg's Serialism cast new light on the polemics of the
1950's and 60's, as well. On one hand, they lend weight to Pierre
Boulez and Theodor Adorno in their denunciations of
neo-Classicism. On the other, they make the opposition between the
Stravinskians and the Schoenbergians (or Webernians) more like a
family squabble than a Manichaean battle.
Schoenberg's conservatism also helps explain seeming ideological
anomalies in important intellectual movements of later times. It
has bothered some rock critics that Adorno and other members of
the Frankfurt School could combine progressive Marxism with an
utter disdain of popular culture. Yet they were drawing from the
same well that produced Schoenberg's dismissal of ''the rabble.''
Similarly, I used to wonder, how could highly politicized
neo-conservative critics like Hilton Kramer and Samuel Lipman
idolize modernism? Surely, I assumed, modernism had a built-in
revolutionary component.
In fact, some (but hardly all) modernists had conservative
political temperaments. And just as much of Stravinsky's Fascism
and anti-Semitism of the 1930's derived from his horror of the
Russian Revolution, so do many neo-conservatives today let an
anti-Soviet hostility color their views - although it's Russian
anti-Semitism and antilibertarianism they abhor.
Should any of this dampen our enthusiasm for the music of
Stravinsky or Schoenberg or Webern? Those for whom political and
moral correctness is inseparable from art, and who consider
themselves staunch defenders of democracy and the Jewish
tradition, and who have heretofore loved Stravinsky's music but
were unaware of his beliefs, may have a problem.
But the real lesson here is that human lives and values are more
complex than any ready equation of art and politics and morality.
And that it is dangerous to assume that someone who espouses a
doctrine you admire (like modernism) abhors a doctrine you dislike
(like Fascism). Bravo to Mr. Taruskin for raising the issues so
feistily in the first place.
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