Javier Blanquez
Updated Wednesday, March 6, 2024-00:08
A commonly accepted idea about classical music in recent decades is
that of
its permanent and irresolvable crisis
: the public ages and does not renew itself, the spaces for its dissemination decrease, as well as the number of new recordings and, in the face of pop, It no longer has the capacity to attract large and consistent audiences.
Several of these premises are largely false
- the elderly who populated the auditoriums in the past have already died, now replaced by others who were once young - but the bulk indicates an easily verifiable reality.
War and music
John Mauceri
Translation by Lorenzo Luengo.
Siruela.
300 pages.
€26 Ebook: €12.99
You can buy it here.
However, as director John Mauceri (New York, 1945) points out in his book
War and Music.
In the paths of classical music in the 20th century
, there is a more serious problem that has not been resolved, and that arises with an uncomfortable question:
where is the new repertoire?
What masterpieces of the last 50 or 80 years are known to the general public
that enjoy the prestige of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony
or
Stravinsky's
The Rite of Spring ?
A wrong canon
Mauceri, who for years was a close collaborator of Leonard Bernstein and accompanied him in his titanic didactic work, points out in his book what the Anglo-Saxons call
the elephant in the room
, that reality that everyone wants to deny, but which is clearly within reach. view.
In other words:
something started to go really wrong with classical music after the end of World War II
.
One of the author's theses is that the post-war avant-garde, the new music of
Boulez
,
Stockhausen
and
Nono
, made sense as a moral and intellectual solution to the horror of the millions of deaths, the Holocaust and the material and intellectual destruction of Europe. .
But
in his eagerness to recover the avant-garde that had been vetoed by Nazism
and designated as degenerate, the promoters of integral serialism - and also those of indeterminacy and, later, spectralism -
forgot about the public
.
Mauceri raises the issue without half measures: it was (is) a music that practically no one wanted to hear - or repeat once known - and,
yet, it still amasses a sparkling institutional prestige
and state support that has ended up overshadowing another much more musical tradition. empathetic and continuous, and which has its most popular expression in
film soundtracks, the natural, and triumphant, extension of post-romantic aesthetics
and Wagnerism.
A "minor music"
Mauceri's proposal could also arouse a certain suspicion: that of defending a populist and conservative position that
would leave the core of music not in novel aesthetic values, but in the law of the market
.
But his book is a clear and chronological exposition of a dysfunction that goes back a long way: at the beginning of the 20th century, symphonic music was massive,
composers like Strauss and Mahler were stars
, and at a certain point everything began to go wrong.
The factors that accelerated the decline were the three wars, the world wars and the Cold War, and in particular the period of the 1930s and 1940s in which
the totalitarian states of Europe attacked the modernist language from a fierce officialdom
, and especially in Germany. of
Hitler
, who in his defense of a Germanic music with a pedigree -
Brahms
,
Beethoven
and, above all,
Wagner
- pursued the modern currents derived from the atonal bankruptcy and the influence of jazz in the Weimar Republic, as well as any composer suspected of being Jewish or appearing to be Jewish.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold rehearsing at the NBC studios.
A paradox of the 20th century is that
that Germanic spirit that Hitler longed for ended up being expelled from Germany to be reborn in Hollywood
: several composers who had to go into exile - not only
Arnold Schönberg
or
Paul Hindemith
, but also
Kurt Weill
,
Franz Waxman
or
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
- They produced an enormous production not only of symphonic concert pieces, but also operas, musicals and film soundtracks, maintaining
a language derived from late romanticism, tonal, rich in memorable melodies
, which fit into the mass culture of their time, but which It received the category of minor music in its day compared to the new avant-garde, and whose comparative grievance continues to this day.
When we want to highlight a great author of "classical music" from the second half of the 20th century,
Pierre Boulez
appears before
Bernard Herrmann , or if we extend it to today, Helmut Lachenmann
enjoys more prestige among the living
than John Williams.
In search of the public
For Mauceri, this has been a crusade that goes back a long way, since
in 1990 he was determined to recover the music banned by the Nazis
and ignored by the masses against their will: according to the director,
there is an alternative and silenced history
in which the great music of the 20th century is also that of
Ernst Krenek
or that of
Max Steiner
, the Viennese exiled to Los Angeles who composed the soundtrack of Gone with
the Wind
and concretized
the extension of that Wagnerian desire for total art in Hollywood sound.
.
And this book - which can also be read as a condensed version of what
Alex Ross
did in
The Eternal Noise
- fulfills the function of
rebalancing the historiography of 20th century classical music, claiming a legacy
that was not lost, but was lately recovered, and that There is still a long way to go in the coming years, because as with early music, there are many gems of the 20th century - this has already happened with
Górecki
,
Weinberg
or
Gubaidúlina
- that are waiting for
a new recording to reach an audience that is unaware of them
, but who will be delighted to hear them.