Expressionism.

A term applied to prominent artistic trends before, during and after World War I, especially in the visual arts and literature in Austria and Germany. By analogy it may apply to music of that time, or more generally to any music, in which an extravagant and apparently chaotic surface conveys turbulence in the composer’s psyche.

DAVID FANNING

Expressionism

1. Definitions.

In a narrow sense Expressionism in music embraces most of Schoenberg’s post-tonal, pre-12-note output – that of his ‘free atonal’ period, roughly from 1908 to 1921. Certain works from this time by his pupils Berg and Webern also qualify. This ‘pure’ Expressionism communicates as a kind of psychogram (Einstein, 1926); its musical language takes Wagner’s chromatic melos and harmony as its starting-point (notably Kundry’s music in Parsifal) but largely avoids cadence, repetition, sequence, balanced phrases and reference to formal or procedural models.

The term is often used more broadly to include other music from the same period with shared characteristics. Indeed, it is almost impossible to frame a definition of musical Expressionism in terms of style or aesthetic which would include the ‘central’ free-atonal music of the Second Viennese School and exclude near contemporary works by Mahler, Skryabin, Hauer, Stravinsky, Szymanowski, Bartók, Hindemith, Ives, Krenek and others. Furthermore, a number of important stage works of the 1920s, especially some by Weill, Hindemith and Krenek, have proved problematic to commentators because they retain strongly expressionistic textual and visual aspects while their musical language has moved on to different aesthetic principles.

A still broader application of the term, especially in the adjectival forms ‘expressionistic’ and ‘expressionist’, is in common journalistic use, often implying disapproval, denoting music of almost any era in which intense self-expression appears to override demonstrable coherence and to flout convention.

Expressionism

2. The term.

The word ‘Expressionism’ appears sporadically in late 19th-century English commentaries on the visual arts, but in its current art-historical and aesthetic sense it was coined in 1909 by the English art critic Roger Eliot Fry, to form a contrast with the passivity of Impressionism (Werenskiold, 1981). By 1911 it was established in Germany and applied to the French fauves, headed by Matisse. Almost immediately its application widened to include virtually all contemporary non-traditional painting. In the same year it appeared in discussions of contemporary German literature, especially poetry, again in explicit contrast to Impressionism. From 1914 it gained a more restricted application to contemporary Austro-German visual art, and it became retrospectively attached to the communities Die Brücke (Dresden, 1905–13) and Der Blaue Reiter (Munich, 1911–14).

Although isolated, less formal, early uses have been traced (Troschke, 1987), it was not until 1918 that the term was applied in discussions of music, in the first instance by Heinz Tiessen (published 1920), and a little later by Arnold Schering (1919). This came about through lectures given in German literary societies, though at this stage analogies with painting were just as important as those with literature. Initially the word was coined in a general sense to supplant its German near equivalent ‘Ausdrucksmusik’, and emerged in discussions about the aspiration of all the arts to the supposedly non-referential, purely expressive, condition of music, an aspiration reinforced by a concurrent upsurge of interest in the psychology of the unconscious. Some writers on music used the concept of Expressionism as a reminder that music too should, in effect, aspire to its own condition, by throwing off extraneous impulses, whether from the other arts or the humanities, which were threatening to debase it. Soon Expressionism became co-opted as a slogan for or against modern music in general, and a war of words was waged around it in 1920–21 in the periodicals Allgemeine Musikzeitung and Melos – the first of many debates about its ‘healthiness’. Paradoxically, most of the now accepted classics of expressionistic music were hardly known until the late 1920s, nearly 20 years after their composition, by which time the intellectual drive that had given rise to them had already been supplanted by less individualistic impulses. Though many composers continued to write occasionally in something resembling an expressionist manner, the eruptive immediacy of pre-war Expressionism was never recaptured.

Attempts to define Expressionism in music have always thrown up more questions than answers. But this slipperiness may be salutary if it reminds us that the terms of musical aesthetics are necessarily fluid and ill-defined. At least Expressionism is a term never likely to be used over-confidently.

Expressionism

3. Meaning.

In 1933 the main section of the Oxford English Dictionary did not include ‘Expressionism’, though it gave the noun ‘expressionist’, defined as ‘an artist whose work aims chiefly at “expression” ’. The supplement defined Expressionism as ‘the methods, style, or attitude of expressionists, esp. in artistic technique’, citing a succinct and resonant definition: ‘Expressionism … is a violent storm of emotion beating up from the unconscious mind’ (MacGowan and Jones, 1923). Practically every early discussion of Expressionism has stressed its provenance in the world of the unconscious, and the word seems to have met the need for a neat epithet for the new spiritual and artistic freedom so ardently acclaimed by artists and critics from the turn of the century on.

This ‘inner reality’, as Kandinsky was fond of calling it, was associated in the expressionists’ minds with ‘truth’, a truth that demanded emancipation from the ‘lie’ of convention and tradition. Schoenberg’s version of the same fundamental idea, with its roots in Greek philosophy and a prolific flowering in 19th-century German idealism, set ‘truth’ as a principle opposed to the cult of ‘beauty’ in post-Wagnerian music. It was in this sense that Schoenberg claimed his 1908–9 song cycle Das Buch der hängenden Gärten broke with previous aesthetic norms: the work is one of his earliest commonly regarded as expressionist.

An important corollary of this attitude to ‘truth’ was the emphasis on inner compulsion, which supposedly rendered redundant any criticism on grounds of professional skill, beauty or indeed traditionally accepted values of any kind. Schoenberg could thus justify his amateur paintings, many of them from his years of personal crisis in 1908–11, which communicate by virtue of strength of inner vision rather than refinement of painterly technique. In his music he could already take technical accomplishment more or less for granted, but, in parallel fashion, he now felt emboldened by his inner vision to cast off most means of support from traditional musical language. He summed up his attitude in 1910 with the maxim ‘Art comes not from ability but from necessity’, which was something of a commonplace at the time, and which was influentially promulgated by Paul Fechter in the first book-length study of Expressionism (1914).

Musical Expressionism was fostered by the intense intellectual atmosphere in turn-of-the-century Vienna, a city summed up by Karl Kraus as ‘an isolation cell in which one was allowed to scream’ (quoted in A. Comini: Gustav Klimt, New York, 1975, p.13). Indeed, the scream was a central expressionist topos, the outer manifestation of inner suffering: ‘Man cries for his soul, the whole era becomes a single cry of pain. Art too cries, into the deep darkness, it cries for help, it cries for spirit: that is Expressionism’ (Bahr, 1916). Essential to the artistic projection of such experience was the shunning of inherited conventions as false comforters. Precisely where the border lies between extensions of tradition and its destruction can never be defined, and Expressionism’s distinctive features of distortion and exaltation can also be identified in much Austro-German late Romantic art. Nevertheless it is widely agreed that expressionists crossed this border, whereas Jugendstil artists such as Klimt and late Romantic composers such as Strauss, Schreker, Zemlinsky and Rudi Stephan turned back.

This crossing of borders is inevitably perceived, though it may not always have been so intended, as anti-establishment in tone, in particular anti-bourgeois. The expressionists ‘proclaim the universality of suffering in transcendent negation of the professed values of their society’ (Schorske, 1980). As such, musical Expressionism was either celebrated for its truthfulness to inner realities, by Hegelian, sociologically minded commentators such as Adorno, or stigmatized as ‘unhealthy’, generally by lesser-known critics. The anti-bourgeois element and the emphasis on inner transformation could lead expressionists to either political extreme in the ideologically charged world of the 1920s. Most inclined to the left, but Paul Joseph Goebbels, later to become Hitler’s propaganda minister, was also a self-proclaimed expressionist. At the same time, however, the overt politicization of the arts was supplanting the individualism which had been at the heart of pre-war Expressionism.

In literature, Expressionism’s disdain for concrete meaning and narrative meant that it flourished in poetry and theatre rather than in the novel (Sokel, 1959). This disdain came naturally to music. Indeed, many composers and writers recognized the broad aesthetic problem that music by most definitions was already expressionist in its essence, and that expressionist music was therefore something of a tautology. Not surprisingly, then, composers rarely used the word and almost never proclaimed themselves expressionists. In music, even more than in literature and the visual arts, Expressionism was ‘not a school, … [but] a state of mind which … has affected everything, in the same way as an epidemic’ (Richard, 1978). In 1919 Schoenberg had wondered whether he should devise an expressionistic programme (Troschke, 1987). But in 1928 he noted that while works of his like Die glückliche Hand were called expressionistic, he himself preferred to refer to the ‘Art of representing inner occurrences’. In 1932 he essayed a more elaborate definition in his Frankfurt Radio talk on his Four Orchestral Songs op.22: ‘Thus, and not otherwise, did so-called Expressionism arise: that a piece of music does not come into being out of the logic of its own material but guided by the feeling for internal or external processes, bringing these to expression, supporting itself on their logic and building on this’.

Expressionism

4. Application.

Though surface elements of Expressionism are traceable in much of Schoenberg’s early work, it was a long time before he was composing in such a way as to exemplify his own definition. A watershed in his output is the Second String Quartet of 1907–8, whose four movements become progressively more emancipated from traditional late Romantic language and form. The introduction to the finale, in free-floating chromaticism representative of the soprano’s words ‘I feel the air of another planet’, is sometimes taken as the first true atonal music, though the coda eventually resolves, somewhat factitiously, to an F major tonic. The voice-writing in the preceding slow movement is expressionist at a gestural level, in its extended range, angular contours and chromatic freedom; yet this movement is strictly constructed using five thematic cells, themselves all focussed on notes of the E minor triad. Here is an early example of the symbiosis of anarchy and control, and of atonality and late Romantic harmony in expressionist music. The anguished tone of this quartet is generally assumed to reflect Schoenberg’s state of mind following his wife’s elopement with the painter Richard Gerstl and the latter’s subsequent suicide when Mathilde returned to Schoenberg. In fact much expressionistic music can be shown to have arisen in response to overwhelming personal crises (Crawford and Crawford, 1993).

1909 was Schoenberg’s expressionist annus mirabilis, the highpoint being Erwartung. The story of this one-act monodrama – that of a woman searching for her lover in a forest at night, finding his dead body, and in the course of her dementia virtually confessing to his murder – is again understandable on one level as a kind of personal catharsis. Schoenberg composed the music in a torrent of inspiration in 17 days, barely enough time to write down the notes of the extremely dense and refined score. The musical language is quintessentially expressionist in its avoidance of repetition and denial of stability in all parameters, including tempo. Harmony is chromaticized to the point where it forms a more or less static backdrop, in a constant state of flux and only occasionally falling back on more tonally reminiscent formations when the woman is in a state of emotional regression. By contrast, more immediately active elements are to be found in the texture, which is polarized between paralysis and anxious hyperactivity (Adorno, 1949). Initially the texture closely shadows the text in its flux between relatively impressionist and expressionist styles; later it takes on more autonomous, form-shaping power.

Further central expressionist compositions from the same year are Schoenberg’s violently eruptive Piano Piece op.11 no.3 and the first and last of his Five Orchestral Pieces op.16. These co-exist, however, with more euphonious late Romantic lyrical studies and more strictly composed or impressionist ones, confirming that even in this arch-expressionist phase Schoenberg was never far removed from late Romantic instincts.

The alienated figure of the artist becomes the subject of his next stage work, Die glückliche Hand. The tableaux that symbolize the central character’s inner turmoil are influenced by the expressionist dramas of Kokoschka and Strindberg. However, the large-scale structural framework represents a significant move away from the stream-of-consciousness style of Erwartung.

Although Berg was fanatically devoted to Erwartung and heavily influenced by its musical language, expressionist impulses in his music had to compete with his instincts for a sensuously beautiful surface and a selfconsciously concealed constructivist core. His comparatively aphoristic and atypical Clarinet Pieces op.5 are cited by Adorno (1982) as his only true expressionist work, though the surrounding works (the Altenberglieder op.4 and the Three Orchestral Pieces op.6) also have strong claims. The success of his first opera, Wozzeck, from 1925 on helped popularize Expressionism; but that very success was a symptom of the opera’s sensational and ultimately consoling aspects, which fall outside the stricter definition of Expressionism.

Webern’s music, by contrast, having been close to the spirit of Schoenbergian expressionism around 1909–13, became increasingly constructivist on the surface and increasingly concealed its passionate expressive core. This represented one of several possible routes away from Expressionism.

Expressionism

5. The end of Expressionism?

Expressionism flourished at the end of an era that had systematically emancipated itself from patronage. ‘The idea that the true purpose of art was to express personality could only gain ground when art has lost every other purpose’ (Gombrich, 1950, p.398). By the same token the movement tottered as soon as artists began to realize that their autonomy had been bought at the cost of their own impotence and their audience’s indifference. Exhilaration in freedom gradually gave way to a bad conscience over relevance.

Kandinsky had noted the socio-political dimension in the rise of Expressionism: ‘When outer supports threaten to fall, man turns his gaze from externals in onto himself’. When, however, the outer supports actually did fall, with the calamity of World War I, the overriding priority seemed to be to create new, more reliable supports. The inner psychic processes of alienated, suffering, hypersensitive artists hardly seemed to qualify.

There was a more banal reason for the demise of Expressionism. As Georges Braque put it, ‘you cannot remain in a perpetual paroxysm’ (Richard, 1978). Moreover, each of the arts found itself in a crisis of technique. In music the effective taboos on inherited form and on the bases of formal construction (not only tonality but repetition, sequence, homogenous timbres, patterning of any kind) left Schoenberg without musical means for creating large pieces. He was temporarily confined either to aphoristic outbursts (the incomplete chamber orchestra pieces of 1910 being the most extreme example) or to structures predicated on texts. The way out of this impasse was necessarily a way out of Expressionism. More subtly, as Adorno noted, the conscious negation of traditional means and of confinement to any style involved principles of selection which paradoxically led back to style and thus again to self-destruction; hence his characterization of musical Expressionism as an ‘unstable chemical element’.

Schoenberg’s quest was increasingly for a musical language that would re-establish elements of comprehensibility to replace the abandoned props of tonality. Pierrot lunaire had already combined examples of classically expressionist eruptive anarchy (no.14) with pieces whose expressionist gestures concealed tightly controlled motivic proliferation (nos.8, 17 and 18), and thereby pointed forward to 12-note technique. As Schoenberg moved in that direction he was moving too beyond the psychological truths of Expressionism to transcendent religious truths (notably in Die Jakobsleiter).

Some of the textural features and the violent discontinuity of Schoenberg’s expressionist music survived in his initial 12-note works (for instance the very first, the Prelude of op.25) and returned from time to time in later works, such as the String Trio of 1946. The psyche and the intellect were never wholly incompatible to expressionists, because their central tenet was the exploration of inner processes at the expense of the senses and of any reference to the outside world: ‘The World is out there … it would be absurd to reproduce it’ (Kasimir Edschmid, cited in Richard, 1978, p.187).

By 1922 a growing number of voices could be heard claiming that Expressionism was more part of the problem than the solution. Former supporters of musical Expressionism, such as the young but already influential critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, were lamenting its excesses, which seemed the more egregious for the new modesty of means favoured by the postwar Zeitgeist. Alongside Germany’s revulsion against rampant individualism, other forces were gathering. Parisian intellectuals, spearheaded by Cocteau in his Rappel à l’ordre, had been advocating a return to Apollonian order and a wholesale rejection of Romanticism and its satellite movements. The German variety of this trend crystallized into Neue Sachlichkeit, a form of neo-classicism that retained a squared-off version of expressionist mannerisms within a more sober aesthetic outlook.

One outward sign of the new ethos was the cultivation of parody. Here again Pierrot lunaire was an early example, but in the 1920s not even the once-sacrosanct suffering artist was immune. In Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf, the first words sung by Max, an effete composer, are ‘Du schöner Berg’. This one phrase neatly sends up all three members of the Second Viennese School, including the mountain-loving Webern.

After World War II it was the neo-classicism of the 1920s and 30s that in turn fell under a taboo, this time pronounced by the shrillest voices of the central European avant garde; on the other hand any art movement that had been stigmatized by the Nazis, such as Expressionism, was sympathetically reconsidered. Expressionist music was reincarnated, either in fairly pure post-Schoenbergian guise (Henze) or fused with post-Webernian serial controls (Boulez). Maxwell Davies showed the continuing potential of expressionist gestures to revitalize music theatre, as did Rihm and Zimmermann in German opera. Now even more than before, however, Expressionism was only one among many competing trends and could hardly claim to be a leading force.

In its least intellectualized form Expressionism from the mid-1950s on has supplied many composers east of the former Iron Curtain with a non-élitist, ready-to-serve musical dissidence, which has allowed audiences to read their own social agony into the music; but with few exceptions (such as the best works of Schnittke) it has been applied in these countries with a naivety of technique which makes it difficult for Western audiences to respond without embarrassment. At the other intellectual extreme Expressionism lives on in the work of, for example, Finnissy. Perhaps its most valuable legacy has been as a vital ingredient in an internationally communicative, progressive style, less militantly dehumanized than the 1950s avant garde yet still untainted by proximity to the entertainment industry. In this sense Expressionism has been embraced by countless composers. As an onomatopoeia of the emotions, as a subversive corrective force to complacency or academicism, musical Expressionism seems likely to live on and reappear in limitless, unforeseeable new guises.

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