Three Who Quit: Ives, Elgar, Sibelius and the Crisis of Modernism

The current “Musical Opinion” (UK) carries an essay of mine: “Three Who Quit: Ives, Elgar, Sibelius, and the Crisis of Modernism.” Strange bedfellows? Think again. Ultimately, my topic is the dead end afflicting twentieth century classical music. My final sentences read: “The dialectical tension between present and past, long the mainspring for musical creativity, has gone slack. In Ives, Elgar, and Sibelius, in Stravinsky and Schoenberg, this conundrum, differently manifest, ran its fatal course.” What follows is an extract – my closing sally – with key points in boldface. (The same issue — which you can download below — carries an excellent piece on Shostakovich):

A glance at the leading musical modernists contemporaneous with Ives is instructive. Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg — not the residual Romantics Elgar, Sibelius, and Ives — are latter-day Fausts, craving experience new and original. Courageously, perilously, they undertook a radical transformation of their own stylistic signatures. 

And they do not [like the anti-modernists Elgar, Sibelius, and Ives] invoke Nature. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov did – most profoundly in his late opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, composed in 1907 when Stravinsky was his prize pupil, virtually a surrogate son. The twittering, shimmering forest music of Stravinsky’s The Firebird (1910) is a sequel to Rimsky’s. Gustav Mahler, a seminal inspiration for Schoenberg and his followers, was a supreme Nature poet. And so, initially, was Schoenberg, in the comparably twittering, shimmering Prelude to Gurre-Lieder (1910) – but never thereafter. As post-World War I modernists, Stravinsky and Schoenberg were dissident, deracinated. No less than the modernist painters and novelists, their predilection was to deconstruct and reformulate. Elgar, Sibelius, and Ives eavesdrop on Nature – a posture of humility, comity, and subordination. Concomitantly: for them, the past remained a daily background presence. Stravinsky and Schoenberg were emigres dislodged by world events; Stravinsky’s St. Petersburg, Schoenberg’s Vienna were no more.

But can the past ever be evaded? In 1928 Stravinsky composed a ballet, The Fairy’s Kiss, adapting more than a dozen Tchaikovsky songs and piano pieces. The plot reads as an allegory of Tchaikovsky’s fate: kissed by the muses at birth, doomed to an early death. The two Tchaikovsky works most tellingly cited say it all: “Lullaby in a Storm” and “None but the Lonely Heart,” both plaintive songs. The Fairy’s Kiss is Stravinsky revisiting his own childhood, confiding his emotional roots.

In 1948 Schoenberg wrote a short essay titled “On Revient Toujours.” It begins by remembering “with great pleasure” a leisurely journey in a Viennese fiacre through the Black Forest – that is, a Nature experience both seductive and frightening. Schoenberg applies this adventure to his recent reversion to an older, tonal style – an occasional desire “to dwell in the old.” “A longing to return to the older style was always vigorous in me,” he admits. “And from time to time I had to yield to the urge.” 

If even for Stravinsky and Schoenberg musical retrospection proved inescapable, for Ives, Elgar, and Sibelius – and also for Gustav Mahler – it acquired a new tone: not just an embrace of the past, but a yearning compelled by dislocation from the present: a chronic impulse, exigent and unwilled.

Some two centuries after Johann Sebastian Bach, Ives, Elgar, and Sibelius felt spent. Stravinsky, too, eventually discovered himself in crisis, unable to compose – and opted for Schoenberg’s 12-tone method. But – we can now admit – 12-tone music proved a wrong turn, a dead end.

Straddling a transitional moment they could not command, Ives, Elgar, and Sibelius foretold the terminus of the symphonic canon; they are casualties of uprooted tradition. Significantly, the final contributor to the mainstream orchestral repertoire, Dmitri Shostakovich, composed behind an Iron Curtain that kept modernism and cosmopolitan modernity at bay: he could feast on Bach and Beethoven, Mussorgsky and Mahler.  Today, too many new orchestral works sound like makeshift music, erected in sand.

The dialectical tension between present and past, long the mainspring for musical creativity, has gone slack. In Ives, Elgar, and Sibelius, in Stravinsky and Schoenberg, this conundrum, differently manifest, ran its fatal course.

“Three Who Quit” is an excerpt from my book-in-progress “Why Ives?” Another chapter adapts my essay on Ives and Mahler for “The American Scholar.” The’yre both offshoots of the Ives Sesquicentenary, and of the four NEH-funded Ives festivals I co-curated with J. Peter Burkholder.