Алекс Росс «The Rest Is Noise Series: Zion Park: Messiaen, Ligeti, and the Avant-Garde of the Sixties»
белый сепиа серый

Читать онлайн «The Rest Is Noise Series: Zion Park: Messiaen, Ligeti, and the Avant-Garde of the Sixties»

Автор Алекс Росс

This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise.

It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you’re attending concerts in the episodes

1960s: Counterculture and Revolution and Politics and Spirituality in the Late Twentieth Century

Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany and a MacArthur Fellowship. The Rest is Noise was his first book and garnered huge critical acclaim and a number of awards, including the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of Listen to This.

ZION PARK

MESSIAEN, LIGETI, AND THE AVANT-GARDE OF THE SIXTIES

From The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross

Contents

13

ZION PARK

Messiaen, Ligeti, and the Avant-Garde of the Sixties

“I have found that it is not to be,” Adrian Leverkühn declares, in his bloodcurdling meditation on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. “The good and the noble, what they call the human, despite the fact that it is good and noble. What men have fought for, have stormed citadels for, and, in their moment of fulfillment, have jubilantly proclaimed—it is not to be. It will be taken back. I will take it back. ”

Thomas Mann’s Faustian composer is alluding to a musical code that is written into Beethoven’s last string quartet.

In the introduction to the finale, the viola and cello play a sighing minor-key phrase to which are attached the words “Must it be?” The violins reply, swinging into the major: “It must be!” The little exchange was conceived as a joke, but it has a serious subtext; it expresses in miniature the spirit of cosmic affirmation that blares forth so triumphantly in Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy. ” Leverkühn has no interest in embracing the millions. In the twentieth century, he might argue, affirmation has become banal. Only by striking the dark note can he achieve true seriousness and originality.

Leverkühn’s aesthetic of denial and negation captures in somewhat exaggerated form one of the dominant strains of twentieth-century music. The fictional composer bears traces of Schoenberg and Webern, who professed to have killed tonality, and perhaps of Varèse, who fancied himself a “diabolic Parsifal. ” Leverkühn also foreshadows Boulez, with his aesthetic of “still more violent”; Cage, who said that he was “going toward violence rather than tenderness, hell rather than heaven”; the ironic, self-flagellating, death-obsessed Shostakovich; and even Britten, who made an arabesque of the words “The ceremony of innocence is drowned. ” (When Mann heard Britten’s Serenade, he wrote, “Adrian Leverkühn might well have been very happy to have done some of these things. ”) More than a few canonical twentieth-century works—Salome, Erwartung, the Rite, Wozzeck, Lulu, Lady Macbeth, Peter Grimes—ride fateful currents toward scenes of violent or mysterious death. They are what Olivier Messiaen called “black masterpieces. ”

Книгогид использует cookie-файлы для того, чтобы сделать вашу работу с сайтом ещё более комфортной. Если Вы продолжаете пользоваться нашим сайтом, вы соглашаетесь на применение файлов cookie.