11 - Music of seriousness and commitment: the 1930s and beyond

Summary

The variety of compositional styles, the multiplicity of the functions of music, the verdict that Schoenberg’s music was destined for the happy few who could understand it (and that Richard Strauss’s was destined for the happy few who could afford it), the lamented lack of a relationship to society and ‘the people’, the lack of genre consciousness in the works of many composers in the 1920s, their flirting with the vernacular or the apparent banality of their music – all these perceptions led inevitably to a quest for greater seriousness in music and a new sense of social commitment. The new seriousness was meant to supersede the arbitrariness of musical styles and reinstate composition as a coherent manifestation of high cultural values or as a timeless emanation of the art of music. It was, in short, to replace the alleged social irresponsibility of the 1920s.

The scandals provoked by Schoenberg’s and Stravinsky’s music before the First World War had been a symptom of the dispersion of a hitherto more or less consistent stylistic language. Together with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Schoenberg’s non-tonal works had been the first compositions which seemed to jettison the musical tradition of the nineteenth century. In hindsight, a work like Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, mirroring in ‘its ahistorical anachronisms’ the ‘disunities of modern life’, equally served to undermine a sense of coherent compositional development. The emergence of a plethora of disparate musical styles and techniques meant that there was no longer a perceived tradition: any composer could be progressive and regressive at the same time, and in this way compositional options presented themselves less in the form of a linear development than of a maze in which tradition seemed to play no part.