Chapter Thirteen - The Ironic German: Schoenberg and the Serenade, Op. 24

Summary

My title comes from a well-known book of 1958 by Erich Heller about ThomasMann. For Heller, irony is a fundamental Weltanschauung andnarrative strategy in all of Mann’s fiction, from the early familytragedy of Buddenbrooks to the comic finale ofFelix Krull. Heller defines irony in this context as“a calculated and artistically mastered incongruity between themeaning of the story told and the manner of telling it.” This isprobably as good a basic description of literary or linguistic irony as onecould find. And, mutatis mutandis, the irony that Hellerand other scholars explore in Mann forms a far more significant dimension ofthe world of early German modernism—including music—than hasgenerally been acknowledged.

There has been a fair amount of writing, including distinguished commentaryby Charles Rosen, on how Austro-German music of the early Romantic periodmanifests irony of the varieties propounded and practiced by FriedrichSchlegel and Heinrich Heine. What has been less studied is how in thedecades following the next Jahrhundertwende in 1900, ironybecomes a key compositional tactic for many composers working withinessentially the same cultural milieu as Mann, including Mahler, Strauss, andSchoenberg. These and other composers achieve their mature compositionalvoices, and their status as modernists, in large part by evoking andtreating ironically music from either the immediate past (Wagner) or themore remote past (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven). Our understanding of modernismhas been hindered by too much commentary that views it as an ideology ofrejection—as advocacy of the radical, the revolutionary, theprogressive, the avant garde.

A consideration of historicizing irony can also encourage us to revisit whatI believe is an exaggerated dividing point of World War I. Music historiestake as a given that the years around 1920 marked a sharp break in Europeanart music, when the intense, overheated styles of late romanticism,expressionism, and primitivism gave way to cooler, more brittleneoclassicism and neue Sachlichkeit. Of course, theselatter terms were coined, or at least used, at the time to describe agenuine shift of aesthetic and compositional technique.