Comprehensive histories of an art form are a daunting task, and a history of a major art form like so-called “classical” music in the West—with its long and variegated past—borders on impossibility. When compiled by a single author in five thick volumes (and a sixth for the index)—containing hundreds of musical examples and extended discussions of chosen works—this task assumes staggering, Johnsonian proportions. It is not surprising, however, to find that the musicologist Richard Taruskin, on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, has assumed this burden and, what is more, acquitted himself nobly. But then, Taruskin, a large figure in today’s music world, has rarely shirked either controversy or hard work.
I recall that, when he was teaching at Columbia, he ran on the side an eight-member a cappella choir which performed renaissance music in a church downtown. His notes on the concerts ran into the dozens of pages, meant to be read at leisure much later. Taruskin is the author of, among other books, a work on Mussorgsky that serves to change one’s perception of that composer and a two-volume work on the early music of Stravinsky—not only the best book I have read on the Diaghilev phenomenon, but a vital corrective on the composer himself. Taruskin is one of the breed of musicologists who likes to commingle with the popular press, and his often polemic ventures on the pages of the Sunday New York Times have infuriated and delighted music-lovers. His notorious postcards to those he agrees or disagrees with are legend in the discipline—I have several of vintage quality.
Taruskin’s introduction to this massive study, however, seeks to mitigate the aura of controversy surrounding himself by cleverly assuming a sheep’s fleece. He writes that he strives for objectivity, and in effect to see everything from an Olympian plane, beyond his personal prejudices. He is forced to ignore many composers, he says, not necessarily because he dislikes them (in- deed, he says he often listens to the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, whom he passes over in the text), but because they do not fit into the argument. Instead he includes much extra-musical material that he perceives as not only germane but also vital to the discussion: the sociological, the socio-political, the psychological, and the philosophical. Haydn’s oratorio The Creation may be a masterpiece, but it is also a nationalistic masterpiece, one of the first, and that aspect must be stressed.
Music is both a direct emotional experience and an abstract art that is difficult to explain. Like all other musicologists, Taruskin centers a good deal of his discussion around close analyses and parsings of a great variety of works (interestingly, for a British history, he uses the Germano-American definitions of quarter- and eighth-notes rather than the “quaver” usage). These he oversees with the precision and diligence of a Swiss watchmaker, and they will be better fodder for the academics than for the lay public.
Taruskin also attempts to place the music within its own time-frame, safe from today’s attitudes, and to try to understand how contemporaries viewed and heard the mu- sic. All of this vast erudition is imparted —thankfully—in Taruskin’s inimitable and highly readable style that combines vernacular and even cliché (deftly placed), lightening what could be a dispiriting journey.
Of course, Taruskin does not succeed completely in any of his aims. As anyone familiar with Taruskin’s work knows, his pose of objectivity works up to a point. Taruskin discusses many philosophers (very cogently), but one he returns to often is the Spaniard Ortega y Gasset, who almost becomes the Virgil to his Dante for the latter part of the trek. One of Ortega’s insights has to do with the playfulness of art and the encoding of subtextual messages within art, and this is right up Taruskin’s street, as we recognize plenty of encoding being practiced by the author himself. Perhaps this is inevitable in the postmodern world afflicted by the deconstruction of all arts; in any case, it assures that these volumes are of the twenty-first century.
To elaborate on one aspect of this work, I must invoke my own schooldays. I was given what must have been the last gasp of a classical education, and my history teachers —all of the “old” school—inculcated in me this mantra: “history” as a subject can only be studied up to a hundred or so years before today. All the rest is “current events,” a confused jumble of incidents and themes which will only be sorted out with the perspective of time. The fact that earlier history itself has been subject to violent change latterly is immaterial: we have the historical perspective to examine these ideas as we do not for contemporary history, even with our much greater access to documents and factual material.
By the end of the second volume of this study we are already in the era of Mozart and Beethoven, and by the fourth we are with Mahler, Richard Strauss, and the twentieth century, so that at least two volumes of the five are about “current events.”
Does this make a difference? Yes, because it is in this area that most of whatever controversy the volumes will engender will arise. Taruskin, to be sure, addresses this by avoiding overt polemics and quite often using the schoolroom dodge of posing a series of questions designed to illuminate and open areas of discussion.
But it is not too difficult to determine Taruskin’s stance throughout. The overriding aim is clear, and it is radical: the dismantling (and discarding?) of the time-honored Germano-centered view of musical history as a continuum of greatness from (at least) Bach to the Second Vienna School, and its partial replacement by French, Italian, and Russian examples. Who fills in is not as important as what is thrown out. I proceeded through the many pages discussing the Schoenbergian serial method waiting for the inevitable bombshell, and there it was: Schoenberg’s famous (infamous?) statement, “Today I have discovered something which will assure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.” Taruskin mentions George Perle’s rationalization of the quote to soften it, but there is little doubt that he intends us to make a direct comparison with the Thousand-Year Reich.
It is this ambivalent, “encoded” tone that marks so much of the work, especially volumes three through five. As might be expected, Taruskin has little use for the serial method of composition, and refers to it derisively in several places. Yet among the plethora of musical examples that packs the volumes he cannot resist giving page after page to Schoenberg and the Second Vienna School, because the games they play look good on paper. Eye candy for the academics—as it has been in books for generations. Milton Babbitt’s music is given similar treatment.
We are left with the inescapable feeling, then, that what matters least is how the music sounds to an audience: what matters most is how it parses on the page, and whether the composer admired Mussolini (Taruskin is beguiled by Stravinsky’s taste in dictators). It’s a pity we don’t know more about Gesualdo, but Taruskin has enlivened Palestrina and the Pope Marcellus Mass by bringing in Pfitzner’s romantic opera on the subject of its creation. It is not surprising that the composers who escape pinning down are the most hermetically abstract in their music: Bellini, Chopin, and the musical core at the center of Wagner.
Taruskin follows most musicologists who write these flood conspectuses by selecting one work for study as representative of musical importance or history. The huge beached whales of Tristan und Isolde and The Rite of Spring are on view, and Taruskin’s other choices (such as the Brandenburg Fifth and its keyboard part) are defensible, though any of us might have chosen differently. I feel that Stravinskian neoclassicism (which Taruskin discusses but does not stress) bulks larger than serialism in the performance of music, if not in its history. His theory of musical “maximalism,” or music loaded with instruments and extra-musical, often metaphysical, baggage is well elaborated through Scriabin, Richard Strauss, and Mahler (and its inverse, the minimalist-maximalist composer Anton Webern), though Taruskin does not really like any of the maximal school. Mahler, he explodes, wrote “bloated musical harangues.” Is this the reason for his popularity?
The one area that is short-shrifted is song and its related origins in folk song. Taruskin bows reverently to Schubert in this regard, but hardly to Schumann, Wolf, or any others. In the field of popular music, which is in part closely allied to song, Taruskin mentions the usual suspects—the Beatles, Elvis, Bob Dylan, and various aspects of rock ’n’ roll—but the feeling is one of having to include rather than of welcoming in. He pays no attention to the broad river of song flowing from Tin Pan Alley. Gershwin is the only such composer considered at length, and this for Rhapsody in Blue and other orchestral works rather than for what makes him memorable as a composer. Jazz—not included in his directions for the study—is considered as it impinges on classical music.
One rather amusing and personalizing feature of the volumes—and a contrast to earlier such works—is Taruskin’s highlighting of academically unpopular music. I suspect this is part of his anti-Germanic bias. Rossini comes in for much praise, and even Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and its sextet is studied, along with Offenbach and Gounod’s easy whipping-boy Faust. Puccini is highly praised, although whether this is because Taruskin really believes in his high stature or wants to bedevil Puccini’s critics is unknown.
It is difficult to arrive at a final opinion of so vast and multifarious a work other than to say that few people in the field could have encompassed it with the thoroughness and knowledge of Richard Taruskin. The one-volume edition will doubtless present more clearly Taruskin’s opinions. And it is perhaps in the field of opera that Taruskin tips his hand. Taruskin grants much space to opera, and one opera he especially focuses on is Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. Taruskin says that Britten is the only British composer of international standing since the seventeenth century, thus eliminating Britain’s sainted Edward Elgar. Taruskin raises all sorts of questions about the opera: Is Grimes a hero or villain? Who is to blame for his suicide? What is the societal guilt? Is his friend Balstrode primarily responsible? Is the opera an allegory? Is the ending dramatically just? Is it the penalty of closeted homosexuality and pederasty?
In all, over twenty pages are devoted to these inquiries. This reminds me of a story that was current when I was in college, which allegedly took place in a course on the Iliad. The professor asked why the body of Hector was dragged around the walls of Troy three times. One bright-eyed student responded that it was obviously symbolic of the Trinity: once for the Father, once for the Son, and once for the Holy Ghost. After a pause, the professor said, despairingly: “Does nobody feel sorry for poor Hector?”
Does nobody feel sorry for Peter Grimes? Anyone who ever saw Jon Vickers in the role, and who has experienced Vickers’s rendition of the scene in the hut followed by his descent into madness does not need to question the bases for his suicide or anything else. The decision for death is overwhelmingly self-evident and utterly persuasive, for Grimes dominates the stage.
It is this quiddity of emotion that I find missing from Taruskin’s volumes. He has eliminated too much in his quest for objectivity. At no time in all the five volumes did I hear the Faustian cry: “Verweile doch, du bist so schoen.” And this for a six-hundred-plus-year history of an art form that throughout its length cries out its manifold beauties. But then, we live in a fallen world, where beauty is outmoded. It’s another century, and der Dichter ist tod.
Patrick J. Smith is a former editor of Opera News.
