Music and Jugendstil

WalterFrisch

At one point in Robertson Davies's novel Tempest-Tostthe antic but

gifted musician Humphrey Cobbler remarks:

"If there is one gang of nincompoops that I despise more than

another ... it is the gang which insists that you cannot reach any
useful or interesting conclusion by discussing one art in terms of
another. Now there is nothing I enjoy more than talking about
music in terms of painting. It's nonsense, of course, and at worst
it's dull nonsense. But if you get somebody who knows a lot about
music and a lot about painting, it is just possible that he will have an
intuition, or a stroke of superlative common sense which will put
you on a good scent."'

Cobbler, holding forth in the midst of a late-night drinking party, is too

intoxicated to elaborate. But his cautionary enthusiasm will be appre-
ciated by anyone who has tried to argue for parallels or affinities
between the arts.
Most of us tend to confine such discussions to general textbooks,
undergraduate classes, or perhaps to departmental (or interdepart-
mental) parties. But this kind of criticism has also found its way into
more serious or sober forums. In recent years, a number of commenta-
tors have been pursuing one potentially "good scent" that emanates
from the artistic world of Western Europe at the fin de siecle, in partic-

1. Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost(New York, 1980), p. 171.

Critical Inquiry 17 (Autumn 1990)

? 1990 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/90/1701-0005$01.00. All rights reserved.

138

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1990 139

ular from the heady fumes of art nouveau or its German manifestation
Jugendstil (named after the Munich periodical Jugend). There is at
present a large body of writings specifically about the relationship
between music and Jugendstil and/or art nouveau, encompassing at
least two books, three collections of essays, and about half a dozen
miscellaneous articles.2 It is here that some of the most ambitiously
interdisciplinary musical criticism and analysis have been focused-
interdisciplinary in spirit, but often undisciplined in practice. Even in
the most suggestive of this work, as in the broader cultural histories by
such writers as Carl Schorske or Roger Shattuck,3 music tends to
remain undernourished-sometimes abused-perhaps because its basic
language and "meaning" are notoriously difficult to decipher, let alone
relate convincingly to some broader zeitgeist.
And yet the essential enterprise seems worthwhile: most historians
and critics of the arts would agree that music does, or should, partake
of the artistic climate of its time in ways that are demonstrable and
meaningful. The years around 1900, which saw many sustained
contacts and associations between artists working in different media,
seem a logical place to look. But to be convincing, parallels involving

2. The critical history of Jugendstil as a whole is traced in the comprehensive

narrative bibliography by Jost Hermand, Jugendstil: Ein Forschungsbericht, 1918-1964
(Stuttgart, 1965). See also the useful anthology of criticism in Jugendstil, ed. Hermand,
Wege der Forschung, vol. 110 (Darmstadt, 1971); hereafter abbreviated J. The writings
on music include the books by Hans Hollander, Musik undJ ugendstil (Zurich, 1975), and
Reinhard Gerlach, Musik undJugendstil der WienerSchule, 1900-1908 (Laaber, 1985). The
collections are Art Nouveau and Jugendstil and the Music of the Early 20th Century, Miscella-
nea Musicologica, Adelaide Studies in Musicology, vol. 13 (Adelaide, 1984); Art Nouveau,
Jugendstil, und Musik, ed. Jiirg Stenzl (Zurich, 1980); and Jugendstil-Musik? Miinchner
Musikleben 1890-1918, ed. Robert Miinster (Wiesbaden, 1987). The latter volume is a
catalogue for an exhibition presented in 1987 at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in
Munich. Individual articles include Reinhold Brinkmann, "Schinberg und George: Inter-
pretation eines Liedes," Archivfiir Musikwissenschaft26 (Jan. 1969): 1-28, esp. pp. 25-28,
hereafter abbreviated "SG"; Udo Dammert, "Der Jugendstil in der Musik," Musica 20
(Mar.-Apr. 1966): 53-58; Gosta Neuwirth, "Parsifal und der musikalische Jugendstil," in
Richard Wagner: Werkund Wirkung, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Regensburg, 1971), pp. 175-98;
Johannes Schwermer, "Jugendstil-Musik in der isthetischen Enklave," Neue Zeitschrift
und Musik in der Oper der
fiir Musik 126 (Jan. 1965): 2-5; and Horst Weber, "Jugendstil
Jahrhundertwende," Die Musikforschung27 (Apr./June 1974): 171-74.
3. See Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-sikcleVienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980),
and Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant Garde in France, 1885 to
World War I, rev. ed. (New York, 1968).

Walter Frisch is associate professor of music at Columbia Univer-

sity and author of Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (1984).
He is presently completing a book on the early tonal works of Arnold
Schoenberg.

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140 Walter Frisch Music and Jugendstil

music must rise above (or get below) the feuilletonish level encountered
in so many writings. They should also take account of more than the
purely literary dimension of the music (opera librettos, song texts,
programmatic commentaries, and so forth) and be made at a funda-
mental level of technique and expression that does justice to musical
processes. The present article is conceived in that spirit, suggesting how
deeper connections might be drawn between the phenomenon of
Jugendstil, which was itself largely inspired by the idea of music, and
some of the best Austro-German lieder of the Jahrhundertwende, espe-
cially those of Arnold Schoenberg.

The most common approach in writings on music and Jugendstil

has been to isolate several aspects of the visual art, either of technique
or of subject matter, and to seek parallels in music of the fin de siecle.
Historians of art and design seem to agree on at least three basic
elements of Jugendstil: the primacy of the dynamic, flowing line; flat-
ness or two dimensionality (Jugendstil has been called a Fldachenkunst);
and the profuseness of ornament. All these features are neatly embod-
ied in a 1900 drawing by Theodor Heine (fig. 1), in which the
ostensible subject matter, the dancing lady, is dissolved in the undulat-
ing linearity of her dress and the swirling smoke or incense. In this
example, as in the celebrated "Cyclamen" tapestry by the Munich artist
Hermann Obrist (fig. 2), line and ornament are largely liberated from
their representational obligations and are manipulated in an almost
abstract fashion. As Robert Schmutzler has remarked, the tapestry is
"on the borderline dividing the symbol and the ornament, between
abstract dynamism and the representation of a distinctive organism."4
This aspect of Obrist's tapestry was realized as early as 1895 by the
critic Georg Fuchs, who wrote in the journal Pan, "'These embroider-
ies do not intend to "mean" anything, to say anything.'" Fuchs went on
to describe the dynamic motion of the image in terms that have nothing
to do with cyclamens per se: "'This racing movement seems like the
abrupt, powerful convolution of the lash of a whip. One moment it
appears as the image of a forceful outburst of natural elements; it is a
lightning bolt. Another moment it resembles the defiant signature of a
great man, a conqueror, an intellect who decrees new laws through new
documents.''"5 Fuchs's metaphor of the whiplash or Peitschenhieb, has
stuck; Obrist's tapestry is today known principally by that name.

4. Robert Schmutzler, Art Nouveau (New York, 1962), p. 193.

5. Georg Fuchs, quoted in Peg Weiss, Kandinskyin Munich: The FormativeJugendstil
Years(Princeton, N.J., 1979), p. 33; hereafter abbreviated KM; translation modified.

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 ~i~73~9~~

A
FIG.1.-Theodor Thomas Heine, "Serpentinentlnzerin." From Die Insel (Berlin,
1900).

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142 Walter Frisch Music and Jugendstil

-,
LcE. *:

.... .. Ai. A-
I-

rA, I ;
:IMF 're-,
... ......
.am Ii" ..... .... .11

FIG.2.-Hermann Obrist, "Alpenveilchen"[Cyclamen],also known as "Peitschen-

hieb"[Whiplash],tapestry,Munich,c. 1900.

The linear abstractnessofJugendstil has inspired critics to transfer

these visual categories to music, with decidedly mixed results. Hans
Hollander, who has become something of a whipping boy in the more
recent literature, manages to find elements of Jugendstil in works by a
suspiciouslywide range of composers, including Schoenberg, Richard
Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg, Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz
Schreker, Claude Debussy, Alexander Scriabin, Frederick Delius,
Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and even Cyril Scott. Indeed,
any piece with flowing line, decorative surface, or rich orchestral colors
seems to find a place on his tapestryof musicalJugendstil.
From the dynamically linear qualities of visual Jugendstil, the
cultural historianJost Hermand (who has undoubtedly read and edited
more literature on this subject than anyone) develops a more general-
ized notion of "dance-like, linear motion" [t~nzerisch-lineareBewegung],
which he then proceeds to find almost everywhere in the arts around
1900. In music he locates it in what he calls the "Tanz-und-Taumel"
atmosphere of operettas. He mentions in particular dance scenes in
Hans Pfitzner's opera Die RosevomLiebesgarten (1901), where the first
act develops into "a general 'Tanz- und Laufspiel,'" accompanied by
"boundingand hopping triplets, staccato accompaniment,and undulat-
ing garlandsof scales, which link up over and over again into a tableau-

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1990 143

like dance."6 The obvious problem with this kind of criticism is that it
attributes to, or at least associates with, Jugendstil technical features
that are virtually universal in Western music: one does not need to go to
Pfitzner or to Jugendstil to find triplets, scales, and staccato articula-
tion; nor are festive dance scenes confined to fin-de-siecle operas.
The unsatisfactory nature of much of the literature on music and
Jugendstil stems from the often unspoken assumption that such terms
as line, ornament, and symmetryare readily transferable to music. In
musical criticism these are metaphors, which, like color, we borrow
from the visual arts to enrich our limited vocabulary. In fact, line in
music, by which we usually mean a coherent succession of tones, might
not necessarily fulfill the same technical or aesthetic function as line in
a drawing.7 The music historian Carl Dahlhaus has asserted baldly that
no possible categorical analogy or mediation can be found between the
primacy of sonority [Klang] in the music of the turn of the century-as
manifested in harmony and instrumentation-and the primacy of line
in Jugendstil.8

Perhaps one way around this apparent critical impasse is to ask not
what Jugendstil can do for music, but what music can or did do for
Jugendstil. Rather than looking vainly for traces of visual Jugendstil in
music, we should first consider the matter the other way around. For
there is considerable evidence that ideas about music were a force
behind the aesthetic of Jugendstil, especially the movement's tendency
toward abstract design. Since at least the late eighteenth century,
music-in particular instrumental music-had been valued for its
"absoluteness," its lack of direct referentiality. As is well known, Arthur
Schopenhauer ranked music above the other arts because he saw in it
an unmediated, direct embodiment of the "will." These attitudes,
which carry over into the later nineteenth century, resurface forcefully

6. Richard Hamann and Hermand, Stilkunst um 1900 (Berlin, 1967), p. 265; my

translation. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. This passage has also
been criticized by Brinkmann ("SG," p. 27).
7. This point has also been raised by Brinkmann, who asks, "Is it so clear that 'line'
in painting (functional with respect to the image) is fundamentally equivalent to what we
call 'line' in the realm of music?" ("SG," p. 27).
8. Dahlhaus, Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Laaber, 1980), p. 279; trans. J. Brad-
ford Robinson, under the title Nineteenth-CenturyMusic (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989),
p. 332.

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144 Walter Frisch Music and Jugendstil

in the writings of the Jugendstil artists, many of whom felt compelled to

defend their aesthetic and technique.
Sometimes the connection with music remains at the level of a
vague metaphor, as when Walter Crane, in his book Line and Form
(1900), writes of "'that rhythmic, silent music which the more formal-
ized and abstract decorative design may contain, quite apart from the
forms it actually represents'"(KM, p. 8). In an essay entitled "Das neue
Ornament" (1901), Henry van de Velde, one of the most brilliant and
influential theorists of art nouveau, observed that "it was the idea that
lines are interrelated in the same logical and consistent way as numbers
and as notes in music that led me to go in search of a purely abstract
ornamental style, one which engenders beauty of its own accord and by
means of the harmony of construction and the harmony of the regular-
ity and equilibrium of forms which compose an ornament."'
These matters are taken up in a still more systematic fashion by the
Munich Jugendstil artist August Endell, whose writings, as Peg Weiss
has shown, are among the most important documents of fin-de-si&cle
artistic theory. In 1898 Endell called for a purely formal art, a Form-
kunst:

"There is an art that no one seems to know about: form-art, which

arouses the human soul only through forms, which are like nothing
known, that represent nothing and symbolize nothing, that make
their effect through freely discovered forms, as music does
through free tones." [KM, p. 25; trans. mod.]

"Form-art" is to be achieved above all by the treatment of line, which

can affect the viewer directly, much as tones affect the listener. Endell
outlines a psychological theory whereby different kinds of lines exercise
certain kinds of effects on the observer. Length or shortness of lines are
functions of time; thickness and thinness are functions of tension. It is
the temporal aspect of Endell's theory that provides another point of
contact with music. For he insists that a viewer perceives a line succes-
sively-that a line implies duration, the passage of time. Endell's
Formkunst, then, becomes like that of music a temporal one, one that
acknowledges and exploits the passage of time.
Endell's theories had a profound influence on Wassily Kandinsky,
whose formative years were spent in the Jugendstil milieu of Munich.
In his 1911 Concerningthe Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky, too, takes music as
a model for abstraction:

A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation,

however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but
envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts

9. Henry van de Velde, "Das neue Ornament," Zum neuen Stil, ed. Hans Curjel
(Munich, 1955), p. 94.

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1990 145

today, achieves this end. He naturallyseeks to apply the methods of

music to his own art.'

Kandinsky's theories of color have much in common with Endell's

discussion of line. Specific colors and color combinations-Kandinsky
speaks unabashedly of "harmony" and "counterpoint"-are said to
produce certain effects on the viewer much like those produced by
music. Thus: "keen lemon-yellow hurts the eye in time as a prolonged
and shrill trumpet-note the ear." Or: white conveys a "harmony of
silence, which works upon us negatively, like many pauses in music that
break temporarilythe melody"(CSA,pp. 24, 39).
In his later studyPointand LinetoPlane (1926), Kandinskyseems to
echo directly Endell's theories about line, asserting that "'length is a
durational concept. . . . the time required to follow a straight line is
different from the time required to follow a curved line even if the
lengths are the same, and the more animated the curved line is, the
more it stretches itself out in time. In line therefore, the possibilitiesof
using up time are very manifold'" (KM,p. 37).
When appealing to the aesthetics of music, these artists rarely
mention any specific compositions or composers. But the music histo-
rian wants to ask what music might have shaped their experience, what
might have been their model for the treatment of line, color, and time.
Here the answer is probablyRichardWagner. Dahlhaushas gone so far
as to claim that Wagner's music actually gave rise to Jugendstil in the
visual arts. From Wagner comes not the subject matter or the general
characteristics of Jugendstil, but what Dahlhaus calls "Anschauungs-
formen" or "Sehweisen"("waysof viewing" or "modes of seeing")."
Dahlhaus explains that Wagner's mature operas unfold by a process in
which time flows yet is suspended: there is apparent motion that does
not progress, that leads nowhere. The Prelude to Das Rheingoldis
Dahlhaus's paradigm for this paradoxical phenomenon; composition-
ally it represents a "surfaceof sound," a Klangflaiche, which "is itself in
motion yet does not activate a development that is directed toward a
goal."'2The effect is that of "stroimendenZeitenthobenheit,"a flowing
suspension of time. In ways that are too complex to summarize here,
Dahlhaus goes on to suggest how Wagner's leitmotiv technique,
harmonic language, and phrase structure all partake of this fluid yet
ultimately static sense of time. He concludes by asserting that it is these
aspects of Wagner's art that inspired the endlessly flowing line, the
basicSehweise,ofJugendstil art.
It is somewhat disingenuous of Dahlhaus to cite the Rheingold

10. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerningthe Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (New

York, 1977), p. 19; hereafter abbreviated CSA.
11. Dahlhaus, "Musik und Jugendstil," in Art Nouveau,
Jugendstil, und Musik, pp.
73-88.
12. Ibid., p. 82.

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146 Walter Frisch Music and Jugendstil

Prelude as "paradigmatic," since there is nothing else like it in

Wagner's oeuvre. Nevertheless, the basic characterization of Wagner's
music rings true. Flowing suspension of time is certainly a factor in the
later operas, especially Parsifal, which Theodor Adorno calls with justi-
fication a "static" score (thus implicitly corroborating Gurnemanz's
famous description of the realm of the Grail in act 1, "Zum Raum wird
hier die Zeit").'3 Adorno even invokes the specific notion of Jugendstil
in connection with Parsifal when he calls the flower maidens of act 2
"the first Jugendstil ornaments."'4 Dahlhaus, who clearly draws on
Adorno for so many aspects of his argument, takes issue with this latter
claim. For Dahlhaus the Jugendstil dimension of Wagner consists not in
specific images or visual motives, but in the broader temporal dimen-
sion-in what we might call the Ii'rweise.
The notion that Wagner's musical-dramatic processes served as a
stimulus to Jugendstil can of course be given some sober historical
support. The operas were tremendously popular in the late nineteenth
century and had an especially strong influence on French symbolism, a
movement in many ways closely allied to Jugendstil. David Hertz has
proposed that the style and content of much symbolist writing seems to
arise directly from the writers' attempts to describe Wagner's music.'5
Dahlhaus himself is skeptical about proceeding further to search
for palpable traits of a musical Jugendstil around the turn of the
century:

Although we can discern a certain, if scarcely tangible, affinity to

Jugendstil and to Secession in many works of Mahler, Schoenberg,
Zemlinsky, and Schreker, this quality cannot be tied down in
compositional terms without interpretive violence. The term
"Jugendstil," although it appears useful for characterizing individ-
ual traits, is at any rate unsuitable as a comprehensive label for the
New Music around 1900.16

Given much of the "interpretive violence" that has been done by such
critics as Hollander and Hermand, Dahlhaus's pessimism seems appro-
priately cautionary. He is joined by the musicologist Reinhold
Brinkmann, who enters a strongly "negative plea" against endeavors to
establish Jugendstil as a viable category in music history." But can

13. See Theodor W. Adorno, "Zur Partitur des 'Parsifal,'" MusikalischeSchriftenIV,

ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 17 of GesammelteSchriften(Frankfurt am Main, 1982), p. 47.
14. Ibid., p. 51.
15. See David Michael Hertz, "Wagner and the French," The Tuning of the Word:
TheMusico-LiteraryPoeticsof the SymbolistMovement(Carbondale, Ill., 1987), pp. 32-55.
16. Dahlhaus, Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts, p. 279. For a somewhat different
translation, see Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-CenturyMusic, p. 332.
17. Brinkmann, "On the Problem of Establishing 'Jugendstil' as a Category in the
History of Music-with a Negative Plea," in Art Nouveau andJugendstil and the Music of the
Early 20th Century,pp. 19-47.

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 CriticalInquiry Autumn1990 147

there not be some middle ground between the poles of Dahlhaus's

dialectic, between detecting the merest traces of Jugendstil in music
and a desire to stamp the whole music historicalperiod asJugendstil?

3
I would suggest that a musicalJugendstil, or a music that is respon-
sive to the aesthetics of Jugendstil, might be sought most fruitfully in
the realm of song. From the viewpoint of genre and social function, the
lied perhaps comes closest to fulfilling the Jugendstil goal of the aesthe-
ticization of life and home.'" More significant, the lied occupies one
middle ground between the apparent specificity of visual images and
the purity of music. The mediator is, of course, the poetic text, which
can swing in either direction: toward the more representational and
naturalisticor toward the deliberately abstract and ambiguous. These
are the very issues over which German critics and poets were arguing at
the birth of modernism in the 1880s and 1890s, when lyric poetry had
begun to shed its volkstfimlich,sentimental qualities.'19And it is in this
context that a literaryJugendstil has often been identified. 0
Some critics have located Jugendstil in poets' choice of images: the
frequent use of flowing hair, dancers, mermaids, swans, highly deco-
rated interiors, luxuriant vegetation, and so forth. Others have
concentrated more on the manipulationof language itself, a topic that,
like the tendency toward abstract forms in the visual arts, has sugges-
tive points of contact with music. Thus Volker Klotz adduces numerous
examples in the poetry of Ernst Stadler, Richard Dehmel, and Stefan
George of the "deactivationof action words," which is seen as analo-
gous to the goalless motion characteristicof the Jugendstil line.21This

18. See ibid., p. 25, and Ludwig Finscher, "Richard Strauss and Jugendstil-The
Munich Years, 1894-1898," in Art Nouveau and Jugendstil and the Music of the Early 20th
Century,p. 170.
19. See the useful anthologies of literary criticism LiterarischeManifeste des Natural-
ismus, 1880-1892, ed. Erich Ruprecht (Stuttgart, 1962), and Literarische Manifeste der
Jahrhundertwende, 1890-1910, ed. Ruprecht and Dieter Bainsch (Stuttgart, 1970). See also
Das literarischeModerne: Dokumentezum Selbstverstaindnisder Literatur um die Jahrhundert-
wende, ed. Gotthard Wunberg (Frankfurt am Main, 1971).
20. There is a large literature on the topic of literary Jugendstil. Among the major
contributions (with substantial bibliographies of their own) are Dominick Jost, Literar-
ischerJugendstil (Stuttgart, 1969); Horst Fritz, LiterarischerJugendstil und Expressionismus:
Zur Kunsttheorie,Dichtung und WirkungRichard Dehmels (Stuttgart, 1969); Edelgard Hajek,
LiterarischerJugendstil: VergleichendeStudien zur Dichtung und Malerei um 1900 (Diisseldorf,
1971); and Karl Eugene Webb, Rainer Maria Rilke and Jugendstil: Affinities, Influences,
Adaptations (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978). See also the essays and excerpts included in section
2, "Literatur," ofJ, pp. 346-494, and Hamann and Hermand, Stilkunst um 1900, pp. 266-
74.
21. Volker Klotz, "Jugendstil in der Lyrik," inJ, p. 362.

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148 Walter Frisch Music and Jugendstil

effect can be achieved in several ways. First, through the frequent use
of modal adverbs, which help to displace "the weight of the bearer of
motion, the verb ... from the goal to the manner." Second, through
the use of intransitive or reflexive verbs, "whose subjects have either
nothing or themselves as objects, which have no effect, change noth-
ing.""22 Third-and this is something Klotz sees as especially character-
istic of George-there can be emphasis on detailed visual description
and a lack of spatial perspective analogous to the surface art ofJugendstil.
The real value of Klotz's approach is that he looks for structural or
technical analogies rather than iconographic identities between art and
poetry. Such an approach may also have something to offer in lieder,
especially in those set to texts by poets closely associated with Jugendstil.
Dehmel (1863-1920) was one of the founding editors of the leading
Jugendstil journal, Pan, and a friend of the artist and theorist Peter
Behrens. All of Dehmel's major books were illustrated and/or designed
byJugendstil artists working under his supervision.23
Like many of his contemporaries, Dehmel called for a closer rela-
tionship between the arts, noting in his diary in 1894, "Nowadays we aim
to make poetic technique more sensuous by incorporating painterly and
musical effects, just as painting and music attempt to learn new means of
expression from the sister arts." Although Dehmel admits there are limits
to this kind of technical interchange, he suggests, for example, that a poet
might "associate a color word with a particularly strong upwelling of a
psychological state" or might intensify his verse "though the use of sound-
symbols."24
Dehmel's poem "Erwartung" ["Expectation"], published in 1896,
seems a virtual textbook of painterly effects:

Aus dem meergriinen Teiche

neben der roten Villa
unter der toten Eiche
scheint der Mond.

Wo ihr dunkles Abbild

durch das Wasser greift,
steht ein Mann und streift
einen Ring von seiner Hand.
Drei Opale blinken;
durch die bleichen Steine
schwimmen rot und griine
Funken und versinken.

22. Ibid., p. 363.

23. On Richard Dehmel's personal contact with Jugendstil artists, see Fritz, Literar-
ischerJugendstilund Expressionismus,pp. 39-43.
24. Dehmel, Bekenntnisse(Berlin, 1926), p. 21.

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1990 149

Und er kiiPt sie, und

seine Augen leuchten
wie der meergriine Grund:
ein Fenster thut sich auf.
Aus der roten Villa
neben der toten Eiche
winkt ihm eine bleiche
Frauenhand.25

[Out of the sea-green pond, near the red villa, under the dead oak
shines the moon.
Where her dark image reaches through the water, a man stands
and draws a ring from his hand.
Three opals glimmer; through the pale stones swim red and green
sparks and sink down.
And he kisses them, and his eyes glow like the sea-green depths: a
window opens.
Out of the red villa, near the dead oak, the pale hand of a woman
beckons to him.]

The poem unfolds as a highly stylized, almost abstract play of color.

Each line of the first stanza states or implies a different color: the pond
is sea green, the villa red, the oak "dead" (hence black or dark brown),
the moon white. These colors are manipulated throughout the poem,
then "recapitulated" in the final stanza, where red and "dead" recur
and the color value of white is transferred from the moon to the "pale"
woman's hand.
The paired juxtapositions of red-green and black-white in stanza
1 suggest that Dehmel may consciously have sought to exploit color
complementarity.26 Indeed, he seems to endow these colors with
psychological associations much like those Kandinsky was to outline in
Concerningthe Spiritual in Art, where the elements of each such pair are
called "antithetical." According to Kandinsky, green is passive, "the
most restful colour that exists"; its opposite, red, is warm and intense.
Black represents a "totally dead silence," white a "silence ... pregnant
with possibilities" (CSA, pp. 36-41).
"Erwartung" also manifests the kind of verbal deactivation or
dematerialization characteristic of Jugendstil. The principal verb
phrase of the first stanza, "scheint der Mond," comes only in line 4; the
preceding lines are comprised of three similarly constructed preposi-

25. Dehmel, "Erwartung," Weib und Welt: Gedichte von Richard Dehmel (Berlin,
1896), pp. 80-81.
26. Red and green are considered psychologically complementary colors, as are
black and white. See The OxfordCompanionto Art, ed. Harold Osborne (Oxford, 1970), s.v.
"colour," esp. p. 258.

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150 WalterFrisch MusicandJugendstil

Sehr langsam J)

Aus dem meer-gri-nen Tei - che ne-bender ro ten Vil - la

3*
34etwas zbgernd

un-terder to ten Ei che scheint

der nd

FIG.3.-Arnold Schoenberg, Erwartung,1899. Published as op. 2, no. 1 (Berlin,

of BelmontMusicPublishers.
1904).Usedbypermission

tionalphrasesthat serveto weighdownthe syntaxand "decorate"the

actualsubject-verb complex.Throughoutthe poemanyhumanactions
(the man pulling the ring from his finger, his kissingit, the woman
waving) tend to be surrounded or obscuredby the delicate,ornamental
play of colors. (In this sense one is remindedof such worksas Gustav
Klimt'sDerKu1,wherethe centrallove act is virtually,and tastefully,
buriedby decorative,jewel-likespotsof color.)
Of the manyturn-of-the-century Austrianor Germancomposers
attractedto Dehmel'spoetry-they includeStrauss,Pfitzner,Zemlin-
sky,MaxReger,andAntonvon Webern-Schoenbergwasperhapsthe
mostresponsiveto itsJugendstilqualities.As a songcomposer,Schoen-
berg had begun setting folklike texts by Paul Heyse and lesser
romanticsin a Brahmsianidiom.Beginningin 1897 his musictookon a
more chromaticWagneriancast as he wasdrawnto majorcontempo-
rary figures,especiallyto Dehmel,whose poems stimulatedno fewer
than fifteen worksbetween 1897 and 1906, includingthe songsop. 2
and the string sextet Transfigured Night,op. 4 (all from 1899).27
Schoenberg appears to be the only major composer to have set
Dehmel's "Erwartung"to music;he placed his splendid song at the head
of his collection op. 2 (see fig. 3). As a corollary to the poem's color
play, Schoenberg creates a distinctive five-note "color"chord, compris-

27. See my article "Schoenbergand the Poetry of RichardDehmel,"Journalof the

Institute9 (Nov. 1986): 137-79.
ArnoldSchoenberg

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1990 151

ing the tonic note E-flat and four neighbor tones dissonant to the tonic
triad. This remarkable sonority, which appears initially with the word
"meergriinen," stands in place of the conventional dominant harmony,
which normally tends toward resolution on the tonic. But the fact that
the tonic E-flat is itself present in the color chord tends to rob it of
forward motion. Schoenberg thus manipulates harmonic syntax in a
way that intimately mirrors the three static or goalless modifying
phrases of the first stanza: despite apparent motion, the music remains
rooted firmly on the tonic E-flat. Schoenberg has transformed a tradi-
tional function of tonal music-that of dominant-tonic tension-into a
nonprogressive stasis. The stasis is broken only with the verb phrase,
"scheint der Mond," when the harmony moves toward a new key area
(C major).
The sense of goallessness is enhanced by the way the vocal line
floats free of the notated barline. The first musical phrase begins on an
upbeat ("Aus dem"), before the barline. In the second, which the
listener might expect to be analogous to the first, the "upbeat" has been
shifted to the right ("neben der"), to the first beat of the bar. This
migration continues in the third phrase, where both the upbeat and
downbeat are empty in the vocal part: the preposition ("unter") has now
been shifted onto the second beat of the bar. This pattern brings the
nouns "Eiche" and "Mond" into their proper musical/grammatical
position on the notated strong beats of measures 4 and 5.
A strikingly complementary musical response to Dehmel's Jugend-
stil can be found in the work of another Viennese composer, Alexander
Zemlinsky (1872-1942). Zemlinsky occupies a somewhat enigmatic
place in the music history of the period. A brilliantly gifted composer,
he began as a protege of Brahms, became an ardent Wagnerian, then
turned briefly to the more dissonant style of Schoenberg, and by about
1920 was writing in an idiom very like that of Mahler (to whose wife,
Alma, he had given composition lessons). As Adorno observed, Zemlin-
sky was a genuine eclectic, who had a "truly seismographic capacity" to
record many different styles, without ever fully adopting any one.28
Zemlinsky and Schoenberg first met in 1895, and it was about this time
that Schoenberg, up to this point an autodidact, studied composition
briefly with his conservatory-trained friend. (In 1901 he was to marry
Zemlinsky's sister Mathilde.) Both composers began to set Dehmel texts
in about 1897; it is not hard to imagine them comparing notes and
methods in their mutual enthusiasm.
In Zemlinsky's arresting setting of Dehmel's poem "Meeraugen"
["Sea Eyes"], which dates from his late tonal or Wagnerian phase
(1898), he shows a remarkable sensitivity-seismographic, one might

28. Adorno, "Zemlinsky," Musikalische Schriften I-III, ed. Tiedemann, vol. 16 of

GesammelteSchriften(Frankfurt am Main, 1978), p. 354.

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152 WalterFrisch MusicandJugendstil

say again-to the Jugendstil-like elements in the poem (see fig. 4, which
reproduces measures 1-15). In contrast to "Erwartung," the first stanza
of this poem contains no color play, but rather a distinct absence of
color: the sea is grey, and its symbolic counterpart, the eyes, are given
no direct color attributes at all. Syntax is even more attenuated or deac-
tivated than in "Erwartung":

Was will in deinen Augen mir

dies dunkelvolle fremde Weh,
so tief und sehr?
so still und schwer
wie Stiirme, die Ruhe suchten
im Schoop der grauen See.
Versinken will, versinken mir
in dieser Augen grauen Schoop
mein Herz-und will
wie Du so still,
so schwer an Dein Herz schlagen,
dann brechen die Stiirme los!

Und will dich wiegen so mit mir

in rasender lachender Seligkeit
auf freiem Meer!
bis tief und sehr
die Herzen wieder ruhen,
ruhen von Sturm und Leid.29

[What does this strange darkened woe in your eyes want of me, so
deep and great, so still and heavy, like storms that seek peace in the
lap of the gray sea.

My heart wants to sink down, to sink me down into the gray lap of
those eyes and wants like you so still, so heavily to pound at your
heart, then the storms break loose.
And wants to cradle you with me in delirious, laughing bliss upon
the open seal Till deep and full the hearts rest again, rest from
storm and suffering.]

The whole first stanza depends grammatically on the single verb "will,"
which expresses volition but no definite action. With the exception of
the other verb, "suchten," in the dependent clause of line 5, the first

29. Dehmel, "Meeraugen," Erlsungen: Gedichte und Spriche, 2d ed. rev. (Berlin,
1898), p. 236. The text of the poem in this edition differs in a number of respects from
the text used in Zemlinsky's song (fig. 4).

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1990 153

3Iissig bewegIt.

Was will in Au-gen mir das

dei-nen dun-kel-vol-le

tt 3F ~tr4*jC~f
t*4*
iW: *T~0s~f
i fjifl't*
9Z ' i
U
t II
_ )SO I

..._ .

frSc
o rde Weh- tief und schwerwie Str me, die Rlu - - he such-ten inI

s 0F M..

<~~~~
~
6'6 CCu V==k i' ' ' "== =
L4____4. •
•. __

ossder grau en er sin-ken will, ver sin-ken

. Se" - "ir ;
0- MR1 I
1-. ,._.
4+/ " PE/
M....,.f iP i
.
W P
MAL"4-
FIG.4.-Alexander Zemlinsky, 1898. Publishedas op. 7, no. 3 (Copen-
Meeraugen,
hagen and Leipzig, 1901).

stanza consists principallyof dense adjectivaland nominal phrases (like

"dunkelvolle fremde Weh") characteristic of Jugendstil verse. The
conventional syntacticalordering seems unusuallyjumbled in the first
two lines (even by German standards):the grammaticalsubject, "Weh,"
is delayed not only by the adjectivesthat modify it, but by two adverbial
constructions, "indeinen Augen" and "mir."By comparison,the order-
ing of the subordinateclause in lines 4-5 is much clearer.
Zemlinskyresponds to this elusive syntax much in the way Schoen-
berg does in "Erwartung":measures 1-4 involve a static repetition in
the piano of a one-measure phrase that is literally rooted on the home
key, F minor. The chromatic inner parts remain only a surface decora-
tion of the prolonged tonic. The steady, repetitive quarter-note
motion, which is the rhythmic correlate of the harmonic stasis, is taken
up by the voice and continued through the middle of measure 7.
In the meantime, the harmony has at last begun to move. This
happens first with the enharmonic reinterpretation of the tonic F as E-
sharp and the approach to the remote key of F-sharpminor in measure
6. With the second half of this measure, Zemlinsky initiates an

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154 WalterFrisch Music and Jugendstil

extended circle-of-fifths progression in the bass (D-G-C-F-B-flat-E-

flat-A-flat), which continues up to measure 10. This bass motion takes
on a life of its own and continues right across the phrase juncture in
measure 8, subsuming along the way a brief return to the tonic F
minor. The harmonic elision is an elegant musical analogue to the
dependent statusof the clause "dieRuhe suchten."
What is perhaps most significant about this five-measure progres-
sion is that the motion it creates is illusory: at measure 11 we end up
where we departed in measure 5 (and touched on in measure 8), in F
minor. In this sense both the chromatic activity in the inner parts of
measures 1-4 and the larger circle-of-fifthsprogression in measures 6-
10 reflect the kind of goalless movement that can be taken as character-
istic of musicalJugendstil (and that Dahlhaustraces back to Wagner).

The above examples are taken from tonal music-music with a

central key that establishes a hierarchy and a continuity of harmonic
relations. Both Schoenberg and Zemlinsky achieve Jugendstil-like
effects by subverting certain of these relations. The devices or tech-
niques, such as Schoenberg's five-note "color" chord or Zemlinsky's
circle of fifths, must still be heard against a backgroundof the expecta-
tion of tonal resolution. Beginning in 1908, with his so-called
emancipation of the dissonance, Schoenberg renounced many of the
rules of conventional harmonic practice, especially that of orienting a
composition around a central referential key. This dramaticchange of
style coincided with Schoenberg's turn in his vocal music to a different
poet (and Dehmel's rival), Stefan George. Poems from George's collec-
tion, Der siebente Ring (1907), furnished texts for the final two
movements of the Second String Quartet, op. 10 (1907-8), Schoen-
berg's last pieces in a definite key.
In the poems of Der siebenteRing critics have observed a distinct
change in George's style, a turn to a more "lapidary,imagelesslanguage
... which has completely broken with Jugendstil" and is on the border
of expressionism.30It is striking, then, that for Schoenberg'snext major
composition, the song cycle The Book of the Hanging Gardens, op. 15
(1908-9), which is also his first sustained work in the atonal style, he
should turn back to earlier poems of George more directly inspired by
Jugendstil.3' The Hanging Gardenspoems were written in 1895, when

30. Claude David, "Stefan George und der Jugendstil," inj, p. 401.
31. The full title of the volume was Die Bilcher der Hirten- und Preisgedichte,der Sagen
und Sdnge und der hiingenden Gdrten. The Hanging Gardens is a collection of thirty-one
poems, of which Schoenberg set the central section of fifteen to music.

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1990 155

George was directly involved with some of the artists in the movement,
several of whom exploited his striking physiognomy in their works (see
fig. 5, by the well-knownartistJan Toorop).S In short, the aesthetic of
Jugendstil may have been a direct stimulus for Schoenberg's new musi-
cal idiom.
The second poem of George's cycle manifests a characteristic
tension between an utterly regular trochaic tetrameter and a deacti-
vated poetic discourse:

Hain in diesen paradiesen

Wechselt ab mit bliitenwiesen
HallenIbuntbemalten fliesen.
Schlankerst6rche schnaibelkraiuseln
Teiche die von fischen schillerni
VWgel-reihenmatten scheines
Auf den schiefen firsten trillern
Und die goldnen binsen saiuseln-
Doch mein traum verfolgt nur eines.33

[Groves in these paradises alternate with fields of flowers, halls,

gaily colored flagstones. Beaks of slender storks ripple, ponds
shimmering with fishes, faintly gleaming rows of birds trill on the
sloping ridges, and the golden rushes rustle. Yet my dream pursues
only one goal.]

Up until its last line the poem is, like Dehmel's "Erwartung,"highly
descriptiveand painterly. Individualimages, especiallythat of the beaks
of slender storks seem to derive from visual Jugendstil. Typical of
George and of literaryJugendstil in general are the many compound
adjectives and nouns, such as "buntbemalten" and "bliitenwiesen,"
which contribute to the deactivation of the language: syntax becomes
distorted or weighed down with verbal ornament. George's poem gives
the impression of motion that is somehow held in place, static. The
verbs "kraiuseln"[ripple], "schillern" [shimmer, iridesce], "trillern"
[trill], and "siuseln" [rustle] all connote a kind of gentle, nonteleologi-
cal activity.
In the Jugendstil poetic language of the Hanging Gardens,rich in
imagery but liberated from naturalistic representation, Schoenberg

32. See chap. 8 of KM, "The Stefan George Circle," pp. 81-91, where Weiss
demonstrates that George was also an important model for Kandinsky. George's reforms
in print style and typography are discussed in Roswitha Riegger-Baurmann, "Schrift im
Jugendstil in Deutschland," inJ, pp. 230-40.
33. The distinctive style of punctuation here follows that in George's own collected
works, which he carefully designed and supervised. See George, Die Biicher der Hirten- und
Preisgedichte,der Sagen und Sfnge und der hingenden Gairten,vol. 3 of Gesamt-Ausgabe(Ber-
lin, 1930), p. 104.

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156 WalterFrisch

? ?:. .
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MusicandJugendstil

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found the perfect reflection of his own musical tendencies at the time.
In an often-cited statement that was published in the program at the
premiere of the cycle, Schoenberg explained that in the songs of op. 15
he was "'conscious of having broken through every restriction of a
bygone aesthetic.'"34AsSchorske has suggested:

George's verse peculiarly lent itself to the bold musical task upon
which the composer now embarked: the dissolution of tonality as
the cohesive structuralcenter of music. The verse had the formal-
istic clarity of the classical garden itself. Sturdy in meter as in
sound, it provided a firm poetic frame within which to create a
music appropriate to a world in which, to the composer, the ontic
hierarchyhad lost its meaning and its truth.s5

34. Arnold Schoenberg, cited in Willi Reich, Schoenberg:

A CriticalBiography,trans.
Leo Black(New York, 1971), p. 49.
35. Schorske,Fin-de-sidcle
Vienna,p. 349.

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1990 157

Despite the common label "atonal" (eschewed by Schoenberg

himself), the style of op. 15 abounds with associationsand implications
of tonality, as has often been recognized.A6Although it has no central
tonic, song 2 (see fig. 6) is clearly "tonal"in the sense that it is centered
on certain recurring sonorities, such as the opening chord D-F-
natural-A-C-sharp. This chord and its continuation, in which the bass
moves up from D to E-flat, recur at the very end of the song (measures
11-12).
Another bow to conventional tonal practice is the rhythmic-
motivic coherence, which is imparted by the rising four-note figure
heard first in the voice at "wechselt ab mit" (x in the example). This
figure stands out as the melodic climax of the first vocal phrase. It
reappears prominently in the piano in measure 4, with intervals and
rhythm slightly altered, as G-sharp, A-sharp, B-sharp, F-natural
(markedx'). In measures 8-9, the figure x' reappearsstill more emphat-
ically in the piano at the same pitch level (augmented and treated
imitatively).At the end of the song, in measures 11 and 13, we hear the
last three notes of x' again at their proper pitch level (with enharmonic
respelling in measure 13). These statements enclose the return of the
original x in the voice at "-folgt nur Eines." This reappearance of x
forms the conclusion of a larger return of the vocal melody of the first
two measuresof the song, markedy and z in fig. 6. Where y and z at first
overlapped, or comprised a continuous melody (measures 1-2), they
are now separatedby an abrupt sforzandoand the dramaticintrusion of
x' in the piano (measures9-12).
The main point to be made about the musical features I have
isolated is that, like Jugendstil visual imagery and literary syntax, they
are defamiliarized;they place familiar things-in this case, recogniza-
ble gestures or procedures from tonal music of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries-in unfamiliarcontexts., The same could be said

36. There is a large literature on Schoenberg's op. 15. Among the most valuable or
stimulating studies are "SG"; Dahlhaus, "Schbnbergs Lied 'Streng ist uns das gliick und
spr6de,'" SchKnbergund Andere: GesammelteAufsatze zur Neuen Musik (Mainz, 1978), pp.
172-80; Albrecht Diimling, Die fremden Klainge der hiingenden Gairten: Die Uffentliche
Einsamkeit der Neuen Musik am Beispiel von Arnold Sch'dnbergund Stefan George (Munich,
1981); Karl Ehrenforth, Ausdruck und Form: SchdnbergsDurchbruch zu Atonalitait in den
George-Liedernop. 15 (Bonn, 1963); Philip Friedheim, "Tonality and Structure in the Early
Works of Schoenberg" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1963), pp. 418-52; Hertz, "The
Bookof the Hanging Gardens,"The Tuning of the Word,pp. 134-66; Lawrence Kramer, Music
and Poetry:The Nineteenth Centuryand After (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), pp. 161-68;
David Lewin, "Vocal Meter in Schoenberg's Atonal Music, with a Note on Serial
Haupt-
stimme," In TheoryOnly 6 (May 1982): 12-36, esp. pp. 25-33; Jerry MacDean, "Evolution
and Unity in Schoenberg's George Songs, op. 15" (Ph.D. diss., University of
Michigan,
1971); and Schorske, Fin-de-sikcleVienna, pp. 344-54.
37. This procedure bears an affinity to what the Russian formalist Victor Shklov-
sky, writing about the same time (1917), called defamiliarization. See Shklovsky, "Art as
Technique," in Russian Formalist Criticism:Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J.
Reis (Lincoln, Nebr., 1965), pp. 12ff.

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 Gesan 4C
Huhigi liwegungz -i,•?
II. t

...
z
Z •

v •
il - rn.
h~nsch

(4 t
..;;..i??-~-
-OR ill I'•l,
il ' l ?jj , ! Wt,I I , .
wqr l rl it
.. . .?
......... ..... .....

pp
Klavier
.x: P...... ..
("

--
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t
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.
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j-4

FIG.6.-Arnold Schoenberg, song 2 from Bookof theHangingGardens,op. 15 (Vienna, 1

Publishers.

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1990 159

of the many vocal appoggiaturasand half-step resolutions in the song,

as well as the unmistakablecadence to B major in measure 5.
The procedure in the HangingGardenssong is thus more or less the
inverse of that used in the songs "Erwartung"and "Meeraugen."In the
latter two, static or nonprogressive gestures are interpolated into a
fundamentally conventional tonal language; in the former, gestures
from that conventional language are now the foreign elements, placed
in a radical nontonal context. If Jugendstil in art represents a step on
the way to nonobjectivity, because it called for a pure Formkunstand
because it exploited naturalor human subjectsmore for the qualities of
line than for their imagery or iconography, then Schoenberg's song
cycle can be said to do something very similar with musical materials.
Harmonies, themes, rhythmic gestures, formal returns-all deriving
clearly from nineteenth-century practice-are used in the service of a
new kind of musicalFormkunst.
The next step, if one takes a deterministic view of style change, is
expressionism, in which the world of outward forms, still beautiful in
Jugendstil, becomes grotesquely distorted, becomes (in theory at least)
a pure expression of the inner self. Schoenberg's name has long been
associated with expressionism, and the label seems especially appropri-
ate in a work like the monodrama Erwartung,op. 17 (1909). It is also
with this work-notoriously difficult to analyze precisely because of the
relative lack of the kind of referential motives, harmonies, and returns
found in the Hanging Gardenscycle-that Schoenberg may be said to
abandon the aesthetic ofJugendstil for that of expressionism.

5
Brinkmannhas suggested that "the question of Jugendstilin music
in particulardemands a departure from the methods used to research
into the Great Masters.""8 He recommends looking at some of the many
Kleinmeister composing in the smaller forms around 1900. (Such an
approach certainly has the advantage of unearthing some interesting
and long-forgotten music.) But it seems to me that the concept of
Jugendstil might be more useful precisely in the opposite way, in look-
ing into the development of a great composer like Schoenberg, just as
for Weiss it has proved valuable in illuminating the career of Kandin-
sky.
It was probably Adorno who first proposed considering Schoen-
berg in this light. In 1963, writing of Schoenberg's Herzgew'ichse
(1911)
and Pierrot Lunaire (1912), texts that make extensive use of the tech-

38. Brinkmann, "On the Problem of Establishing 'Jugendstil,'" p. 29.

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160 Walter Frisch Music and Jugendstil

niques and imagery of Jugendstil, Adorno noted, "Both works

transcend the Jugendstil out of which they arise. For the musical
expression assumes an immediacy that no longer requires any meta-
phor: the music consumes the images and speaks directly from
within."39Adorno seems to be saying that Jugendstil, still relying on
concrete imagery, is the final step before abstraction, where das Innen
can be presented directly, without mediation.40 Thus Schoenberg's
atonal music fulfills the tendency of Jugendstil, as do Kandinsky's
nonobjective paintings. Adorno finds this shift from Jugendstil to
expressionismso "authentic"in Schoenberg because it arisesnot from a
style change per se, but from a technical, compositional need: "The
solution of strictly compositional problems becomes a historical trans-
formation of style." In this way, then, Schoenberg's work "contains
neatly within itself the whole history of the spirit of his time.""'
We need not buy the whole of Adorno's rigidly deterministic and
zeitgeist-bound view of history to feel that his conclusions ring true,
especially for Schoenberg's work. The same points could not, I think,
be made about Richard Strauss's apparently similar development
during this period. It is perhaps tempting to view his Salomeof 1905 in
the context of Jugendstil and to view El'ektraof 1909 as going over
toward expressionism.CertainlyOscar Wilde'sSalomeplay of 1893 and
Hedwig Lachmann's faithful translation of it, set by Strauss, bear
strong traces of literaryJugendstil, especially in the static, repetitious,
symbolic use of language.42(The original Aubrey Beardsley illustra-
tions are classic examples of art nouveau.) But Strauss'sluxuriant and
white-hot music does not on the whole reflect these qualities; to me it
seems strangelydisengaged from Wilde's literary-dramaticdevices. As I
have been characterizing it, Jugendstil music is not especially erotic,
dynamic, and lavish, but somewhat cool, sublimated, and nonprogres-
sive, as in the Schoenberg song we have examined.
It is this latter kind of music that incorporates compositional
impulses analogous to those evident in the visual and verbal arts: a
tendency toward the abstract and a loosening of the syntax that had

39. Adorno, "Uber einige Arbeiten Arnold Sch6nbergs," MusikalischeSchriftenIV,

p. 344. I am grateful to Anthony Barone, a member of my graduate seminar at Columbia
University in Fall 1987, for bringing this particular essay to my attention. I also wish to
thank the other members of the seminar for many stimulating discussions on the topic of
music and Jugendstil.
40. Elsewhere Adorno remarks on the broader relationship between Jugendstil and
expressionism as follows: "Jugendstilwas the first collective attempt to inject, by means of
art, a new meaning into a world that had lost all meaning. The attempt failed .... Jugend-
stil was genuinely exploded by expressionism" (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C.
Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno and Tiedemann [London and New York, 1984], p. 381).
41. Adorno, "Uber einige Arbeiten Arnold Schainbergs," p. 344.
42. On the play's Jugendstil qualities, see Hajek, LiterarischerJugendstil,pp. 40-62.

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1990 161

traditionally governed expression. To be sure, these tendencies had

been present in Western art music well before 1890, even well before
Wagner, just as they are evident in poetry before Stephane Mallarme
and George and in art before the Munich secession. But if we use
Jugendstil less as a kind of cultural Geiger counter ("Aha! There's a
trace!")or labeling device than as a heuristic concept, perhaps it will
have served adequately to enhance our understandingof the origins of
musical modernism in the seductive, enigmatic world of the fin de
siecle.

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