Name: 未解答的問題》1973年5《二十世紀的危機》伯恩斯坦-諾頓。 (The Unanswered Question 1973 5 The XXth Century Crisis Bernstein Norton)
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Duration: 2 h 13 min 58 s
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Our lecture tonight on the 20th Century Crisis is going to be somewhat different in format

in that we’ll be starting directly with a piece of music on film

and, as usual, any of you who’d like to follow the score at the desk

this Spanish Rhapsody of Ravel's is totally unaware -or at least unconcerned-

that a crisis lurks just around the corner,

a life-and-death crisis in musical semantics.

But this music has no worries about the future,

it has a childlike faith that the tonality, on which it feeds, is infinite;

and enriched by bigger and better ambiguities,

both phonological and syntactic ones, chromatic and metrical ones.

all those elusive and seductive Either/Or's that we found

last time in Berlioz and in Wagner and Debussy; they're all there, and then some.

But all that wandering chromaticism we've been listening to

and Ravel is telling us, through his music, that he sees no reason

why it can't go on forever similarly controlled and contained,

it's only 1908, and there's still Rosenkavalier to be written,

and who knows how many other similar delights.

a disturbance, a prescient feeling that all this smug optimism

can't last –neither tonality, nor figurative painting,

nor syntactical poetry, nor, indeed, the seemingly endless growth

of the bourgeoisie, or of colonial wealth, or of imperial power.

Sensitive minds are beginning to hint at a social collapse

A premature flicker of fascism is already perceptible:

Marinetti's famous Manifesto of Futurism is about to appear,

glorifying war, the machine, speed, danger

and calling for the destruction of the past with all its traditions,

At the same time, on the other side of the musical moon,

Mahler is writing his Ninth Symphony, agonizing over

his reluctant and protracted farewell to tonality.

Even Scriabin in his Prometheus is waging a losing battle

is writing a Fourth Symphony filled with unresolved doubts and terrors.

And these troubling presentiments are particularly intense in and around Vienna

are seen by the Viennese polemicist Karl Kraus.

(I don’t know if you know that name, but it's a very important

Seen by Karl Kraus as glaringly reflected in the degeneration of language,

and are cruelly exposed in a harsh light of his critical writings.

If you don’t know the name Karl Krauss, look him up,

but who will live to do something about it.

in which he has stretched those Wagnerian tonal ambiguities we found last week

The problems presented by Tristan and Isolde have now

grown to a point necessitating some radical solution.

The works have become not only chromatically unmanageable

Like the dinosaur, they've simply grown too big.

Composers like Reger and Pfitzner are vying with each other

for some kind of Oscar to be awarded for the longest, thickest, and most

And Schoenberg too made his bid with an early

super-Wagnerian monster work called Gurrelieder.

They were all, including Mahler, swept along by

the mighty "wave of the future" that Wagner, in his hyper-romantic egomania,

But how big can you get, how chromatically ambiguous, how syntactically overstuffed

without collapsing of your own sheer weight like the dinosaur?

There were just too many notes, too many inner voices, too many meanings.

And this was what caused the crisis in Ambiguity.

So, now in 1908, Schoenberg is already giving up the struggle

to preserve tonality, to contain those post-Wagnerian chromaticisms.

In this very year he is writing a Second String Quartet

that clearly announces the upheaval and his renunciation of tonality.

In the last movement of this quartet he resorts to the human voice,

a soprano who sings Stefan George's prophetic words:

"Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten" ("I feel air from another planet").

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未解答的問題》1973年5《二十世紀的危機》伯恩斯坦-諾頓。 (The Unanswered Question 1973 5 The XXth Century Crisis Bernstein Norton)

phrase

sense

life

crisis