Why does the impulse toward lyric utterance survive in the culturally inhospitable environment of musical modernism, and how does it do so? There is nothing obvious about the continued and even increased attraction to lyric in pivotal strands of musical modernism. In terms of their stylistic connotations, modernism and lyric would appear to be opposites. The literature on modernist music has frequently relied on a juxtaposition between “modernist” and “lyrical” styles, a binary that in turn maps onto a whole set of binaries that structured so much of the discourse on twentieth-century art music until the past couple decades. Those binaries might include angularity vs. smoothness, intellectualism vs. emotionality, forbiddingness vs. accessibility, rarefaction vs. warmth, masculinity vs. femininity. Many of us might cringe at these binaries now, especially given that they were, and in some circles continue to be, employed to deem pieces and composers that fall on the side of “lyrical” less worthy of study. Such canonizing judgments occurred despite or because of the fact that, in the twentieth century, being lyrical was more correlated with being popular than being modernist. One way of seeing the stakes around lyric’s place in modernism is to historicize the binary: what did we get out of pitting modernism and lyric against each other, which side won, and why? This question is still worth asking even though the current thinking on modernism trends toward neutralizing any and all binaries, and here I’m taking a hint from Christopher Chowrimootoo, who questions our motives when we try to ignore modernism’s propensity to be judgmental.
I’m interested both in the ways in which modernism and lyric feel like opposites and in the fact that some of the most iconic examples of musical modernism confront lyric head-on. Such confrontation might occur via lyric genres as in Schoenberg’s watershed George Lieder (op. 15). Op. 15 is a great example of how modernist forays into lyric genres often upended what many would consider to be lyric, both at the time of composition and today. This upending is exactly why it’s so curious that such works retained the association with lyric—the aesthetic impact of which can’t be explained simply by slapping on the label “irony.” Yet scholars have mostly done their best to ignore what it would mean to think of a work like op. 15 as a lyric one. Often such works are valorized precisely insofar as they fail to be lyrical. Modernist confrontation with lyric might also occur within larger works, in moments of lyricism that often feel like an outpouring of otherwise restrained emotion. While such moments are frequently audience favorites—think of the “Great Bear aria” in Britten’s Peter Grimes or the final orchestral interlude in Berg’s Wozzeck—they are generally sources of embarrassment in the literature. What I’m saying is that it causes problems when a work identifies as both modernist and lyric, and that these problems have to do with how these categories influence reception.
If the central question of my dissertation is why and how lyric persists in modernist conditions, this question has a Cavellian twin: how did the persistence of the lyric impulse even come to be an issue worth investigating? I’m going to show that the problem of lyric’s survival takes on a mythic, life-or-death intensity in some of musical modernism’s most striking moments, and yet there are many cultural environments across time and place in which lyric’s survival hasn’t even arisen as an issue. It is not remarkable that musical modernism at times embraced lyric, at other times adopted other modes. What is remarkable is how charged lyric became in key modernist pieces. When it took on this charge, lyric was not just one mode among many: upon its survival seemed to depend the very cohesion of human society.
How and why did lyric become charged in this way? What did lyric seem to provide that other modes didn’t—and why, at this moment in history, did its powers nevertheless appear increasingly, urgently insufficient to society’s needs? As this gap between society’s need for lyric and lyric’s capacity to deliver widened, composers wrote pieces that envisioned a desperate solution: to destroy lyric for the sake of lyric’s renewal. All of the works I’m studying juxtapose an old lyric that must die with a new lyric that must, but has not yet, come into being. In addition to explaining how these composers would have conceptualized the “old” lyric and why it seemed increasingly insufficient, I’ll ultimately aim to define this new lyric that is imagined within the works. I’ll argue that these composers saw lyric as a ritual enactment of the social, or, even more fundamentally, the basic orientation toward interpersonal relationality without which ethics—and integrated personhood—would have no meaning. The difference between the old lyric and the new lyric is one of “person”: as these composers would have imagined it, the old lyric was only conceivable in the first person or, at best, the third person, but the new lyric would be in the second person.
The way I’m describing the old vs. new lyric may seem overly abstract and convoluted, and you might think that I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. You might think what I’m talking about is the turn away from Romantic lyric, a turn that you might also think was historically overdetermined. A historian focusing primarily on style and convention might say that Romantic lyric had simply gone out of style by the early twentieth century (leaving aside the curious fact that many of the most beloved icons of Romantic lyricism, like Puccini’s arias or Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder, were composed during the twentieth century). As Walter Benjamin would observe, “the lyric poet with his halo is antiquated”; note, however, that despite his tongue-in-cheek remark, Benjamin did not attribute this change to the vicissitudes of fashion but to a fundamental change in the nature of experience in modernity. One doesn’t have to go as far as Benjamin to see how early-twentieth-century experience might have cast Romantic lyric in a cynical light, especially if we caricature Romantic lyric as a sentimental idealization of the enchanting and soothing Orphic voice. In the aftermath of wartime atrocities enacted under the aegis of purity and beauty, beauty’s supposed relationship to goodness inevitably came under suspicion, and not least in the domain of what we now call classical music. If lyric could enchant, it could also seduce; if it could soothe, it could also drug. Critical theory pursued and heightened this moralization of pleasurable aesthetics—the negative valence placed on aesthetic experiences like pleasure and comfort, or, worse, captivation and succumbing. From the perspective of postwar theorists like Theodor Adorno or Paul Celan who valorized poetry that could write itself out of wholeness, Romantic lyric’s attachment to beauty and wholeness guaranteed its falseness, its inability to speak the truth about experience, since early-twentieth-century experience was neither beautiful nor whole. Adorno’s famous statement that “poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” is just one example of postwar intellectuals rejecting lyric, or adopting it only in broken forms.
But the story of how and when Romantic lyric became a problem is deeper than a story of stylistic shift, and historically reaches much further back than the wars. We can better understand why lyric would accumulate a life-or-death significance in a modernist context if we recognize that lyric, as one of the main inheritances from the Romantic era, held profound cultural meanings—and that these cultural meanings underwent equally profound shifts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If we look back to the turn of the century, we see that art music milieus were already in turmoil about what lyric for a modern age ought to be, not just for the sake of lyric itself, but for the sake of what it was thought to represent. Schoenberg’s op. 15 premiered at a moment in history when tensions surrounding Romantic models of lyric reception were rapidly becoming impossible to ignore. Savvy audience members no longer found it obvious how to attend or respond to lyric performances. Debates about concert etiquette and a proliferation of innovative performance models were symptomatic of an ontological confusion: petty spats about the proper use of lighting in song recitals were, on a deeper level, motivated by uncertainty about what defined lyric and what it was for.
Meanwhile, composers like Schoenberg were writing pieces, like op. 15, that aggressively challenged the frameworks through which many audience members were still accustomed to hearing lyric. Such pieces invoked lyric via convention, historical reference, form, or genre while denying what many audience members still expected from lyric: beauty in the Kantian sense, a well-regulated, balanced, integrated aesthetic experience. But these expectations went beyond mere aesthetic appraisal, for as the contemporary critical reception shows, audiences didn’t just expect lyric works to sound a certain way; they also expected to get something out of lyric. That something had to do, I’ll argue, with self-improvement and the broader culture’s aspirations to bloom and flourish (aspirations that were often and increasingly nationalistic). Works like op. 15 fundamentally challenged these old assumptions about what lyric reception consisted of. They suggested that insofar as lyric was a ritual enactment of integrated personhood, the experience of modernity ensured that this integration could no longer be defined as the autonomy of the individual. To have integrated personhood in modernity had everything to do with our ability to see each other in the second person: to look at one another in the eyes and recognize their otherness. As Levinas would later teach, ethics begins not when we recognize our sameness but when we recognize our difference.
One way to describe the old model of lyric reception is via the symbol of the circle. In the old model, successful lyric constitutes a circle. The reception around lyric genres at the turn of the century was shot through with a Romantic belief that lyrical beauty simultaneously proves and guarantees the moral, even spiritual ideal of integrated wholeness. The well-regulated, balanced, integrated qualities of the lyric utterance were taken as evidence of the beauty of the lyric speaker’s soul as well as proof of the cohesion of the society of which the speaker was part. Sometimes, the aesthetic qualities of lyric were also taken as tools by which balanced and integrated qualities might be instilled in the audience. By proxy, lyric was charged with the job of facilitating the thriving oneness of society as a whole.
The Trauma Rover 