The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
By Alex Ross, Farrar Straus Giroux, 623

At a New York gathering around 1952, John Cage, the Zen avant-garde of that moment, declared, "Beethoven was wrong!" It was a declaration that showed both Cage's bold determination to step outside of what he considered 'the European vogue of profundity' as well as, one sense, his anxiety with this very unshakeable influence. We'll see in Ross's The Rest Is Noise, the same pugnacious refrain will echo through the entire music landscape of the twentieth century.

Sometimes, the musicians revolted not so much against the dominating influence of a composer, but against the domineering authority. Shostakovich lived his life in constant fear of disapproval of the tyrant, Stalin. His disapproval could mean a sudden disappearance or, if the central authority deemed the composer as too inconvenient to be made to disappear because of his popularity, the systematic disappearances of his next of kin. While on the surface he might appear subservient to the prevalent system, he was to show his defiance by inserting surreptitiously in his compositions notes that spelled his personal motto, in German spellings, D.S.C.H, Dmitri Schostakowitsch. He never forgave himself for not openly defying the authority.

Long after the demise of Stalin, and acclaimed worldwide, he was to meet with Benjamin Britten, the relatively much younger British composer, and proclaimed, "You great composer; I little composer." So great was his burden of guilt for not standing up to the dominating regime and the pressure he had to endure, first from Stalin and then Khrushchev. Whereas Stalin demanded that Soviet art should 'mirror' the ideology of the regime, Hitler dismissed publicly 'scientific worldview' in musical terms.

Hitler was an aficionado of classical music. He once attended an orchestra performance conducted by Mahler. He was so impressed with Mahler that it's said the way he raised his hand when delivering his speeches reminded one of the Maestro when conducting. Instead of suppressing the proliferation of music, Hitler was to encourage certain favorable composers to create or perform works for the cause of the Third Reich. In Hitler's rise, there was a false sense of blooming support for the arts. This led to Thomas Mann, who fled to the United States, to state that 'great art is allied to great evil.' Hitler's love for music was of course inspired, like most in Germany of that period, by Wagner's 'pure humanity and all that is noble in man', whose anti-Semitic rants stood out in the chorus of the time. Richard Strauss was considered the 'model' Jew, the rare acceptable few. We are told in passing how even in his old age Richard Strauss's allegiance to Hitler remained deplorably unwavering.