Of the many innovations in classical music during the Weimar Republic, perhaps none was more decisive—and more enraging to the Nazis—than jazz and its offshoots. Ernst Krenek, Kurt Weill, Erwin Schulhoff, and many other Europeans used rags and jazz motifs in their music. Hindemith’s Ragtime (Well-Tempered) from 1921 is a sardonic, fun-loving example. Here, the C-minor fugue from J. S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier is irreverently combined with dancing and strutting bitonalities, culminating in a crashing brass climax and a mock-heroic major-key conclusion.
Hindemith admired Bach but believed that he had been so deified that he had been turned into “a banal figure,” robbed of his humanity. Of Ragtime (Well-Tempered), he mused, “Do you think that Bach is turning in his grave? On the contrary: If Bach had been alive today, he might very well have invented the shimmy or at least incorporated it in respectable music. And perhaps, in doing so, he might have used a theme from The Well-Tempered Clavier by a composer who had Bach’s standing in his eyes.”
Hindemith continued to be both a Bach and a jazz fan. He published a book on Bach in 1952, and when he came to the US, he attended a Duke Ellington performance.
Despite his talents as a composer and conductor, Zemlinsky is often overshadowed by his colleagues who enjoyed more widespread acclaim in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Among them were Arnold Schoenberg, who was Zemlinsky’s pupil and eventual brother-in-law, as well as Gustav Mahler and Erich Korngold. Zemlinsky immigrated to the United States after Austria’s annexation to Germany in 1938. Four years later, he died in exile (and relative obscurity) in Larchmont, New York, just outside New York City.
In his Symphonische Gesänge, Zemlinsky employs German translations of poems by writers of the Harlem Renaissance. A Jewish composer setting texts by Black poets represented everything abhorrent to the Nazis. Except for a broadcast on Radio Brno in 1935, the songs remained un-performed until 1964, when they were revived in Baltimore. (Due to the racially charged texts, the work remains infrequently performed to this day.) Zemlinsky selected his texts from the remarkable anthology Afrika singt—a large collection of Black American poetry from 1929, translated to German—that circulated in Germany and Austria. (Langston Hughes, one of the featured writers, turned out to be the most important musical figure, later providing the libretto for Weill’s Street Scene and the inspiration for songs by Elie Siegmeister and other late–20th-century composers.) At its worst, this phenomenon represented, in the words of Alex Ross, “the manipulation of dimly understood African American imagery in behalf of shallow exotic atmosphere”; at its most eloquent, as in Zemlinsky’s songs, it resulted in works of desolating power.
Despite the elaborate crossover—a Viennese Jewish man setting Black American poems translated into German—the music feels surprisingly authentic. Indeed, it is closer to the text, especially to the bleak concision of Hughes. Intensely passionate, it has not a wasted note nor a trace of sentimentality.
The Symphonische Gesänge open and close violently with poems depicting lynchings and their aftermath. The quietly ominous “Lied aus Dixieland,” a setting of Hughes’s “Song for a Dark Girl,” leaves the victim in the hands of a “white Lord Jesus,” an ambivalent deliverance at best. The D minor of this opening song becomes major by the final “Arabeske,” a bitterly ironic gesture given the image of a lynching. Like other spirituals, the Symphonische Gesänge invoke divine intervention as a last alternative to oppression, but they are only cautiously hopeful about its efficacy, and sometimes sarcastically dismissive.
Zemlinsky is sometimes accused of being timid and indecisive, never sure whether to invoke the legacy of Gustav Mahler or Schoenberg. In these defiant settings, he invokes neither, but creates an idiom of American songs, one he continued to mine in the African American settings in his Zwölf Lieder, Op. 27 (which uses European poems). The music is incisive and stinging. “Lied der Baumwollpacker,” for example, features barren octaves and clanking percussion to suggest the shackles of slavery. Equally austere is “Totes braunes Mädel,” depicting a Black mother who must pawn her wedding ring to pay for her daughter’s funeral, so she can “lay her out in white.” The scathing irony of this poem is conveyed with powerful restraint. By contrast, the pounding timpani in “Afrikanischer Tanz” and “Übler Bursche” sound like a lethal sneer.
In these songs, Zemlinsky pared down the elaborate late Romanticism and early modernism and expressionism of his earlier style. What is left is a new clarity and spareness, exemplified most eloquently by the melancholy wind solos, mysterious woodblocks, and open harmonies in “Erkenntnis,” which whispers goodbye to the “great dark city” of Harlem.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the Harlem Renaissance gave rise to notable poets like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Frank Smith Horne, who used their art to celebrate African American culture and identity. Their groundbreaking work challenged racial stereotypes, promoted social justice, and celebrated the resilience and beauty of the African American experience. Their poetry captured themes of empowerment, pride, and the fight for equality, epitomizing the spirit of defiance and creativity. Through their poignant and powerful verses, these poets continue to inspire and illuminate the richness of African American literature.
Despite ongoing efforts to combat racism and promote inclusivity, use of the so-called “N-word” still evokes strong emotions and sparks heated discussions about race, power, and privilege in America. While some argue that it can be used to challenge stereotypes and critique systemic injustices, others maintain that the word carries too much historical pain and trauma to be reclaimed.
In Horne’s poem “Arabesque,” he delves into the complexities of human emotions and relationships, exploring themes of love, loss, and longing. His poetry reflects a deep sensitivity to the human experience, capturing life’s joys and sorrows with a profound empathy. A man—a Black man—hanging in a tree while little girls play on a perfect summer’s day is filled with irony and juxtaposition that perfectly describes life in America during the Harlem Renaissance and dare I say even today.
Ultimately, the debate around race is one America cannot escape—it is built into our history and baked into all parts of our society. This poem and our decision to maintain some of its harsh text hopefully encourages us to continue the debate of how we move forward with our democracy where all people are created equal and have full freedom. It reflects the ongoing and intricate struggle to grapple with America’s legacy of racism and the power dynamics inherent in language and culture.
—Lester Lynch
Mahler is such a popular composer in the 21st century—a kindred spirit who so uncannily anticipated the volatile eclecticism of our time—that we easily forget how recently he entered the active repertory. Arnold Schoenberg declared in 1912 that “today’s young people worship Mahler like a God. His time will come in, at most, five or 10 years.” This, alas, did not happen; from his own time in the late 19th and early 20th century until the 1960s, Mahler’s symphonies were considered exotic and chaotic (at best), or simply unplayable. He was programmed only occasionally, though a few die-hard conductor devotees like Bruno Walter and Maurice Abravanel tried to keep his flame alive.
Not until Leonard Bernstein—himself, like Mahler, a charismatic, larger than life composer-conductor—did a maestro emerge with the clout to definitively declare that Mahler’s “time has come” and present him as the ultimate “Amen-sayer to symphonic music.” Bernstein had no problem with Mahler being “excessive,” “overblown,” and the very definition of “overwrought”—all the words critics trotted out to attack what they considered vulgar, and that so many used for half a century to keep Mahler out of the repertory (along with a healthy dollop of anti-Semitism).
Mahler needs to be sprawling and larger than life, for he exactly straddles the 19th and 20th centuries, recapitulating his own era and forecasting the next, in broad gestures as well as small details. In Carnegie Hall’s traversal of all the Mahler symphonies in 2008–2009 with the Staatskapelle Berlin, Pierre Boulez commented on how Mahler walked a treacherous border between “sentimentality and irony,” “nostalgia and criticism,” “meticulousness of detail,” and “grandeur of design,” demanding that we listen in a “manner more varied, more ambiguous, and richer” than we ordinarily do.
Certainly no Mahler symphony makes this demand more emphatically than the Sixth. This symphony is often singled out as the most forbiddingly complex and “modern” of the composer’s nine. Yet much of its material—the riveting march that opens the work, the brutal hammer blow that closes it, the bucolic slow movement complete with cowbells—is surprisingly basic and instantly memorable, like the motifs in a movie score. What disconcerts is Mahler’s seeming determination to deconstruct—even smash—what he painstakingly creates, a bit like Ravel in La valse but on a much more epic and disturbing scale. Nowhere do we feel more viscerally the tension between the longing for a vanishing Romantic universe and the need to break free—violently, if necessary.
The fateful hammer blows crashing through the Sixth, and its gloomy drift toward minor keys from major ones, have given rise to its “Tragic” label, yet when Mahler wrote it in 1903–1904, he was happily married to Alma and was the proud father of his second daughter. (He also completed his most tragic song cycle, Kindertotenlieder, during this period.) This seeming contradiction has given rise to all manner of convoluted explanations, but Mahler had already written what he called a comedy, his Fifth Symphony; like the Greeks, he was completing the mask, following comedy with a tragedy.
Just as he poured his most raucously jubilant feelings into the Fifth, here (as he told a friend after the final rehearsal) he wanted to express “the cruelties I’ve suffered and the pains I’ve felt.” Perhaps the bright state of his life gave him the strength for dark musings. He once said that a symphony should contain the entire world, and he clearly wanted to emphasize how disturbing the world can get.
Yet the gentler moments in the Sixth are as achingly innocent and beautiful as anything Mahler wrote. Indeed, what is most striking to us about the symphony is its closeness to the postmodern volatility of contemporary music, the constant switching from light to dark, from open-hearted lyricism to grinding dissonance, from cosmic grandeur to vernacular triteness. In the Sixth, sublime terror coexists with mocking triviality.
Mahler was one of the earliest great artists to take advantage of psychotherapy. He told Freud in 1910 that after fleeing into the street following a traumatic fight between his parents, he heard a hurdy-gurdy playing a Viennese pop tune: Forever afterward, tragedy and banality were fused in his imagination, forging an aesthetic he could not escape. The high and the low were inextricably united. This conjunction was perhaps more shocking to Mahler’s contemporaries—who regarded it as a fundamental lack of taste—than any aspect of his work. To us, it is one of his most remarkable and enduring signatures.
Many have pointed out that despite this radical instability, the Sixth actually has the most classical structure of any Mahler symphony: a traditional four-movement format, a discernable sonata form in the opening Allegro energico, a playful dance movement with trios, and a “real” slow movement. The first movement does present a series of clearly etched themes—a maniacal march, a haunted chorale, a swooning “Alma” portrait—that it develops and recapitulates, with Alma’s melody providing a breathtaking coda. The pastoral Andante is exquisitely tender, a vision of paradise worthy of Beethoven or Schubert, while the Scherzo is alternately devilish and delicate, as a scherzo should be.
Still, it is doubtful, given the symphony’s dark rush of ideas, that many listeners will be very aware of classical niceties. And the long finale, which creates its own form, is like a symphony unto itself, a monster of ruin and disintegration that devours themes—including ghostly apparitions from other movements—as fast as it presents them.
Rather than classical models, the symphony suggests a dream that darkens into a nightmare. Many of the themes themselves are singularly dreamlike even for Mahler: the “Alma” melody, for example, or the piercing cry for strings and harp that opens the finale. Mahler’s hallucinatory orchestration adds to the feverish atmosphere, alternating high-pitched winds and percussion with deep churns and growls from the lower strings and brass. Most nightmarish of all are the grimly recurring hammer blows, which blacken every glimmer of hope. They have the last word, a finality we don’t want to face. Depending on the performance, the final catastrophe can sound either inexorable or (as Bernstein demonstrated) terrifying. In either case, it is hard to think of a more devastating conclusion to any piece of music.
—Jack Sullivan