Read Online The Ellington Century by David Schiff - Free Book Online

model.” 44 Kandinsky's book presented three arguments. First he called for an art that would rise above “materialism,” with its concern only for appearances and “shapeless emotions such as fear, joy, grief, etc.” The new art would express “lofty emotions beyond the reach of words” in pursuit of “the internal truth which only art can divine, which only art can express by those means of expression which are hers alone.” 45 Next he described a “spiritual revolution” using the figure of a triangle moving onward and upward. At the centerof this argument he cited Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, a movement that approached “the problem of the spirit by way of the inner knowledge.” 46 Finally, Kandinsky discussed at length “the psychological working of color” as a way toward a fusion of the arts involving musical movement, pictorial movement, and physical movement. (Not surprisingly, Kandinsky's search for a Gesamtkunstwerk sprang from his experience of Wagner's Lohengrin .) 47 Although, unlike Scriabin, he did not actually experience synesthesia, Kandinsky catalogued the effects of colors in terms of musical sounds:
    A light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a cello; a still darker a thunderous double bass and the darkest blue of all—an organ.
    â€¦absolute green is represented by the placid, middle notes of the violin.
    White…has this harmony of silence, which works upon us negatively, like many pauses in music that break temporarily the melody.
    In music black is represented by one of those profound and final pauses.…The silence of black is the silence of death.
    Light warm red…is a sound of trumpets, strong, harsh, and ringing.
    Violet is…an English horn, or the deep notes of wood instruments (e.g. the bassoon). 48
    The purely spiritual was no vague region; psychic explorers from Swedenborg to Blavatsky had mapped it out in terms of numbers and colors. 49 The Theosophical Society attached particular importance to the numbers three and seven; the society defined its mission in terms of three large aims and pictured the universe as seven bodies of spirit/matter.
    During his brief but intense friendship with Kandinsky (which terminated with the outbreak of the First World War), Schoenberg applied occult ideas of the spirit to two major works, one, Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand), a one-act opera already in progress, the other, Pierrot Lunaire , an unforeseen opportunity. Die glückliche Hand was begun in 1910 as a pairing to Erwartung , a contrast of masculine genius to feminine instinct straight out of Weininger. At curtain rise, the protagonist, simply called “Der Mann,” lies facedown: “On his back crouches a cat-like, fantastic animal (hyena with enormous, bat-like wings) that seems to have sunk its teeth into his neck.” Following the example of Kandinsky's opera Der gelbe Klang , written in 1909 with music by Thomas von Hartmann (a Russian composer who later became a follower of Gurdieff) and published in The Blue Rider in 1912, Schoenberg represented the creative work of Der Mann through a “color crescendo”: “It begins with dull red light (from above) that turnsto brown and then a dirty green. Next it changes to a dark blue-gray, followed by violet. This grows, in turn, into an intensely dark red which becomes ever brighter and more glaring until, after reaching a blood-red, it is mixed more and more with orange and then bright yellow; finally a glaring yellow light alone remains and inundates the second grotto from all sides.” 50
    In January 1912 Albertine Zehme, a onetime Wagnerian soprano who had become a diseuse , asked Schoenberg to write music to accompany her recitation of poems from Pierrot Lunaire , a collection of fifty poems by the Belgian Parnassian Albert Giraud in the German translation of Otto Erich Hartleben. Zehme promised twenty to thirty