Classicism of the Twenties: Art, Music, and Literature 9780226184036

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Classicism of the Twenties

Classicism of the Twenties Art, Music, and Literature

theodore ziolkowski

The University of Chicago Press  ó Chicago and London

theodore ziolkowski is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at Princeton University.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  1  2  3  4  5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­18398-­5 (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­18403-­6 (e-­book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226184036.001.0001 Library of Congress Control Number: 2014029537 a This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Ilhi Synn President, Keimyung University, a student who became a friend, in admiration of his achievements in support of the arts and humanities in South Korea and globally

Contents List of Figures  ix Preface xi

part 1 the theory  1

Prewar Classicism  3 Classicism as Term  4 Classicism as Reaction  10 Prewar Classicism  12 An Ironic Retrospective  27

 2

Classicism of the Twenties  35 Wartime Transitions  35 The Turning Point  44 The Dissemination  52 The Turn to Antiquity  60

part 2 the practice  3

Three Exemplary Figures  71 The Composer: Igor Stravinsky  73 The Artist: Pablo Picasso  91 The Writer: T. S. Eliot  109 Summary  120

part 3 test cases  4 The Writers  125 James Joyce  127 Jean Cocteau  131 Hans Henny Jahnn  135 Paul Valéry  139

 5

The Artists  146 Giorgio de Chirico  146 Gino Severini, Fernand Léger, and Others  154 Francis Picabia  159

 6 The Composers  163 Paul Hindemith  163 Alfredo Casella  175

part 4 conclusions  7

Classicism of the Twenties?  189 Notes  199

Index  231

Figures figure 1 Giorgio de Chirico, Song of Love (1914)  43 figure 2 Pablo Picasso, Studies (1920)  94 figure 3 Pablo Picasso, Bacchanal with Minotaur (1933/34)  102 figure 4 Pablo Picasso, Two Women Running on the Beach (1922)  103 figure 5 Pablo Picasso, Three Women at the Spring (1921)  105 figure 6 Pablo Picasso, Woman in White (1923)  107 figure 7 Giorgio de Chirico, The Joys and Enigmas of a Strange Hour (1941)  150 figure 8 Giorgio de Chirico, Roman Villa (1922)  151 figure 9 Giorgio de Chirico, Departure of the Argonauts (1921)  152 figure 10 Fernand Léger, Three Women by a Garden (1922)  158

Preface I undertook this study initially in order to provide myself with a “scholarly” excuse for indulging several personal predilections: for the music of Stravinsky, the paintings of Picasso, and the poetry of  T. S. Eliot—­works that fall outside the normal scope of my research as a scholar of comparative literature but all of which I have treated, at least in passing, in earlier books. I began to wonder if there might be some common denominators linking the works of these three masters, who are routinely labeled (neo) classicists at one stage in their careers and who were bound to one another in various relationships of friendship and respect. It was my hope to detect a common set of values—­the “theory”—­ underlying the works of the trio and their fellow (neo)classicists of the twenties and then to determine whether there were common means—­the “practice”—­through which they achieved the realization of those values in music, art, and literature. Interdisciplinarity is currently a fashionable endeavor, as evidenced by the articles and reviews in such journals as Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, SUNY–­Albany Press’s Literature and Medicine, and Oxford University Press’s Literature and The­ ology. But the study of literature and the other arts is honored more frequently in theory than in practice. The Oxford Hand­ book of Interdisciplinarity (2010) devotes fewer than fifteen of its

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almost six hundred pages to music and art, and few studies deal in a common vocabulary with the interdisciplinary relationships among the arts. Indeed, some influential theorists such as René Wellek—­in his chapter “Literature and the Other Arts” in René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1948)—­have even expressed skepticism concerning the possibility of determining any common and comparable elements among the arts. A notable exception was Leonard B. Meyer’s Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-­Century Culture (1967). In his brilliant synthesis, Meyer makes the case for an “aesthetics of stability” in the twentieth century, in which various styles coexist and past styles are productively recovered by various techniques for use in contemporary art forms. I found Meyer’s work encouraging because it demonstrates the possibility of determining a common vocabulary with which comparisons may be drawn across the arts. But because he was concerned with twentieth-­century culture generally and not with what I call the classicism of the twenties, his book did not address the specific questions that intrigued me. As Meyer correctly emphasizes, the different concurrent styles of modernism are governed by utterly different criteria. More recently, Christopher Butler, undertaking a similar, albeit temporally more limited, challenge in his Early Modernism: Art, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900–­1916 (1994), approached the subject thematically rather than through the analysis of specific works and mentioned (neo)classicism only briefly in connection with vorticism. Surprisingly, despite the vast secondary literature overwhelming the oeuvre of the three modern masters in their various fields, few studies venture beyond their areas of specialization in musicology, art history, and literary criticism. Many of the studies aspiring to comparison deal with such specifically delimited topics as ekphrasis: the representation of the visual arts in literature, as in W. H. Auden’s depiction of a Bruegel painting in his “Musée des Beaux Arts” or Rainer Maria Rilke’s portrayal of preclassical sculptures in his “Früher Apollo” and “Archaïscher Torso Apollos.” Other such specific topics concern the influence of a

Preface xiii

painting on a poem (e.g., Picasso’s Les saltimbanques in the fifth of Rilke’s Duino Elegies); the musicalization of a literary work (e.g., Rilke’s Das Marienleben in Paul Hindemith’s setting); the representation of paintings in music (e.g., Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition); musical motifs in art (e.g., the violins and guitars in paintings by Picasso and Georges Braque); and so forth. But we rarely encounter attempts to demonstrate general analogies and stylistic similarities among the paired or tripled examples or to posit similar criteria for their disparate arts. The occasional exhibitions of “classical” art of the twentieth century, which have a great deal to teach us about the paintings and sculptures on display, rarely look across to music and literature of the same period. Among these, the one that I found most helpful was Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music, 1914–­1935, the catalog accompanying the exhibition of that title at the Basel Kunstmuseum in 1996. The volume, beautifully edited and in part written by Gottfried Boehm, Ulrich Mosch, and Katharina Schmidt, contains five substantial introductory essays plus some sixty briefer commentaries on specific works of music and art. Despite the generally high quality of the contributions, however, few of the authors look beyond the boundaries of their own disciplines to note similarities among the compositions and artworks presented there. More recently, New York’s Guggenheim Museum mounted a splendid exhibition entitled Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–­1936, but the essays in the informative catalog edited by Kenneth E. Silver (2010) restrict themselves wholly to the visual arts of that period. When I say “classicism of the twenties,” I wish no one to infer that it was the only or even the predominant aesthetic style of that decade. Many movements were competing for attention under the common label of “modernism”—­expressionism, surrealism, New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), and various Marxist tendencies (socialist realism, Brecht’s epic theater), among others—­and the criteria of the one do not apply to the others.

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Hence the appropriate plural form in the title of the recent Ox­ ford Handbook of Modernisms (2010). It is not my ambition here to discuss the currently fashionable but still loose concept of “modernism” or what in German is somewhat confusingly called “klassische Moderne” but, rather, to identify certain criteria that characterize the (neo)classical movement of that period, to understand to what extent those criteria are shared by the music, art, and literature of the period, and to ascertain the motives underlying the movement. This book should not be confused, in other words, with works from the increasingly popular field of modernism studies. It is my goal to inquire to what extent the stylistic character­ istics—­the “practice”—­are directly related to the theory of classicism that emerged independently and simultaneously in various European cultures. I am aware that there is considerable disagreement on the extent to which the arts and their embracing cultures are mutually interdependent. (The conflicting views have been summarized by Leonard B. Meyer in his chapter “Varieties of Style Change.”) Many scholars do not believe that external forces, such as war, directly cause style change. Yet even if the Viennese classical music of Mozart and Beethoven was not directly influenced by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, I believe it can be demonstrated that World War I provided the direct instigation for the resurgence of classicism—­ first in theory and then in practice—­during the twenties. In an effort to find common terms applicable to all the arts and to make the following chapters accessible to readers who are not specialists in all the fields, I have avoided, whenever possible, the sometimes abstruse technical and theoretical terminology of art history, literary criticism, and musicology. If specialists note any loss of precision, I hope that they will find a corresponding gain in lucidity and general accessibility.

I want to express my gratitude to Alan Thomas, who took an early interest in my project and guided it through the editorial

Preface xv

process. I benefited from the suggestions in three incisive readers’ reports, which helped me to sharpen my argument. Randy Petilos responded to my frequent technical queries with admirable patience and skill. I am grateful to India Cooper for the meticulous and sensitive care with which she copyedited my manuscript. For their assistance in obtaining copies of the artworks for this volume, and the authorization to use them, I would also like to thank Kay Menick of Art Resource and J’Aimee Cronin of Artists Rights Society. As so often before, I am indebted to my wife, Yetta—­not only for her constant encouragement but especially for her extensive knowledge of art and art history. She has been my constantly stimulating muse during our visits to the splendid collections featuring Picasso at the Musée Picasso in Paris, the Sammlung Berggruen in Berlin, and the 2013 exhibition of Picasso’s prints at Berlin’s Kulturforum, as well as other museums featuring art of the twentieth century. Theodore Ziolkowski Princeton, New Jersey December 2013

part 1 The Theory

1 Prewar Classicism “Classicism,” a term originating in the early nineteenth century, is probably one of the last words that spring to mind when we think of the twenties, whether Roaring or Golden, that followed the destruction and deprivations of the Great War in Europe. Some may recall the visual and verbal clichés that fill Woody Allen’s comedy Midnight in Paris (2011) as the Lost Generation of American writers gathered in Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon. Others may visualize the expressionistic horrors of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or the Weimar Germany of The Blue Angel. The Jazz Age with its marathon dances, its flappers, and its Charleston also brought to Europe a surge of fascination with African art and the Harlem Renaissance as represented by Josephine Baker and other African American stars. When one emerged from the salons, dance halls, nightclubs, and thriving new movie theaters featuring the comic antics of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp or the sublime propaganda of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and tore one’s eyes away from the omnipresent art déco, the scene seemed to be dominated by the twelve-­tone compositions of the Second Viennese School, by the fantasies of surrealism, by the inanities of dada, by late or so-­called synthetic cubism. Meanwhile, in the background the political arena was dominated by the fierce and often brutal struggle between adversaries from

4

Chapter One

Left and Right. Where, amidst this cultural turmoil, was there room for anything as sedate and conservative as classicism? Yet when we remind ourselves that the chief representatives of that movement in the twenties were none other than Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and T. S. Eliot, surely we must pause to give it due consideration.

Classicism as Term “Classicism” remains one of the more slippery terms of cultural criticism. Stemming from the Latin word classis, which basically means simply a grouping—­divisions of the army, for instance, or fleets of the navy—­it was appropriated in the sixth century BCE to designate the five classes into which Roman society, not least for purposes of taxation, was divided by Servius Tullius. By the second century CE, as we know from the encyclopedic Noctes  Atticae of Aulus Gellius, the adjectival form classicus was restricted to designate citizens of the top economic class: classici dicebantur non omnes, qui in quinque classibus erant, sed primae tantum classis homines (6.13.1; “not all who were in the five classes were called ‘classici’ but only men of the first class”)—­those worth at least 125,000 Roman asses (a vaguely defined but considerable fortune) and distinguished by the taste and elegance associated with their wealth. (The four lower classes were regarded as infra classem.) Consistent with this meaning, the adjective was expanded to designate writers appropriate to that estate—­classicus assiduusque aliquis scriptor, non proletarius (“some classic and prosperous writer, not a proletarian one”; Noctes Atticae, 19.8.15)—­in contrast to the merely popular ones whose appeal was more to the lower classes and tastes. From that general implication came the vernacular meaning of “classic,” which today is used broadly and loosely both as an adjective and a noun to designate items regarded as the representative best of their category, often with the implication that their heyday is past. As the German composer Wolfgang Rihm

Prewar Classicism 5

rather drastically put it, “something of the present can never be classic. Classicism always is when it has been. . . . Classicism becomes.”1 The Classic Car Club of America defines classic cars as those built between 1925 and 1948—­expensive cars suitable for the uppermost socioeconomic class embracing what the Romans called classici. “Jazz classics” are commonly associated with musicians already deceased (Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, among others). In this sense the term “classic” has been expanded to encompass works in fields ranging from physics, children’s literature, crime fiction, and film to protest poetry, rock music, rap, or hip-­hop. As a critical term the word has become virtually meaningless—­or, at least, valueless. A later and secondary derivation of the word since late antiquity, notably in the Romance languages, connected classicus with students who attend school classes—­an association that was broadened to include the authoritative texts that the students studied as models of excellence, both stylistically and contextually. Hence “classic” was applied to the finest works of Greek and Roman antiquity. In universities today the Departments of Classics teach the architecture, art, history, and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and “classicist” designates the students and professors who specialize in those fields. In an even more specific sense the term is often narrowed down to refer to what is regarded as the high point of classical antiquity: the culture of Periclean Athens. In this restricted sense, suggests one critic, Aeschylus would be regarded as archaic and not yet classic and Euripides as postclassic and Baroque.2 The noun “classicism,” a fairly recent coinage in most modern languages,3 refers to the principles underlying the works of classical antiquity, such as proportion and moderation. In this sense “classicism” has been appropriated by scholars to designate periods within various modern literatures and the visual arts that have sought to emulate the arts of antiquity and their principles and are held to represent high points of their respective cultures.4 These principles, as enunciated in particular by Aristotle and

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Horace, were differently evaluated. In Italy, “classicism” refers to various periods in the history of Italian literature, from the classicism of the ninth-­century Carolingian revival and twelfth-­ century scholasticism by way of humanism and the Renaissance down to the early eighteenth-­century Arcadia era.5 Their tradition of Latinity led French classicists of the later seventeenth century (Boileau, Corneille, Racine, and Molière, among others) to look mainly to ancient Rome for their models, while borrowing from Aristotle the formal criteria—­notably the three unities of time, place, and action—­suggested in his Poetics.6 In Germany, although as late as 1730 Johann Christoph Gottsched still prefaced his Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst (Essay toward a critical art of poetry) with a translation of Horace’s poetics, the principal writers regarded today as “classical”—­Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Herder—­turned to ancient Greece, rather than Rome, for their models.7 In his early and influential essay Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755; Thoughts on the imitation of Greek works in painting and sculpture), Johann Joachim Winckelmann coined the phrase that caught the imagination of his generation as characterizing the works of Greek antiquity: edle Einfalt und stille Größe (“noble simplicity and quiet grandeur”). With his chapters on dramatic art (Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 1767/68), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing rejected the French-­ classicist formal reading of Aristotle’s Poetics and emphasized instead his conception of catharsis as a vehicle for emotional purification. In England the popularity of Greek architecture produced a wave of “neoclassical” buildings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.8 Indeed, as Salvatore Settis points out in his stimulating essay on “the classical,” Western civilization, in contrast to other great but culturally static civilizations (Chinese, Indian, and others), is unique in its notion of the cyclical return of “classical” periods.9 In yet another variant, historians of music, which has few ancient models to imitate, have appropriated the term “classical” to designate works of music that, in contrast to contemporary popular musical forms, are considered to be analogous in their

Prewar Classicism 7

excellence to the works of fifth-­century Athens. As a German musicologist puts it: In music history, unlike the history of art and architecture, the term usually applies either to a nineteenth-­century recourse to genres from the late seventeenth or eighteenth century such as the suite, courtly dances such as the gavotte, technical models such as the motet style, or to a general quality of formal clarity and sublimity that characterizes the great masterworks of this period.10

Accordingly, on “classical” radio stations one hears a great deal of Bach along with Gregorian chants, Renaissance gavottes, symphonies from Beethoven to Mahler, and opera from Monteverdi to Stravinsky. In fact, Aaron Copland, who was in Paris at the time, has pointed out that before the terms “classicism” or “neoclassicism” became common in the later 1920s to designate a movement in contemporary music, the phrase “back-­to-­Bach” was commonly used.11 More narrowly, the term is often restricted to apply to the late compositions of Haydn and Mozart (often in contrast to the more “romantic” Beethoven), who were roughly contemporaneous with Weimar Classicism in literature. “Classicism” is sometimes used to designate two separate aesthetic phenomena of the early twentieth century. First, its writers and artists often took themes from Greek and Roman history and mythology as their subjects, as did Joyce when he borrowed the tale of Odysseus as the prefigurative pattern for his Ulysses (1922). Second, writers, artists, and musicians sought to achieve in their own works the form and the values of simplicity and order that epitomized ancient classicism, as when the purity of line evident in the works of Picasso’s so-­called classical period in the 1920s is said to correspond to the elegant forms of Greek sculpture. In the chapters that follow we shall have occasion to examine the specific manifestations of this thematic and formal emulation of the past in various works by modern writers, artists, and musicians. This classicism of the early twentieth century has been labeled in various ways and with various restrictions.

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One designation used frequently is “neoclassicism,” a term that, according both to the Oxford English Dictionary and to the Random House Dictionary, is quite recent in origin, occurring first as an adjective (“neoclassic”) between 1875 and 1880 and as a noun around 189012 and often bearing negative associations. This was noted by T. S. Eliot, who argued that “all ‘neos’ indicate some fad or fashion of the moment, and it is not our concern to be fashionable.”13 In reaction against the “pejorative taint” associated with “neoclassicism” it has been called, notably with regard to music, “modernist classicism,”14 a formulation suggesting that all classicism of the period is “modernist,” while “alternative modernism”—­a term proposed by the editors of the same volume in order to avoid the belief that classicism is hostile to modernism15—­implies that it is simply another form of modernism. “Classicisme méditerranéen” is geographically restricted to France and Italy,16 while “klassische Moderne” as understood by the contributors to the volume of that title defines loosely a “paradigm” for the period from 1880 to 1930 in German literature.17 Similarly restrictive is the term “socialist classicism,” which Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) proposed to replace “socialist realism” because, he argued, the latter “starts from an ideal image to which it adapts the living reality.”18 “Modern classicism,” in turn, has been largely preempted by architecture, as any glance at Google will confirm,19 and in many cases it implies nothing but ornamental quotations taken out of context.20 Such terms as “restorative modernism”21 drift, in my opinion, too far away from the subject. And “pseudo-­classicism,” as used cynically by Yves Bonnefoy and based on a selective group of minor French painters, ignores the positive achievements of the movement.22 In my opinion it is better to avoid the label “modernist” or “modernism” altogether in connection with “classicism” because “modernism” is such a loose and in many senses misleading term that embraces, according to one scholar of the movement, “a variety of aesthetic practices”23 ranging, according to another,

Prewar Classicism 9

from expressionism, dadaism, and cubism to imagism, futurism, and vorticism.24 Classicism is of course often included among the movements designated as modernism, but it differs quite radically, as we shall see, from most of the other contemporary “modernist” movements. Indeed, it is sometimes set explicitly in opposition to modernism, as by that notorious enemy of neoclassicism, Theodor W. Adorno, who called it, among other things, a “catastrophe” and a “deformation” that “leads aesthetically to hell.”25 It should be stressed at the outset that every “classicism” takes on characteristics of its own time: the buildings of Palladio and Karl Friedrich Schinkel are both regarded as “classical” or “neoclassical,” yet despite their similarities no one would mistake the Villa Rotunda for the Altes Museum, any more than one would confuse a play by Goethe with one by Racine or the paintings of Ingres with those of Raphael. In other words, classicism, whether “neo” or not, is always a synthesis of past and present and never simply a restoration of antiquity. So how should we specify the classicism of the twenties? Jeroen Vanheste proposed the term “interbellum classicism,” a term that is appealing because it is purely temporal—­one that in English, German, and other Western languages conventionally specifies the period between the two world wars—­and assigns no preliminary values, modernist or other, to this twentieth-­century movement.26 In that case, why not something like “twentieth-­ century classicism” or “classicism entre deux guerres”? The former designation is temporally too general, and the latter inevitably carries associations suggesting that the emphasis will focus on developments in France, as is the case, for instance, in Yves Bonnefoy’s essay. “Interbellum,” in contrast, is a neutral and easily comprehensible term taken from the Latin and, as such, linguistically compatible with the word “classicism,” which comes from that same base. Yet accurate and precise though it may be, the term seems clumsy and even a bit pretentious. For that reason I prefer simply “classicism of the twenties.”

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Classicism as Reaction In a large sense all classicism may be viewed simply as one manifestation of the eternal and universal struggle between order and chaos, discipline and license, authority and freedom—­the struggle represented in the Bible, for instance, by Moses and the Tables of Law as opposed to Aaron and the ecstatic worshipers of the Golden Calf; in Manichaeism by the contest between Light and Darkness; in Greek culture by the opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, as depicted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872); in revolutionary eras between conservatives and insurgents; and analogously in other philosophical, religious, and political systems. This association of classicism with conservatism has a long history and accounts in large measure, as we shall see, for the disdain of classicism expressed by many modernists of the twenties—­or, for that matter, of any generation, including our own. Classicism in its various manifestations almost always involves opposition to some other movement exhibiting what is regarded as excesses of creativity, spontaneity, and exoticism and the abandonment of all measure, restraint, and clarity. Thinkers, artists, and poets of the Renaissance, who had newly rediscovered classical antiquity, viewed medieval art and literature as barbaric and “gothic.” The inevitable reaction to Renaissance classicism came in the Battle of the Books, or the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes of the seventeenth century, when many authors argued that the rigid classical standards of taste had been superseded by progress in civilization generally.27 French “classicists” of the late seventeenth century, in turn, revolted against the stylistic excesses of the Baroque, as exemplified by such writers as Rabelais, and looked to the ancient classics for their inspiration in prose fiction (e.g., Fénelon’s Telemachus) and tragedy (e.g., Racine’s Iphigénie and Phèdre). A conspicuous example of this opposition can be traced in the conflict between classicism and romanticism that has been continuously waged in many countries over the past two centuries.

Prewar Classicism 11

In his “fragments” published in Athenäum (1798; 1:204), the leading journal of German Romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel famously defined romantic poetry as “a progressive universal poetry,” which—­in a vivid rejection of classicism’s tidy generic divisions—­“reunites all the separated genres of poetry.” Elsewhere he explained that “the classical poetic types have only unity; the progressive ones have wholeness [“Ganzheit”].”28 Romanticism spread rapidly among young German writers, who viewed Goethe with respectful distance but ridiculed such Weimar classicists as Schiller and Wieland. Goethe, in turn, expressed his antipathy toward the new movement in his often-­cited utterance to Eckermann on April 2, 1829: “Das Classische nenne ich das Gesunde, und das Romantische das Kranke” (“I call the classical healthy and the romantic sick”).29 A few years later, in his critical survey of romanticism (Die Romantische Schule, 1835), Heinrich Heine condemned what he regarded as not only the religious but also the politically conservative proclivities of romanticism. Defining the romantics as “the writers who in Germany dragged the Middle Ages from its grave,” he argued that “the effect they were able to exercise upon the great masses endangered the freedom and the happiness of my fatherland.”30 In Germany the dispute has continued down to the present. In the mid-­twentieth century and in reaction against the Nazis’ notorious co-­optation of many romantic writers and thinkers for their own ulterior purposes,31 Marxist critics of the German Democratic Republic rejected romanticism out of hand, setting it in opposition to what they regarded as Germany’s legitimate cultural heritage: Goethean classicism. German Romanticism was introduced into French culture by Mme de Staël in her survey De l’Allemagne (1813; bk. 2, ch. 11: “De la poésie classique et et de la poésie romantique”). Stating that she was unwilling to take sides in the dispute, she explained that the term designated poetry that, “originating in the songs of the French troubadours, is born from chivalry and Christianity.”32 In France the conflict flared up at the premiere in 1830 of Victor Hugo’s Hernani, which was rejected by most critics and viewers

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as “one of the greatest scandals that have taken place within the memory of man.”33 The work inflamed the fury of neoclassical aesthetes through its language and metrics and shocked social conservatives with its seeming anarchy.34 In 1921 André Gide speculated that “the struggle between classicism and romanticism exists within every mind.”35 And in 1930 Benedetto Croce recapitulated the view of the preceding decade with his assertion that “the problem for aesthetics today is the reassertion and defense of the classical as against romanticism.”36 It is not our purpose here to survey in any detail the fascinating history of the ongoing battle between classicism and romanticism. Suffice it to say that it provided one of the principal factors—­we shall discuss other factors below—­for the resurgence of classicism in the early twentieth century: a resurgence that began even before World War I but came to maturity during the twenties.

Prewar Classicism For some two decades before World War I the term “classicism” was uttered by conservative intellectuals in France as a shibboleth of opposition to those aspects of modern society that they detested. The movement known as L’École romane was founded in 1891 by the poet Jean Moréas, who broke with the hermeticism and décadence of the Symbolists and urged a return to the Mediterranean ideal of Greco-­ Latin beauty as practiced by French classicists of the Renaissance. One of his chief associates was Charles Maurras (1868–­1952), who achieved renown and, later, notoriety as the principal ideologue of the right-­wing Action française. Initiated in 1899 by Henri Vaugeois, the movement recommended through its journal a policy of “integral nationalism,” which was characterized by its anti-­Semitic, anti-­Masonic, anti-­Protestant, and antidemocratic agenda.37 Accordingly, the idea of “classicism” was early contaminated by its association with often objectionable sociopolitical views—­ an association that was revived in the twenties by its left-­leaning critics. More

Prewar Classicism 13

moderately, Henri Ghéon spoke of an “internationalism centered around an intelligent nationalism”38—­that is, a classicism that would absorb harmoniously such extraneous factors as the currently fashionable Orientalism, a classicism based on “the great countryland common to Beethoven, Racine, Michelangelo, and our French Gothics.” “Classicism,” he concluded: “behold the grand problem of modern art.” Maurras’s veneration of classical antiquity was initially purely aesthetic. He was exposed as a child by his mother to Esther, and Racine’s tragedy had no rival in his admiration until, as he recalls in an essay on his school years, he was introduced at the College of Aix to the Greek and Latin classics in the original: Homer, Virgil, and notably Lucretius, who “occupied [him] more than any other” and became his lifelong “companion at all hours.”39 A trip to Greece in 1896 (ostensibly to attend the Olympic Games but in fact a “rendezvous d’amour”) confirmed his feelings about classical antiquity and, almost immediately, produced an encounter with the romantic opposite. A professional traveler, proud of having seen many mosques and pagodas, accused Maurras of  having “an utterly atrophied spirit and a mind narrowed by a classical education.” The young classicist thought to himself that “romantic education had muddled and disorganized whatever brain” the other had.40 In a moving epiphany on the Acropolis41 he saw the Parthenon as the symbol of a perfection based upon reason, a reason that constituted the basis of all civilization, as he explained in his account of that trip. It was the Greeks, he ruminated later in a “meditation” among the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum—­ the most sensitive, light-­hearted, uneasy, lively, and wretched of all peoples—­“who saw Pallas born and brought about the ancient discovery of Reason.”42 Athenian reason created the order of true civilization and is no doubt able to recreate it among those who comprehend it properly. “The Parthenon has no need of anyone,” he states; “it is we who have need of the Parthenon in order to develop our life.”43 He exhorts his countrymen to return every day to the wisdom and beauty that gird the walls of

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Athens and to repeat (without citing the famous source) Renan’s magnificent Prière sur l’Acropole (1883):44 O noblesse, ô beauté simple et vraie! déesse dont le culte signifie raison et sagesse, toi dont le temple est une leçon éternelle de conscience et de sincérité, j’arrive tard au seuil de tes mystères. (O nobility, o true and simple beauty! Goddess whose cult signifies reason and wisdom, you whose temple is an eternal lesson of conscience and sincerity, I arrive late at the threshold of your mysteries.)

The reason and order upon which the perfect beauty of Greece was based were appropriated and spread by the Romans and, subsequently, by the Catholic Church, which Maurras, himself an agnostic, respected as being more Roman than Christian. Those fundamental values were in constant danger of being tainted and corrupted: in late antiquity by the Romans, “model administrators” but “poor guardians,” who did not know how to cure the “Semitic lepers” (“lèpres semites”) or “all the ill that Alexandria had been able to inflict on the Greek world”;45 and later by the “German poison” initiated by Martin Luther and Protestantism.46 That German poison, which exalted self above the law, as in Luther’s Protestantism, became especially venomous in German Romanticism and the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose “anarchism” infected all Europe and was introduced into France by what Maurras regarded as the perfidious work of Mme de Staël, De l’Allemagne (1813).47 It was Fichte, he was convinced, who had deformed French thought by injecting into philosophy, politics, literature, and painting the undefined and the amorphous. Maurras felt that “the ancient implicit principles of wisdom” along with “the moral foundations” of France were being menaced as much by perfidious arguments as by force. Gradually, however, “the principles of classical politics are untangling the motifs for which this robust and wise country has won the right to live, to expand, and to prosper.”48 Maurras regarded it as his political mission to eliminate this German poison—­what Léon Daudet later called “the German

Prewar Classicism 15

yoke” (Hors du joug allemand, 1915)—­and the remnants of romanticism, along with democracy and the synagogue. This spiritual rebirth could be achieved aesthetically, he was convinced, only through classicism: that is, through a return to the original ideals of Athens as symbolized in the Acropolis. French literature would not be reborn through commerce with the Germanic spirit, he argued. “It was necessary for the Provençals of the Xth century to recapture the ancient rhythm in order for modern literature to emerge. It was necessary for Ronsard to read Homer and Pindar for true song to be reborn from the Middle Ages in perdition.”49 To achieve this end it was essential to expose “the microbe of Romanticism and Revolution,” as practiced by Victor Hugo and his followers down to the present, through a “criticism illuminated by the uninterrupted fires of  Tradition,” a mission he undertook in the essays collected in the volume tellingly entitled Barbarie et poésie.50 He attacked his literary foes with a vicious irony, expressing his gratitude, for instance, to José-­Maria de Heredia “for providing the world with such a pure model of the intellectual tricks [“tour d’esprit”] of the hapless poets of his generation” (6). Despite their lofty theories the self-­styled Parnassians “are not writers shaped by classical rule: they are romantics ordered and tempered at times by timidity, at times by a failure of verve” (27). “The beauty and order of classicism are living things; the Parnassians have conceived of this order in the manner of dead bodies” (27). How much longer, he wonders elsewhere, will we be the dupes of numbers and of matters even more vile? “Shall we ever again see the grace and the demi-­divine measures of Reason?”51 The presence of classical personages is only a mediocre test of classicity, he avers. In true classicism “order is everything.” Maurras’s comrade-­ in-­ arms in his battle against romanticism was Pierre Lasserre (1867–­1930), the leading literary critic of l’Action française until 1914, when he broke with the journal for what he regarded as its vulgarization of his antiromantic views. A staunch defender of the classics and the humanities as director of the École pratique des hautes études, he labeled as “romantic” all the evils that he saw corrupting French society. His polemic, Le

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romantisme français (1907), opens with a lengthy section entitled “La ruine de l’individu,” which is devoted entirely to Rousseau, whom he regards not as a precursor of romanticism but virtually as the embodiment of romanticism in its entirety (“le Romantisme intégral”) and, moreover, as “an atrocious novelist.”52 Rousseau was not only the prophet of “that total corruption of the lofty aspects of human nature that is called Romanticism” (70) but, worst of all, “one of the most important agents of the Revolution” ( 321). Lasserre goes on to analyze what he regarded as “romantic sentiments”: “chimaeras” of the heart and the spirit and the romantic “corruption of the passions.” This is followed by a detailed account of the “frenetic infantilization of false ideas” (191) in French literature since 1830 and, in particular, of romanticism’s association with revolution and “the idolatry of progress” (432). The volume ends with a more moderate account than those of Daudet and Maurras of the “Germanic influence” on French thought. For instance, Lasserre excepts Goethe from his criticism because Goethe “sets out with the vivacity of barbarism and spontaneity” to arrive, in Faust and Wilhelm Meister, at “a consummate and serene understanding” (475). He deplores notably what he calls German “pantheism” (his term for Fichte’s theory of dualism or identity between I and Thou, between spirit and nature). Lasserre closes his work with the observation that many “convulsions rigorously imputable to the romantic malady” were still attracting curiosity and favor in Paris at a recent date: a malady that “continues to infect the sensibility, the intelligence, and the will of many of our immediate contemporaries” (542). It is his hope that his meditations will lead thoughtful contemporaries to recognize that many of the popular ideas of the day, far from moving in accord with righteous minds and healthy souls, “favor movements of political, intellectual, and sentimental decomposition closely linked to those whose common source is designated by the name: Romanticism” (543). Others in France propagated the need for a revival of classical values: notably in the Symbolist journal La Phalange or the newspaper Paris-­Journal.53 Because of

Prewar Classicism 17

its identification with conservative writers and journals, the term “classicism” was associated increasingly with the politics of the Right and, as a result, won the antipathy of many young intellectuals and artists on the Left—­for largely nonaesthetic reasons.54

It was the antiromantic Lasserre and Maurras, the idolizer of classical antiquity, and not the rabble-­rousing anticosmopolitans, who appealed to such conservatives in England as T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot in their opposition to romanticism and what they considered its contemporary excrescences in the form of symbolism, impressionism, and expressionism. While Maurras had arrived at politics by way of aesthetics, Hulme (1883–­1917) followed the opposite route. Entering Cambridge as a gifted mathematician, he managed to get himself sent down and, rather than pursuing his studies, journeyed in 1906 to Canada, where his travels across the vast spaces stimulated both his early philosophical speculations (collected under the rubric “Cinders”) as well as poetic efforts. These continued the following year in Brussels, where he taught English and where his familiarization with contemporary French literature prompted him to write imagistic poems in vers libre. Hulme wrote few poems and published only half a dozen of them before turning away from his poetic efforts, but those few works won the attention and admiration of his friend Ezra Pound as well as the young T. S. Eliot. His fascination with the thought of Henri Bergson, which began in 1907, generated a series of articles through which he sought to introduce into England Bergson’s anti-­intellectualist attack on the mechanistic rationalism that governed most contemporary philosophy.55 But Lasserre, with whom in 1911 he became acquainted in Paris, persuaded him that Bergson’s thought was in truth nothing but “the last disguise of romanticism,” which he had come to despise.56 This led, in turn, to the lectures and essays in which he applied his understanding of, and contempt for, romanticism to political ends. Hulme was convinced

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that conservatism, in order to convert the intellectuals who turn almost ritually to socialism, required a new set of catchwords. He found “an excellent example of this process of restating an old dialect . . . in the group of people in France who call themselves L’Action française,”57 for they had succeeded not only in reviving the intellectually dead French Conservative Party but also in overcoming radical liberalism. Hulme undertook this challenge in a five-­piece essay entitled “A Tory Philosophy,” which appeared in Commentator in the spring of 1912. It begins with his definition of what he characterizes as “the two temperaments”58 of human nature, and he proclaims his aim to explain “why I believe in original sin, why I can’t stand romanticism, and why I am a certain kind of  Tory.” The two temperaments are, in short, the “classical” and the “romantic.” The former believes that man is by his very nature essentially limited and incapable of anything extraordinary. He is incapable of attaining any kind of perfection, because, either by nature, as the result of original sin, or the result of evolution, he encloses within him certain antinomies. . . . The best results can only be got out of man as the result of a certain discipline which introduces order into this internal anarchy. . . . The classical attitude, then, has a great respect for the past and for tradition, not from sentimental, but only purely rational grounds. It does not expect anything radically new, and does not believe in any real progress. (234–­35)

Classicism, then, is characterized by such epithets as order, discipline, and tradition. The “romantic” point of view, according to Hulme, is the exact opposite. It does not think that man is by nature bad, turned into something good by a certain order and discipline, but that, on the contrary, man is something rather wonderful, and that so far he has been prevented from exhibiting any wonderful qualities by these very restrictions of order and discipline the classic praised. (235–­36)

Seeing in romanticism “a certain characteristic sentiment, a certain kind of exhilaration,” Hulme goes on to define a romantic as

Prewar Classicism 19

“a person who was in a certain disordered state of mental health in which he can only remain sane by taking repeated doses of this kind of emotion” (237). This romanticism betrays itself in certain clichés featuring the epithet “new”: a new art, a new religion, a new age, and so forth (239). While Hulme’s analysis of romanticism began in the political arena, he saw it best exemplified in literature. As for Lasserre, his key representative is Rousseau, but the contrast with the classical position was displayed most clearly by Victor Hugo and his followers, who believed that “they had, by freeing themselves from rules and traditions, attained liberty—­that is to say, absolute spontaneity in artistic creation” (236). Accordingly he turned, in several lectures and articles in 1911–­12, to the topic “Romanticism and Classicism.”59 Hulme realizes that the terms, as we noted earlier, are subject to a variety of antithetical meanings, but he chooses to follow the writings of Maurras, Lasserre, and other writers of l’Action française, who have “almost succeeded in making them political catch-­words” (60). Hulme does not apologize for involving politics in the discussion: “Romanticism both in England and France is associated with certain political views” (60). He reminds us that Rousseau taught that man was inherently good and that he had been suppressed and spoiled by bad laws and customs. The classical, he repeats, is the exact opposite: “Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and orga­ nisation that anything decent can be got out of him” (61). Like Maurras, he credits the Church with the classical view and “the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin” (61). In that classical view, belief in the deity is as fixed as is the belief in the existence of matter, the objective world, the appetites, and the sexual instinct. Hulme notes that those instincts have sometimes been suppressed: in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin, and in England under the Roundheads—­a suppression that causes the repressed instinct to assume abnormal forms. “You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe

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that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism” (62). Applied to literature, this means that the romantic, “because he thinks man infinite, must always be talking about the infinite,” and, because reality never catches up with the ideal, it tends to be gloomy (62). Classical verse, in contrast, always displays a certain restraint, even in its most imaginative flights, because the poet “never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man” (62). Hulme then goes on to explain why he thinks that the period of modern romanticism is finally coming to an end. It seems to have reached a stage of exhaustion when all its devices—­for instance, such forms as blank verse—­have been brought to perfection. “We shall not get any new efflorescence of verse until we get a new technique, a new convention, to turn ourselves loose in” (64). Classical poetry—­Horace or Pope—­is characterized by a “dry hardness” (66), a quality admirably evident in Hulme’s own few published poems, as in “Above the Dock” (1912): Above the quiet dock in mid night Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height, Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.60

In response to such critics as Ruskin, who believed that imagination must be serious and dark, Hulme goes on with his effort to prove that “beauty may be in small, dry things” (68). “The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description” (68)—­an extraordinarily difficult challenge. It means, first, that the artist must learn to see things as they really are and not as we have been conventionally trained to see them; and, second, that he must cling to that “sincerity” in the expression of his matter. Almost as though he were anticipating Eliot’s The Waste Land, Hulme prophesies that “a period of dry, hard, classical verse is coming” (69), and its tool will be what Hulme calls “fancy” (71): not mere decoration but precise new metaphors, a mechanical complexity

Prewar Classicism 21

that is the sum of its parts, in contrast to the “organic” complexity of the romantics (72).61

Hulme, an early admirer of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, was well acquainted with contemporary German literature, and his knowledge was enhanced by an extended visit to that country in the autumn of 1913. In the course of his sojourn he wrote the brief but extraordinarily well informed “German Chronicle,” in which he mentioned what he called the German “Neo-­Classical Movement,” as represented in particular by Samuel Lublinski.62 Lublinski (1868–­1910), a writer, critic, and philosopher active in Berlin, regarded the “Neu-­Romantik” of the present as a cultural danger, which he summarized in his “book of opposition” Der Ausgang der Moderne (1909; The end of modernism). He believed that it was a distinct achievement of the literary present to have enabled a proper recognition of the essence of romanticism, apart from any contingent associations of its various historical manifestations.63 Basically, he was convinced, “the Romantic is not only an artist, but also a religious being” (5). Since he recognizes in his own mind the totality of all existence—­that Fichtean identity that Maurras deplored—­he regards any art that restricts itself to the single and the individual as trivial. Torn between his metaphysical and artistic needs, he seeks a unity of art and mysticism. “All the artistic efforts and oddities and confused phantasies of the Romantic stream from this source” (5). It is the problem of the romantic work of art to organize the chaos of this “all-­oneness” (6; “Alleinheit”). The inevitable exaggeration required by the violent linking of the general with the individual “shatters that higher form of art that normally emerges from the completed harmony of material and shaping” (8). Since the mystical romantic is incapable of recognizing the unity of material and form, all culture is for him only “a ruin, a fragment, and a mine for forms and materials” (10). Consequently “in human culture as in art romanticism can produce only fragments or

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interesting abnormalities, and it becomes no small danger when in single-­minded obstinacy it seeks to assert domination beyond its mission” (11). For this reason Lublinski raises the question regarding the potential danger of modern neoromanticism and its “revolutionaries of today” (11), which he senses in such movements as naturalism and impressionism. His analysis, which parallels that of his conservative contemporaries in France and England (although he mentions none of them by name), leads Lublinski eventually to the conclusion that “this battle against naturalism and impressionism can be waged only on the basis of a striving for classical art” (77). He acknowledges the similarities and differences between the ancient polis and modern parliaments, between Pericles’ Athens and modern Berlin, Paris, or Vienna. “The ingenuousness [“die Naivität”] of an ancient people’s assembly beneath the open skies can no longer suffice to deal with the problems of modern politics and government” (79). What results from these developments for modern art and literature? Here Lublinski senses a similarity to the Greeks. “A life of the masses flows through our state and our civilization and brings about a democratic frame of mind that produces as its opposite and its complement an individualistic-­aristocratic, swollen ambition in the soul of leader-­types” (82). Among the Greeks, he reasoned, this tension between a popular content and a strict form produced both Homeric epic and classical tragedy. Similarly, if we could overcome the loss of immediacy characteristic of Greek existence—­through modern technology, through newspapers and modern means of transportation—­we could achieve a similar classical art. Modern man is justifiably proud of his technological achievements, but “only art can complete modern civilization in this fundamental manner without succumbing to an unrewarding flight from the world or a banal antithesis” (83). For this reason Lublinski finds it necessary to come to grips in his next chapter with the best-­known representative of contemporary neoromanticism: Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It is unnecessary for our purposes to follow in detail Lublinski’s analysis of Hofmannsthal’s impressionism, Gerhart Haupt-

Prewar Classicism 23

mann’s naturalism, and Richard Dehmel’s lyrics, or to recapitulate his well-­informed discussions of contemporary politics, art, science, and philosophy. In all these aspects of modern culture he sees in summary (308–­11) two basic problems: first, a conflation of science and art that has misled many people to subject mind, soul, and will to an allegedly scientific method; and, second, the anachronism of a revolutionary conviction that exaggerates the significance of all sorts of irrelevancies that it monumentalizes. In their place a culture must be created that, based on the whole of human nature, displays a synthetic character that is neither sociological nor romantic, neither purely mystical nor purely rationalistic. People must believe once again, as the Greeks did, in human grandeur. “Modernity has failed and relapsed into an epigone state because it has lost that faith” (311), Thomas Mann was familiar with Lublinski’s conception of classicism.64 In his “Life Sketch” Mann recalled with gratitude that Lublinski was one of the few contemporary critics who predicted that his novel Buddenbrooks would “grow with time and be read by future generations.”65 Although he rather ungraciously called him “the ugly little Lublinski,”66 out of gratitude for that early appreciation Mann leapt to Lublinski’s defense in 1910 when he was viciously attacked in a scurrilous article by the Social Democratic and Zionist lecturer and critic Theodor Lessing. Mann stressed in his response that “nothing is of more consuming interest, and in the last analysis nothing more fruitful and stimulating, than criticism of modernity” of the sort that Lublinski represented.67 The following year, in a short piece called “On the Art of Richard Wagner,”68 following his acknowledgment of all that he owed as a writer to Wagner—­leitmotiv, self-­quotation, symbolic formula, and other techniques—­Mann expressed his sense that Wagner’s time had passed, that he was “nineteenth century through and through, indeed the representative German artist of that epoch.” When he envisioned the masterpiece of the twentieth century Mann imagined something quite different: “something exceptionally logical, formful, and clear, something simultaneously rigorous and serene, with no less tension of will than the other, but

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of a cooler, more aristocratic and even healthier intellectuality, something that does not seek its grandeur in the baroquely colossal and its beauty in intoxication—­a new classicity [“Klassizität”], it strikes me, must come.” Precisely these qualities characterize his major work of this period, Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912). With a language almost clinical in its purity and elegance Mann diagnoses the gradual spiritual and physical disintegration of his hero, the acclaimed writer Gustav von Aschenbach, whose life up to this point—­he is now in his fifties—­had been characterized by “practiced self-­discipline” (448) and an “obligation to production” (447).69 His prizewinning work exemplified “duration of will and tenacity” (452) and “rigorous obeisance to form” (453). As he matured, he “banned every common word from his manner of speaking” (456), and his last work—­a page and a half of choice prose celebrating beauty—­displayed “purity, nobility, and a vibrant tension of feeling” (493). What is planned to be a brief vacation trip to Venice is extended by his homoerotic obsession with a radiantly lovely fourteen-­year-­old Polish boy, which leads, in a romantic conflation of beauty and disease, to the dissolution of his character and ultimately to his death from the cholera infecting the city. The early critics were shocked equally by the immorality of his subject matter and by the classical coolness of his style, which differed radically from the naturalism, impressionism, and expressionism of the decade.70 Lublinski and Mann were of course not alone in their classicism. In another context altogether, for instance, Alfred Loos concluded his pronouncement “On Architecture” (1910) with the flat statement “Our culture is founded on the recognition of the all-­transcending greatness of classical antiquity,”71 by which he meant an architecture of forms that rejected everything that serves a merely practical purpose.

These various initiatives in the name of classicism in France, England, and Germany display, for all their differences, at least

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two common denominators: a respect for reason, order, and restraint; and a veneration of Greco-­Roman institutions and art, in which those qualities were embedded. In short, they view classical antiquity as the depository of timeless forms and values worthy of repeated study and use. Lest we mistakenly think that such classicism was restricted to Europe, we should recall such American thinkers as T. S. Eliot’s Harvard professor Irving Babbitt, who, scorning Rousseau because he “positively gloats over his own otherwiseness,” was convinced that “there was never greater need of the Hellenic spirit than there is to-­day, and especially in this country, if that charge of lack of measure and sense of proportion which foreigners bring against Americans is founded in fact.”72 He goes on to cite Matthew Arnold, who “admirably said, it is the Greek writers who best show the modern mind the path that it needs to take.” However, by analogy to the Constitution of the United States, these qualities could be interpreted either according to a strict doctrine of “original intent” or, more loosely, as adapted to shifting social and political circumstances. The latter inclination sometimes led in its application by specific individuals to unsavory consequences: anti-­Semitism, antidemocratic sympathies with fascism, or nationalistic xenophobia. It tended to group its aversions under the general heading of romanticism. It is worth noting that a trip to Greece alone did not always suffice to turn contemporaries toward classicism or against romanticism. Unlike Maurras, who experienced his epiphany on the Acropolis, or Renan, who was moved to his earlier Prière sur l’Acropole, two German writers who visited Greece in the first decade of the century had utterly different reactions. When the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, who had not benefited from a classical education, experienced in 1907 his “Greek Spring” (Griechischer Frühling, 1908), he almost aggressively resisted anything that might smack of the “weakly Graecicizing, the bloodless love for a bloodless Greece,”73 that he attributed to the scholars he sometimes encountered there. It was a wholly romanticized Greece of myth, not of history, that he found, “the

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splendid land of the gods” (119), not of men. For him the Parthenon upon the Acropolis, “the rock of ghosts” (51), was not, as it was for Maurras, the embodiment of human reason but “a construct of air, conceived and summoned into a divine aether by the gods themselves” (62). When he visits—­repeatedly!—­the great theater beneath the Acropolis, “the sacred precinct of Dionysus” (49), he doesn’t think of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides but of “the sacred ground of the Eleutherian Dionysus” (51) and the myths of the other deities. In Hauptmann’s account we hear nothing of reason, restraint, or purity of form but only of the Dionysian raptures that inspired the souls of the theatergoers, who were “fortified by the nearness of divine troglodytes and temple-­inhabitants of the rock” (51–­52), which like a breaking wave washed away all skepticism. If Hauptmann was absorbed by what he regarded as the timeless presence of the mythic deities, the Austrian poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal reacted a year later in a wholly different manner. Where are the Greeks? he asked himself when he climbed up to the Parthenon. Trying to remember, he recalled only memories: names, figures that merged into one another. “Because they were long gone and because they had disappeared so quickly, I hated them” (198).74 Unlike Hauptmann, who readily created his own mythic world, the classically trained Hofmannsthal is bewildered. “Where is this world and what do I know of it?” Pessimistically, he concludes, it is an “impossible antiquity,” a vain search because nothing of it is still pre­ sent (200). To escape the “demonic irony” surrounding the ruins he enters the small museum on the way down, and there he is startled by the five female marble figures, who gaze at him with an indefinable smile. In their almost animal beauty he finds a “sensuous presence” (203). The only reality that Hofmannsthal encounters in modern Greece is that of the archaic kore statues in the museum. In sum, like Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal finds in Greece the reality of myth rather than history. To that extent both resemble their contemporary the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Unlike Hauptmann and Hofmannsthal,

Prewar Classicism 27

Rilke never visited Greece and got no closer to antiquity than the French and Italian museums that he frequented. Still, as in their cases, it was not the historical Greece of reason and order that attracted him but, rather, the archaic Greece of myth and sculpture that he heralded in the poems that open the two parts of his New Poems (Neue Gedichte, 1907–­8). Both feature Apollo (and not Hauptmann’s Dionysus), but both are explicitly preclassical statues: “Early Apollo” (“Früher Apollo”) and “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (“Archaïscher Torso Apollos”)—­both radiant figures but utterly speechless with as yet no hint of the reason that Apollo was later to embody. All three writers, then, exemplify what has been identified as the “enthusiasm for archaicism of the turn of the century.”75 The early efforts of such classicists as Maurras, Hulme, and Lublinski to overcome romanticism—­literary as well as political—­in its modern manifestations were doomed to failure by World War I. Indeed, the impact of the war helped to further the rapid flourishing of one radical outgrowth of romanticism: expressionism in its various forms as literature, art, film, theater, and architecture. It was not until the twenties that classicism again became a powerful force among the leading thinkers, writers, artists, and musicians of those decades.

An Ironic Retrospective Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924) constitutes in one sense an ironically detached review of the ideas and forces motivating the European world in the years leading up to World War I.76 The author was no longer the conservative (even reactionary) nationalist (even chauvinist) who confessed to a friend in 1916 that “I hate democracy,”77 nor yet the refugee from Nazi Germany who in the spring of 1938 traveled the United States, speaking to audiences in fifteen cities about “the coming victory of democracy.”78 The novel may be regarded as a literary laboratory where Mann critically replicated, tested, revised, and sometimes rejected his earlier views as

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expressed in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918) and other writings.79 The Magic Mountain was originally conceived, as Mann wrote in 1913 to a correspondent, as “a kind of humoristic counterpart” to Death in Venice.80 Inspired by a brief stay in Davos in 1912, where his wife was undergoing treatment, the novel displays obvious parallels to the novella that he was just completing. In both cases men—­an older, famous writer and a young, unformed bourgeois, an engineer—­come from the disciplined routine of their normal existence in Germany—­respectively Munich and Hamburg—­to which they have every intention of returning, for a brief vacation abroad. Their plans are radically altered by their erotic attraction to figures from the mysterious, romantic, exotic East: in Aschenbach’s case his homoerotic fascination with the Polish youth Tadzio; in Hans Castorp’s, his obsession with the Russian beauty Clavdia Chauchat. In both works the action is accompanied by classical mythological allusions that illuminate and add further dimensions of meaning. The earlier work ends tragically with Aschenbach’s death from cholera, while its counterpart closes with Hans Castorp’s return to the flatlands and probable death in the war. But in the twelve-­year course of its composition, which was interrupted by the war, his project grew from a comic pendant of the eighty-­page novella to a thousand-­page symbolic novel encompassing the entire culture of its day, from a work focusing on two figures to a panorama involving many representative figures, and from the classical restraint of a distanced and impersonal narrator to the solicitous account by a humorous chronicler who involves us as readers closely with his story. According to Mann (as narrator of The Magic Mountain) “a human being lives not only his personal life as an individual but, consciously or unconsciously, also the life of his epoch and his contemporaries” (50). Various figures exemplify typical positions and views to which Hans Castorp, the naive young hero of the bildungsroman, is exposed and—­according to the Petrarchian motto placet experiri—­explores during his seven years in the Berghof sanatorium, situated some five thousand feet above sea

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level in the Swiss resort town of Davos and thus both literally and figuratively removed “hermetically” from the reality of life in “flatland” Europe in the years from 1907 to 1914. By any standard the leading representative is the Italian humanist Lodovico Settembrini, the self-­styled homo humanus (210) and pedagogue who takes it upon himself to guide Hans Castorp, to warn him constantly against the dangers posed by other inhabitants of Davos, and to urge him to return to a life of action in the real world below.81 Hans Castorp meets Settembrini—­ who in his mixture of shabbiness and grace and with his twirled moustache strikes him as “an organ-­grinder” (82)—­on his first day at the sanatorium; and it is Settembrini alone—­his other principal acquaintances have either died, committed suicide, or departed—­who on almost the final page waves farewell to him at the train station as Hans Castorp returns to the flatlands and the war raging there. The basis of Settembrini’s beliefs is a profound classicism and humanism based on the ancient languages, which he regards as the foundation of all formal education (362; “Bildung”). Loving form, beauty, freedom, and order, he calls himself a defender of “classicismo against romanticism” (348), setting right above might, freedom over tyranny, and knowledge over superstition (221). An admirer of Carducci, who inscribed his poems “against the shadow-­and moonlight-­poesy of romanticismo” (223), he protests against what he views as “the absurd formlessness to which the Middle Ages and the epochs imitating it had pandered” (548) and praises “the Graeco-­Roman heritage, classicism, form, beauty, reason, and a serenity in keeping with nature” (548): in short, “the Mediterranean-­ classical-­ humanistic tradition” and “the classical ideal of education [“Bildung”]” (720). To this extent his classicism is absolutely consistent with that of the prewar classicists. (At the same time, his clownlike appearance unmistakably relates him to the Pierrot figures so central, as we shall see, in the postwar imaginations of Stravinsky, Picasso, and Eliot.) His classicism leads him to challenge Hans Castorp’s romantic notion that beauty is somehow related to illness and death and

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to express his concern when civilized Italy engages with Austria in diplomatic discussions about Albania, “that Latin-­less half-­ Asia” (987). For similar reasons he opposes the other figures who attract Hans Castorp. In the dining room of Berghof he gestures at the patients seated at the table of the “Good Russians,” warning Hans Castorp against infection by their Asiatic concepts: a general lethargy reflected in their nonchalance regarding temporal matters. “This generosity, this barbaric grandeur in the use of time is Asiatic style” (339)—­and totally at odds with the Horatian maxim: carpe diem. For that reason he is justly alarmed when, in the licentiousness of Mardi Gras celebrations, Hans Castorp finally works up his courage to approach the Russian femme fatale, Clavdia Chauchat. As he nears her, he hears Settembrini—­so agitated that he reverts to his native Italian—­asking him what he thinks he’s doing and crying out, “Un po di ragione, sa!” (462). He is equally distressed when Castorp is captivated by the Dutch plantation owner Pieter Peeperkorn, a personality of “biblical grandeur” (784).82 Peeperkorn’s inarticulate gestures overwhelm the intellectuals, whose convoluted arguments he dismisses with cavalier disdain as “cerebrum, cerebral” (807). Settembrini, whose classicism allows no appreciation for this Jesus-­like figure with disconcertingly Dionysian features, calls him simply “a dumb old man.” Similarly, when Hans Castorp reports that he has attended séances and experiments in telekinetics and materializations of the dead, the humanist is horrified, crying that it is the last straw: “Oh misery, misery!” (926). Chief among Settembrini’s opponents is the Jew turned Jesuit and Communist Leo Naphta, who disdains Settembrini’s beliefs in reason, freedom, and human progress as nothing but “the whole moth-­proof chest of classicistic-­bourgeois virtue-­ ideology” (701). It quickly becomes clear that a kind of classicism and romanticism underlies their respective attitudes. (Their increasingly heated disputes, which lead ultimately to a duel, bear a certain resemblance to Theodor Lessing’s polemic against Lublinski as characterized by Mann in his article of 1910.) Settem-

Prewar Classicism 31

brini upholds the classics and the Renaissance against the fanatic medievalism of Naphta, who despite his position as a professor of Latin in the Jesuit seminary has a wholly medieval orientation and rejects modern notions of democracy and progress. It is symptomatic that the featured artwork in Naphta’s luxuriously furnished apartment is a splendid wood-­carved Pièta from the fourteenth century and that he rejects Copernican heliocentrism in favor of the ancient Ptolemaic view (550). Settembrini defends reason against Naphta’s advocacy of faith, order against anarchy, monism against the latter’s dualism, nationalism against a communistic church, and humanism in the face of Naptha’s endorsement of blind terrorism. One of their early quarrels begins when Settembrini, hearing of Mme Chauchat’s return to the Berghof, expresses his hope, with a Dantesque allusion, that Hans Castorp will not reject “the friendly guiding hand of your Virgil” (717). While the others laugh at Settembrini’s “jocular erudition” and Hans Castorp raises his glass to “his Virgil,” Naphta, although a professor of Latin, immediately goes on the attack, ridiculing Settembrini’s “almost idolatrous” veneration of Virgil and expressing his contempt for Latin poetry in general. He calls it a generational weakness on Dante’s part to give such a major role in his poem to “this mediocre versifier,” this “courtly Laureate and bootlicker of the Julian house,” who was not in the least a poet but “a Frenchman in Augustan wig” (718). The debate prompts Naphta to insult Settembrini, the advocate of progress, by labeling him a conservative, and to attack the classical ideal of education as nothing but “an instrument of bourgeois class-­dictatorship” that is ridiculed by the common people (720). Settembrini responds to Naphta’s “fervent taste for the barbarism of certain epochs” with his own defense of  “the cult of speech as an art for art’s sake, an inheritance of classical antiquity, which the humanists, the uomini letterati of the Romance lands, had revived and which was the source of all further and contextual idealism, including the political” (722). It is essential to recognize that these two representative figures, in their extensively recapitulated debates, often sacrifice

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intellectual consistency for the sake of rhetorical argument.83 (Thomas Mann himself told his friend Paul Amann that “I shall never be the slave of my ideas, for I know that nothing which is merely thought and said is true and that only form is unassailable.”)84 Following one of their lengthy disputes Hans Castorp notes that “the principles and aspects constantly got tangled up; there was no lack of inner contradictions” (646).85 Accordingly their last quarrel—­the one that leads Naphta to challenge Settembrini to a duel and then to shoot himself in a frustrated rage when the humanist fires his shot into the air—­ involves a wild confusion regarding classicism and romanticism. Naphta begins by speaking of the confusing ambivalence of the term “romanticism,” which negates the concepts of reaction and revolution (964). It is ridiculous, he argues, to equate revolution only with progress and enlightenment, as Settembrini does. “European romanticism was above all a freedom movement: anticlassicistic, anti-­academic, directed against antiquated French taste, against the Old School of Reason.” Here he introduces the wars of liberation, enthusiasm for Fichtean ideas, and popular uprisings against an unbearable tyranny. Laughing, he points out that the result was simply the destruction of a revolutionary tyranny for the sake of a reactionary aristocratic domination. “Freedom,” he concludes, “is actually more a romantic than an enlightenment concept” and produced a narrowing of human impulses by its emphasis on the self. True individualism, in contrast, is romantic-­medieval in its conviction of the infinite, cosmic significance of the individual, from which arose the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the geocentric theory, and astrology. Individualism, the result of a liberalizing humanism, tends toward anarchy and seeks to protect the individual from sacrifice to the whole. One word for two entirely different phenomena! (965) Going on, Naphta introduces Christian mysticism, Luther’s emphasis on acts rather than beliefs, and so forth. At this point Settembrini interrupts what he calls his antagonist’s “lewd slipperinesses” (966; “Schlüpfrigkeiten”) and objects to his misleading youthful minds with his ambiguities, which he

Prewar Classicism 33

calls disgraceful. This word incites Naphta to his challenge—­a challenge to a duel that goes back ultimately to arguments over classicism and romanticism! For this and other reasons Hans Castorp decides ultimately that, as “Lord of the Antimonies,” he will follow neither of the two pedagogues: neither Settembrini with his bourgeois world republic nor Naphta with his hierarchical cosmopolitanism (535). “Their quarrels and contradictions are nothing but a muddle [“guazzabuglio”] and a confused street noise by which no one is dazed who is only a little bit free in his head and pious in his heart” (685). By the time he was writing these final pages Mann had come a long way from his initial plan, according to which Settembrini—­ consistent with the essentially romantic views summarized in his wartime Reflections—­was to be nothing but a figure of ridicule intended, among other things, to parody the views of Mann’s more liberal-­minded brother Heinrich Mann. In an article entitled “The Problem of German-­French Relations” (1922) he expressed his astonishment at the paradox of the war’s results. “As victor emerged the nationalistic or even international-­pacifistic Bourgeois Rhetorician,” a “Don Quixote of Humanism” with his “lawyerly jargon, his classical diatribes about virtue,” who no longer has a single word of relevance for the modern world.86 Someone, he felt, “should attempt a drama, a novel, in which one might contrast him, say, with a sphere of depraved romanticism.” This is precisely what he attempted with the figure of Settembrini, who (perhaps to Mann’s own surprise) emerged in the course of the composition as one of the most sympathetic figures—­far more so than the more incisive Naphta, who wins most of their debates. Mann, who in his Reflections had aggressively taken the side of German Kultur as opposed to a more generally Western “civilization,” now reflected that a writer ought to depict “the man of civilization, the Mediterranean Freema­ son, Illuminatus, positivist, free-­ thinker, and prophet of the bourgeois world-­republic, who incessantly is guided by ‘the principles of reason as virtue,’ ” in such a manner as to make “this petrifact” appear more attractive.

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Settembrini is not simply a fictionalized Lublinski, Maurras, or Hulme; while like Maurras he praises reason, he is also an advocate of progress and enlightenment, turning on the lights every time he enters a dark room. Reason and enlightenment, he believes, will fully liberate humankind and “lead it on the paths of progress and civilization toward an ever brighter, milder and purer light” (140). Unlike Hulme, he believes that humankind was originally good and ruined only by social errors (531). Emphasizing the fact that he is a European, he maintains that the responsibility of the Occidental is “reason, analysis, action, and progress” (523). In his ultimate transfiguration Settembrini emerges from the novel as the positive, albeit ironic, image of the prewar classicist whom Mann had represented altogether differently in the figure of Gustav von Aschenbach. A quarter century later Mann again made fruitful use of the classic-­romantic juxtaposition in his novel Doktor Faustus (1947), where the life of the composer Adrian Leverkühn is related by his friend, the classics professor Serenus Zeitblom: a perfect opposition in Spengler’s terms of the Apollonian classical and the Faustian romantic.

2 Classicism of the Twenties Wartime Transitions We have already had occasion to note that various prewar thinkers anticipated a twentieth-­century classicism. In 1911 Thomas Mann predicted that Wagner would be replaced in music by “a new classicity [“Klassizität”].” That same year T. E. Hulme prophesied that “a period of dry, hard, classical verse is coming.” Any true revival was delayed, however, by World War I. An initial use of mythic themes signaled not so much a return to antiquity with a serious desire to restore classicism as, rather, a turn away from the wartime present. It is striking what a vibrant cultural life succeeded in maintaining itself in major European cities despite the slaughter going on in the trenches only a few score or a few hundred kilometers away. As Edith Wharton reported from Paris in 1915, “Paris scorned all show of war, and fed the patriotism of her children on the mere sight of her beauty”1—­as though the Parisians had decided instinctively that their city should not resemble the Paris torn by the siege of 1870. Similarly, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound conveyed in their letters a sense of the lively literary life in wartime London. For many, indeed, the war seems to have amounted to not much more than an inconvenience. Expatriates in Paris of military age,

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such as Picasso and Giorgio de Chirico, who were not subject to the draft, were sometimes treated with disdain and offered white feathers by passersby on the streets. Meanwhile, in Germany Richard Strauss complained to his wife in December 1917 about the eight-­hour train trip from Berlin to Bielefeld. No restaurant car, nothing hot to drink. There is only one train from Cologne to Aachen on a Sunday: packed, of course, and 1½ hours late. What made it worse is that the war is so eerily close along that stretch of line.2

Many artists, writers, and musicians, of course, served in their national armies, and some were killed in action. Both Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke were in the Austro-­Hungarian military until reasons of health forced them out. Others, such as Reinhard Sorge, Wilfred Owen, and T. E. Hulme, died at the front. Like many other Frenchmen, Guillaume Apollinaire was seriously wounded in action, as we see in Picasso’s well-­known portrait of his friend with bandaged head (1916). Yet despite the nationalistic fervor that motivated many, we often sense that salons, theaters, and concert halls were kept open in order to distract minds from the unpleasantness of the war. In the spring of 1916 the Jeu de Paume presented the Triennale, an exhibition of French art for the benefit of the “Fraternité des Artistes.” In May 1917 Paris witnessed the scandalous premiere of the ballet Parade produced through the unlikely collaboration of scenarist Jean Cocteau, composer Erik Satie, set designer Pablo Picasso, and choreographer Léonide Massine3—­ an occasion that Cocteau, in his customary self-­ aggrandizing manner, called “the greatest battle of the war.”4 In the early winter of 1918 Matisse and Picasso, both of whom had been enormously productive during the war years, were featured in a two-­man exhibition at the Galerie Paul Guillaume.

Surprisingly much of this wartime cultural activity featured themes from classical antiquity. Yet this use of classical themes

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rarely heralded a turn to classicism in form or spirit, as we see in the early collaborations of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal on Elektra (1909) and Ariadne auf Naxos (1916). The almost dementedly vengeful Elektra as conceived by Hofmannsthal, who is anything but classical in her violence and hysteria, is more than matched by Strauss’s score. The wish to set this demonic, ecstatic image of sixth-­century Greece up in opposition to the Romanized copies of  Winckelmann and the humanism of Goethe triumphed over my caution, and so Elektra turned out to be even more intense in the concentration of its structure, in the violence of its intensification.5

Here, as earlier in Salome, he continues, “I went to the utmost limits of harmony, psychological polyphony, and the capacity of today’s ears to take in what they hear.” In addition, the opera omits the chorus that is fundamentally characteristic of Greek tragedy. A contemporary cartoonist depicted Sophocles in an “Elektric” chair being pummeled by Strauss and Hofmannsthal.6 The same applies by analogy to their later collaboration, Ariadne auf Naxos. The opera, which initially premiered in 1912 as the entertainment offered to his guests by the nouveau-­riche Monsieur Jourdain at the end of a full-­length performance of Le bourgeois gentilhomme, was a total failure in that six-­hour form. Extensively revised and with a charming prologue replacing Molière’s comedy, the short opera enjoyed a successful new premiere in Vienna in 1916. Yet here again any classicism inherent in the original mythic theme of Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos and rescued by Bacchus, is undercut by the intrusions of the delightful Zerbinetta, whose virtuoso coloratura steals the show, by the antics of her four clownish suitors, and by their comments, all of which locate the mythic love of Ariadne in a more generally human and humorous context.7 Moreover, the prologue does not permit us to forget that the “opera” is merely an entertainment for a nouveau riche audience of spoiled contemporaries. Strauss’s score, though composed for an orchestra reduced to the classical scale of thirty-­six musicians,

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succeeds in reaching Wagnerian grandeur in the passages accompanying Ariadne. While the work as we know it today has become a standard on opera stages all over the world and must have succeeded brilliantly in distracting the attention of its first audience from the horrors of the war, it hardly aroused in those viewers and listeners any sense of classical repose and order.8 That same year, 1916, saw the completion of another work sometimes reckoned among the “founding documents” (“Grün­ dungsdokumente”) of neoclassicism,9 Darius Milhaud’s symphonic cantata, or opera in seven scenes, Les Choéphores, the middle work of Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia, based on the translation by Paul Claudel (1869–­1955). In 1911 Milhaud (1892–­ 1974), already an admirer of Claudel’s work, met the poet, who befriended the brilliant young composer and later took him along as secretary in his diplomatic entourage when he was appointed ambassador to Brazil (from February 1917 to November 1918). “Between Claudel and myself, understanding was immediate, our mutual confidence absolute,” Milhaud recalled in his autobiography.10 No sooner had the young composer at that initial encounter played his setting for seven of Claudel’s sixty-­one prose poems entitled Connaissance de l’Est than the poet mentioned his ongoing translation of Aeschylus’s trilogy. He had rendered the first play, Agamemnon (1896), some years earlier and now described scenes from Les Choéphores, with which he was currently engaged, arguing that “the text became so intensely lyrical that it called for musical expression” (50) and viewing the chorus as resembling the choir of the Catholic liturgy, to which he was attracted from his acquaintance with such in old Roman churches.11 In his program notes Claudel states that he continued working on his translation with the idea that it would be set by “mon ami Darius Milhaud.”12 First, however, Milhaud composed incidental music for Aga­ memnon (1913)—­music that the poet wanted to be heard only briefly from the moment late in the play when Clytemnestra comes out of the palace bearing the axe with which she has just slaughtered her husband and, against the background of a full

Classicism of the Twenties 39

symphony orchestra, engages in song alternating with antistrophes sung by a chorus of old men. By 1915, when Milhaud undertook his score for Les Choéphores (1916; first performed in 1917), he had been engaged for a year with the intense study of polytonality, examining “every possible combination of two keys superimposed and to study the chords thus produced” (65). It was on the basis of these experiments that he composed the music for Les Choéphores, which originally bore the telling subtitle “Harmonic Variations” (65), reinstates the chorus omitted by Hofmannsthal/ Strauss, and lasts only thirty-­five minutes. The first of the seven scenes chosen following consultation with Claudel (“Vocifération funèbre”) comprises a chorus, accompanied by a full symphonic orchestra, in two simultaneous keys, against which in the next two scenes are set solos by Electra (“Libation”) and Orestes (“Incantation”). Scenes four (“Présages”) and five (“Exhortation”), in contrast, are “so violent in character that they created a problem which I solved by having the words spoken in time with the music by one woman narrator, while the choruses uttered words or disjointed phrases, the rhythm of which was indicated, but not the pitch” (65). This agitated recitative is supported not by the vast orchestra featured earlier but by the expanded percussion section—­fifteen instruments including castanets, slapsticks, and whistles—­which creates a pounding rhythmic pulse. This innovation was suggested by Claudel, who, inspired by the Arab festivals he had experienced, demanded a music “reduced to its purely rhythmic state.”13 This use of percussion constituted perhaps “the first instance in western concert music of an ensemble consisting only of percussion instruments.”14 In sum, what we find here is not, as in the Hofmannsthal-­ Strauss Ariadne auf Naxos, a modernizing psychological interpretation of an ancient theme but what has been termed an “up-to-­ date linguistic-­ musical realization” (“zeitgemäße sprachlich-musikalische Realisierung”).15 Much of the action, in fact, is actually pantomime accompanied by the chorus’s narrative. With its polyphony and insistent rhythms, the symphonic cantata can by no stretch of the imagination be considered a

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work of classical balance and restraint.16 While the percussions achieve an archaic, indeed primitive, effect, they had no place in the music of classical drama.17 For a final musical example of “classical without classicism” we may turn to Prokofiev’s first symphony, which under the composer’s own label as his Classical Symphony (1917) has become a favorite of the concert halls. Here, in contrast to the operas and cantatas of Strauss and Milhaud, we have a work that consciously strives for classical effects. Already as a student Sergei Prokofiev (1891–­1953) had become familiar with classical music. He arranged Buxtehude’s A-­minor Organ Fugue for performance at his piano examinations18 and, in his classes on directing, became fond of the scores of Haydn and Mozart, whose subtleties he was led to appreciate by his teacher Nikolai Tcherepnin.19 In his autobiography Prokofiev summarized the four main directions of his musical taste and creativity around the time he completed his conservatory studies. The first was the classical direction, stemming from my early childhood, when I heard the sonatas of Beethoven [played by] my mother. It assumes at times a neoclassical appearance (sonatas, concertos), at other times it imitates eighteenth-­century classicism (gavottes, my “Classical Symphony,” in part also my “Sinfonietta”). (136–­37)

A second or modernizing direction involved the search for an original harmonics, which was transformed into a search for a means of expressing strong emotions and expressed itself in innovations of melody, instrumentation, and formal structure. The third direction was the motoric or rhythmic one that he calls toccata. And the fourth, which manifested itself last of all, was lyrical. The classical direction is strikingly evident in that first symphony, composed in the summer of 1917, which Prokofiev spent alone in the country outside Petrograd—­the recently renamed St. Petersburg that the utterly apolitical twenty-­five-­year-­old had left in an attempt to escape the turmoil of the early revolutionary period in the new Soviet Union. Here, he tells us in

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the autobiography, he read Kant and worked hard, composing intentionally without a piano. “Up to that time I had usually composed at the piano, but I ascertained that themes invented without the piano are better” (145). In this spirit Prokofiev came up with the idea of composing an entire symphonic work without the piano—­as a result of which, he believed, the orchestral colors would resound more richly. He decided to write a symphony in the manner of Haydn, whose technique had struck him as especially lucid when he studied those scores with Tcherepnin. “If Haydn were still alive today, I thought, he would retain his manner of composing and at the same time would appropriate something of the new style” (145). So he named his project the Classical Symphony—­in part because that title was simpler, but in part to annoy the Philistines and with the secret hope that the symphony would really turn out to be “classical” (146). He composed his symphony in his head in the course of walks through the fields and based in part on motifs that he had conceived during the preceding year. The symphony instantly reveals its classical aspects—­with the striking “Mannheim rocket” that opens the work: an arpeggio theme rising through several octaves that typified the mid-­ eighteenth-­century Mannheim school of composers. In a radical departure from the huge ensembles that had characterized until quite recently the late romantic symphonies of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss (his Alpensymphonie, 1911), Prokofiev scored his work for an orchestra of thirty-­six, like those of Haydn and Mozart. When he set to work in 1917, he already had several of the major themes in mind. From his autobiography we learn that the first section he conceived was the gavotte (third movement)—­a fact consistent with a remark by his second wife that his “love for Bach’s B minor Gavotte inspired a predilection for writing gavottes.”20 The work teems with other formal gestures that mark it unmistakably as “classical.” Yet despite these many external details, as Malcolm Hamrick Brown has demonstrated, Prokofiev fails to grasp, or at least to use, the inner form of the mature classical symphony. Instead of the thematic development

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characteristic of Haydn, Mozart, and their contemporaries, “his method is typified here by complete restatement of themes or phrases. He all but ignores the devices of motivic segmentation, expansion, and reassembly.”21 For Prokofiev, in other words, his Classical Symphony represented no consistent turn to classicism but, rather, a “de-­ romanticization,” the term almost routinely applied to his music. Indeed, in his diaries of that year he makes fun of his own efforts, imagining the screams of protests from the critics at this new example of his insolence: “Look how he will not let even Mozart lie quiet in his grave but must come prodding at him with his grubby hands, contaminating the pure classical pearls with horrible Prokofievish dissonances.”22 Years later, in his autobiography, he ridiculed Stravinsky’s “creation in the Bach style, his preference for ‘Bachisms and false tones,’ in other words the craving to present as his own the style of another” (158). He concedes that he too had written a Classical Symphony—­ “but only incidentally.” Musicologists generally agree that the Classical Symphony represents a brief interruption in Prokofiev’s output23—­“sports within an essentially neo-­Romantic oeuvre.”24 For the late Stravinsky, in contrast, classicism was the essential element, as we shall see. In sum, whereas in Strauss/Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos and in Milhaud’s Les Choéphores we find classical mythological themes with no classical form, in Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony we hear ample evidence of classical form with no serious turn to classicism as a mode. All three cases exemplify what may be termed “classical without classicism.” While this aesthetic play suggests a turn away from a chaotic present, the inner dissonances—­the audience and opera in Ariadne auf  Naxos, Milhaud’s polyphonic harmonies, the tensions between Prokofiev’s formal devices and his inner avant-­gardism—­all hint at the inevitable awareness of the tumultuous real world in the background. Precisely the same tensions between past and present can be observed in paintings of the period that adapt classical themes. The most notable example is Giorgio de Chirico (1888–­1978),

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figure 1. Giorgio de Chirico, Song of Love (1914). © 2015 Artists Rights Society, New York/SIAE, Rome. Photograph © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York.

who in the course of his lifetime painted over one hundred works featuring Ariadne—­not the Ariadne of Hofmannsthal and Strauss, who is rescued and transformed by Bacchus, but the abandoned woman, alone on her island. The earliest of these, a series of eight paintings revolving around the figure of Ariadne (1912–­13), exemplify the “metaphysical” style that preceded his

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later “classical” period and feature a marble figure of Ariadne reclining (in a classic pose familiar from dozens of earlier paintings and sculptures) on a plinth situated in an empty piazza. The fact that she is located in a modern setting provides an utterly nonclassical tension between the mythic past and present reality that we find in Ariadne auf Naxos —­both in the tension between audience and opera and in the contrast between the grief-­stricken Ariadne and the coquettish Zerbinetta. A similar juxtaposition suggesting free associations of the mind at play may be observed in other paintings by De Chirico from the same wartime years: notably in his Song of Love (Canto d’Amore, 1914), where a classical head of Apollo hangs on a wall alongside a reddish-­yellow rubber glove and above a green ball as a train puffs along in the background (fig. 1). In all these paintings we encounter the same “classical without classicism” that resounds from much of the contemporary music. At the same time we should note that the irony evident in all of these compositions and paintings anticipates an element strongly present in the works of the three exemplary classicists whom we shall consider in chapter 3.

The Turning Point It is a commonplace that World War I brought to a devastating close the “long” nineteenth century—­what Serenus Zeitblom, in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, calls “the epoch of bourgeois humanism”25—­shattering political and social notions that had been held valid since the French Revolution and leaving in their wake an intellectual, spiritual, and (not least) aesthetic vacuum that the most varied movements flooded in to fill: from the communism that emerged from the Russian Revolution to the reactionary cadres that opposed it in Germany, from the extravagances of expressionism and dada to the “call to order” issued in 1919 by André Lhote in the opening paragraph of his review of an exhibition of Braque’s paintings, where he observed that Braque’s oeuvre, along with that of Picasso, represents a kind of “rappel à l’ordre” (with the phrase highlighted by quotation

Classicism of the Twenties 45

marks).26 The catchy phrase was later appropriated by Jean Cocteau as the title for a collection of his essays (1926), and many people still attribute the coinage to him. But that attribution is quite misleading because it suggests that Cocteau was the herald of a movement that actually began much earlier rather than, as usual in his case, simply an opportunistic follower. Even before the war ended thinkers were proposing various outcomes. In the series “Six Lectures on Modern French Literature” (1916) delivered in England, T. S. Eliot observed hopefully that “the beginning of the twentieth century has witnessed a return to the ideals of classicism,” specifying as its characteristics form and restraint in art, discipline and authority in religion, and centralization in government.27 That same year, in a review of the Triennale of 1916, the critic Jacques Vernay foresaw, following the war’s end, “a reaction or renaissance, if you wish, of classical tendencies against those of liberty in the extreme.”28 Paul Dermée, editor of the short-­lived journal Nord-­Sud (1917– 18), predicted that, following the “lamentable adventure” of the Symbolists, “a period of exuberance and force will be succeeded by a period of organization, of classification, of science, that is to say: a classical age.”29 Ten months later he defined his hopes more clearly. “The classicism of one epoch may not be the pastiche of the classicism of a preceding epoch.” Disdainfully relegating ancient mythologies to “art in decadence,” he demands original subjects, purety, and “a reign of intelligence.”30 “Mastery of oneself is the moral and aesthetic ideal of classical epochs.” It is clear from these statements that classicism is understood essentially as a frame of mind and not as imitation of the themes and forms of Greco-­Roman antiquity. In Germany, observers were less sanguine about the role of classicism in any European future. In his essay The Crisis of Eu­ ropean Culture (Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur, 1917), for instance, Rudolf Pannwitz concluded his analysis of civilization with the depressing view that “there is no longer any way out of the crisis of European culture on any hitherto tested path.” The only possibility for Europeans, who have reached the edge

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of the abyss, is “a merging of our European half-­cultures, which are already fused among themselves, with the great classic Oriental cultures.”31 In December of that same year, stressing in the preface to the first volume of his opus The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918) that “the war itself belonged to the assumptions under which the final aspects of the new world-­ image would be determined,” Oswald Spengler emphasized that his title “designates, in the strictest sense of the word and in view of the decline of antiquity, a world-­historical phase extending several centuries, at the beginning of which we stand at present.”32 Whereas Pannwitz had simply believed that European culture, founded on the model of Greco-­Roman antiquity, must be expanded to embrace the ancient cultures of the Orient, Spengler denied the idea of the classical heritage altogether. “It is a venerable prejudice, which we should finally overcome, that antiquity is inwardly close to us because we have allegedly been its pupils and followers, while in fact we have been its venerators” (37). Immediately after the war, however, and notably in France and Italy, various manifestos appeared, proposing a return to classical ideals as the most promising avenue to a fresh European future, both cultural and political. As a critic in the London Athenaeum opined in 1919: “The war has proved a severe obstacle to the romantic imagination; it even looks as if the obstruction will prove fatal.”33 Accordingly, Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-­ Edouard Jeanneret (better known as Le Corbusier) opened their “purist” manifesto, Après le cubisme (dated October 15, 1918), with the statement “Now that the war is over, all is being organized, clarified, and purified.”34 They identify “the characteristics of the modern spirit” as “purism,” in which form precedes color, and all is harmonized in proportionality in order to overcome chance (“hazard”) and control emotion in such a manner as to transcend cubism, which has remained decorative and ornamental, and to reestablish “the connection with the epoque of the Greeks” (57). Paul Valéry (1871–­1945) began his incisive analysis The Spiritual Crisis (La crise de l’esprit, 1919) with the observation that, while the military crisis was now at an end and the economic crisis

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visibly at its zenith, the world was currently experiencing “the spiritual crisis, more subtle, which in its very nature takes on the most deceptive appearances (since it takes place in the very kingdom of dissimulation)—­it is with great difficulty that we can seize the true centre, the exact phase, of this crisis.”35 Looking back at the spiritual state of Europe in 1914 (in the first of the two letters), Valéry comes to a conclusion radically opposed to Pannwitz’s multiculturalism. In Valéry’s view the problem, “the disorder of our mental Europe” (183), goes back to the willingness of all cultivated minds to accept “the free co-­ existence of the most heterogeneous ideas, of the most opposite principles of life and knowledge.” That, he asserts, is “the characteristic of a ‘modern’ epoch,” and Europe in 1914 reached the very limits of such modernism. Valéry imagines a present-­ day Hamlet, standing on the vast terrace of Elsinore extending from Basle to Cologne, from the sands of Nieuport to the granites of Alsace, and regarding the millions of ghosts resulting from the war—­an intellectual Hamlet tottering on the edge of two abysses, the two dangers that have not ceased menacing the world: order and disorder (184). He looks at the skulls surrounding him: Leonardo, whose invention of flight resulted eventually in the wartime bombings; Leibniz, who dreamed of universal peace; Kant, “who begat Hegel, who begat Marx, who begat . . .” (184). As his clairvoyant mind contemplates the present transition from war to peace, he realizes that it is “more obscure, more dangerous than the transition from peace to war.” The second letter begins with a summary of the first: peace is “something more complex and obscure than what is called war, as life is more obscure and more profound than death” (279). He wonders if Europe will become what it is in geographical reality: simply a little promontory on the continent of Asia. Or will it remain what it formerly appeared to be: “the most precious part of the terrestrial universe, the pearl of the sphere, the brain of a vast body?” He lists the principal characteristics of this “European psyche”: intellectual eagerness, ardent and disinterested curiosity, a happy blend of imagination and logical rigor,

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a nonpessimistic skepticism, a nonresigned mysticism (280). He elucidates the practice of these qualities with the example of geometry: discovered by the Greeks as the intellectual pursuit of a gifted few, it was soon appropriated for broader material application and eventually reduced to a commodity distributed to an increasingly broad clientele. As a result the intellectual inequality among the regions of the world gradually disappeared, leading to a diffusion of culture and the access to culture by broader groups of people—­a diffusion, argues Valéry, that is opposed to genius or spirit (“génie”). “But the European mind, or at least its most precious elements—­are they capable of total diffusion?” (280). Will this equalization of techniques and the phenomenon of democracy, he ponders in conclusion, lead to a “diminutio capitis of Europe”: that is, the diminishment of Europe’s preeminence in the world? A solution to the dilemma was proposed by the editors of the Nouvelle Revue Française, when it began publishing again following a wartime interruption. In the first number ( June 1919) the case was made by its new director, Jacques Rivière (1886–­ 1925), who before his military service and wartime imprisonment in Germany had served as secretary of the journal and now became one of the leading intellectual spokesmen of France. In his twelve-­page introduction Rivière reviews the prewar history of the journal, stating that its early editors had proclaimed no literary gospel and entertained no desire to establish a new school. Their only program was to maintain a pure climate that would permit the birth of similarly pure works of art. The war, which has come and gone, “has profoundly overturned everything, and in particular our spirits.”36 Like their predecessors, the new editors wished to create a disinterested journal that would continue to judge and create in absolute freedom of mind. “The war was able to change many things, but not this: that literature is literature, that art is art” (3). At the same time, it is important not to forget the vast misdeeds of the war, of which one of the worst was to have preoccupied men’s minds. Everyone experienced what Maurras termed

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the “mon-­archy” of the war (4)—­its absolute power of obsession, more compelling even than love’s passion. It will be the editors’ enterprise to terminate the constraints that war still exercises on the mind, to restore to thought its spontaneity, and to struggle against any remaining exigencies of war on the human spirit. The French, he continues in a spirit of nationalistic fervor, are “the most truthful people on earth” (5) and their literature the purest, lacking all hypocrisy. For that reason, and more than any other nation, France was distracted by the yoke of war from its native genius. It is now essential that the French demonstrate once again their ability to listen to their own voice and to disregard the clamor from without. “La Nouvelle Revue Française wishes to become the speculative organ, in the more general sense of the word, of which France has a greater need than ever. It proposes above all to look forward and gather the natural products of our inspiration” (6). In order to tear people away from the intellectual servitude to which events have reduced them, it is essential to manifest convictions and precise aspirations. As in the past, the journal will continue, alongside perfect openness of spirit, to demonstrate taste and preferences, especially in art and literature. To this end the editors hope to convince readers that “the aesthetic age that began with Romanticism is today completely finished,” even though it continues to breathe with “a sort of artificial respiration” in symbolism and other derivatives (7–­8). Here Rivière expresses the journal’s aesthetic position: it will say “everything that seems to anticipate a classical renaissance”—­not merely textual and imitative, like the disciples of Moréas and the writers of the Revue Critique, but “profound and interior” (8). Rivière does not deny the achievements of romanticism and symbolism: the “prodigious refinement” that they introduced into our sensations and their enrichment of the human heart. The journal has no wish to supplant this sensibility entirely but desires to penetrate it, to analyze it, and to control it. He concludes with the statement that this liberalism has nothing in common with indifference and that political neutrality

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should not be confused with detachment. The atrocities of the war have rendered impossible any purely speculative position. The editors, inhabiting no ivory tower, neither regard art as a mere jeu d’esprit nor declare themselves disinterested vis-­à-­vis public affairs (9). They will strive to demonstrate independence of spirit in art as well as politics. Their reflections on current events will never be simple professions of political faith but rather a critique and interpretation of contemporary history. Because their views are less uniform, Rivière declines to define that political color as precisely as he previously declared their ideal of a literary classicism. As for the artists specifically, three months later in that same journal André Lhote reported on his first visit to the newly reopened Louvre.37 It seems indispensable, he begins, for contemporaries “to situate ourselves, shipwrecked as we are in the tormented ocean of painting.” Regarding those past masterpieces from Raphael to Ingres, he wonders if it is possible once again to become “classic” in their sense: that is, to efface all traces of effort in order to give art the appearance of the natural, “the pure method of classicism” (527). To this end he recommends the study of David, “god of the lucid painters,” who purified, separated, and delimited the elements conflated by the “amiable negligence” of Boucher and Fragonard, “those masters of disorder” (529).

It was not only in France that a new classicism was felt to be the essential restorative for spirits infected and weakened by the war. In the same spring of 1919 as NRF, the journal La Ronda was established in Rome with an explicit classicist agenda. (The journal ceased publication in 1923 when the Fascists ascended to power.) In his brief “Prologue in Three Parts” the editor, the poet Vincenzo Cardarelli (1887–­1959), outlined the journal’s goals, which, apart from a pronounced apoliticism, correspond closely to those expressed in Rivière’s introduction.38 Sobered because he and his contemporaries have all aged since the days of their

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youth—­ “O brave and blessed youth, farewell!”—­ which was characterized by “an agreeable and audacious promise,” they have matured to find that “reality is completely different” (17). Unified by an affinity of tastes, of culture, of education, they have come together to found their review, “without clamor and without illusions” and inspired solely by “an honest curiosity” and by their “love of the past” and “unprejudiced preferences” (18). He stresses that, like the classic writers, “for whom art had no other purpose than delight,” they have learned to be men first, and only then men of letters. In that connection they intend to write the word “humanity” proudly with the initial h used by writers at the time of Machiavelli—­in contrast to modern Italian, in which the word is written umanità—­in order to indicate the precise associations with which they imbue that vocable. Having inherited from the romantics a “rational disdain” for merely mythological poetry, they reject modern poetry that continues that trend under the pretext of sensibility, as well as the writings of those parvenus who deceive themselves by making fun of craftsmanship and by playing with unaccustomed forms—­ here he has in mind such contemporary movements as Marinetti’s Futurism—­because “heredity and familiarity of language are the sole riches that a decent writer may put on display” (18). In the effort to rediscover a semblance of what he calls “formal chastity,” they will apply all the tricks of logic, irony, sentiment, and cunning. “Our classicism is metaphoric and has a twofold foundation” (19). Their use of a defunct style, for the contributors to the journal, is nothing more than a means “to perpetuate the tradition of our art” and “to be modern in the Italian manner.” Though its modernity was retarded for more than a half century by history and its art remained nationalistic and provincial, “Italy is on the point of becoming a modern land—­that is the stupendous and unbounded promise that it offered to our artistic and spiritual future.” No other country, he concluded, has as much to gain by setting itself in tune with the times. In 1921 his fellow countryman Gino Severini opened his work Du cubisme au classicisme (From cubism to classicism) with the

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statement that at the beginning of the twentieth century, artistic anarchy was at its peak, a product of social and moral disorder but also aesthetic and technical confusion.39 Artists today, he continued, no longer grasp the true laws of art based on harmony and proportion. In the immediate postwar years, the emphasis has shifted. Advocates of “classicism” no longer stress its political function but focus, rather, on its aesthetic values. This does not mean that they ignore the social and philosophical implications, but, unlike Maurras, Hulme, and Lublinski, they accent the potentialities for classicism in the arts. At the same time, as we shall see, the opponents of classicism refused to let them forget the origins of prewar classicism on the reactionary Right.

The Dissemination During the twenties the mood initiated in France and Italy spread rapidly from country to country. In 1919 Giorgio de Chirico, who earlier that year had still committed himself to pittura meta­ fisica,40 now proclaimed himself a pictor classicus41 and the herald of an art dominated by “the daemon of Greek painting,” that is, “the linear daemon.”42 In their “paradise of art” Greek artists sought lines that were perfectly straight or gently curved or spiraled, but they were concerned with nothing else: “In no other forms did they seek joy and refreshment” (309). He modified a statement of his revered Nietzsche to the effect that “the classical power of a painter is measured by intelligence and the emotion of his line” (310). “But the daemon of classicism did not vanish” (312), he continues, detecting a glimmer of classicism in certain designs of such recent contemporaries as Gaetano Previati and Giovanni Segantino. Recalling the religiosity of the Greek and early Italian artists, he maintains that “a strong current of mysticism is indispensable to the formation of classical artists” (313). Accordingly he hopes that artists of the present will be mystical enough for a rebirth of classicism. Various factors have contributed to Italian mysticism, but they waited too long: “Too much

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discontent, obscurity and confusion have covered the world, weighing with a particular insistence upon Italy” (313; note that De Chirico attributes to Italy the same uniqueness as did Rivière to France). But in compensation, he concludes, and more forcefully than elsewhere, “the daemon of classicism has returned to tempt men,” enticing them with the promise of new signs and more perfect outlines. “We, without confusion or agitation, will follow the call, striving for ever greater discernment and love” (313). De Chirico’s declaration amounts, as we shall see, to the program for his own painting in the following years. His musical contemporary Ferruccio Busoni (1866–­1924) was advancing similar ideas. Already in 1917 the composer had stressed that, as an editor of Bach’s Well-­Tempered Clavier, he was “a worshipper of Form.”43 Three years later, in a statement that has become famous, he defined what he called “Young Classicism,” by which he meant “the mastery . . . of all the genius of previous experiments and their inclusion in strong and beau­ tiful forms.” Like Stravinsky later, he emphasized his conviction that “music is music, for itself, and nothing else.”44

Back in France, meanwhile, writers heeded the call. In 1921 André Gide, responding to an inquiry from the journal La Renaissance regarding his views on classicism, began by maintaining—­perhaps unaware of developments in Italy—­that such a question could be comprehended only in France.45 True classicism, he argued, results not from exterior constraints but from moral qualities: “I consider classicism as a harmonious sheaf of virtues, of which the first is modesty.” Classic perfection implies no suppression of the individual but, rather, the submission and subordination of the individual and, by analogy, of the word to the phrase, of the phrase to the page, of the page to the work. “It is manifestation of a hierarchy.” The classic work of art represents “the triumph of order and of measure over internal romanticism,” and the work is more beautiful to the extent that the material is initially obtuse. “True classicism permits nothing restrictive or suppressive; it is

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not so much conservator as creator.” In his “Billets à Angèle” (1921) he commented at length on his brief “Response,”46 warning that the term “classicism” has become such an honor that it is in danger of being applied to any major and lovely work. But that is absurd, he insists, for many enormous works are not at all classical. Classicism, he reiterates in an often quoted phrase, “tends altogether toward litotes”—­the rhetorical art of expressing the most while saying the least (42). “The only legitimate classicism today, the only one to which we can and should aspire, is of an order in which ‘all the elements fermenting in the modern world, after having found a free expansion, are organized according to their true reciprocal relations,’ ” he concludes (citing an unnamed critic in the London Times). The same insistence on order was adroitly appropriated by Jean Cocteau, who recapitulated the by now commonplace notion in the title of Le rappel à l’ordre (1926).47 One of the pieces in this collection of essays is the address delivered in May 1923 when he was honored by the Collège de France: “On order considered as an anarchy.”48 Here the initiator of the cubist ballet Parade (1917), which bemused Paris with its weird effects, emphasizes what Gide termed the “modesty” and restraint of classicism. “Every time art is en route to that profound elegance that is called classicism, emotion disappears”—­like a snake, he continues, discarding its variegated skin. But eventually this totally naked art achieves equilibrium and “opposes to the riches of costume the riches of the heart.” It is unnecessary to recapitulate the other essays of Cocteau’s collection because his theme, differing in no essentials from that of Gide and Rivière, has already been stated. Unfortunately, the growing tendency to identify classicism and the call to order with a reactionary conservatism was intensified in Italy by a volume entitled The Circumnavigation of Art—­The Call to Order (Periplo dell’arte—­Richiamo all’ordine, 1928), a collection of essays by the painter-­novelist Ardengo Soffici, who had become an early spokesman of Fascism. For in Italy, unlike France, the turn to classicism was unopposed by any

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strong romantic trend that might have defined and shaped it.49 In any case, the turn to classicism was not restricted, as the Italian and French cultural nationalists took for granted, to those two countries.

In England T. S. Eliot responded in January 1926 to critiques of his journal the New Criterion, established three years earlier (as the Criterion).50 A review, he believes, should be neither so comprehensive in its choice of contributors as to be merely a miscellany nor so narrow that it simply “propagates the ideas of a single man, or the views and fancies of a small group.”51 And it must not be too general in its selection of material or too narrowly “literary.” “Even the purest literature is alimented from non-­ literary sources, and has non-­literary consequences” (4). So any material should be included that is “operative on general ideas” useful to the man of general culture. Accordingly, he concludes, the New Criterion has no program or platform but, rather, what he calls a “tendency” (5). “I believe that the modern tendency is toward something which, for want of a better name, we may call classicism”—­a tendency “toward a higher and clearer conception of Reason, and a more severe and serene control of the emotions by Reason” and one that “approaches and even suggests the Greek ideal” (5). A year and a half later, because the journal had been criticized for that very tendency, Eliot wrote another commentary to clarify his position in words that seem to echo Gide.52 “If we are to be qualified as ‘neo-­classicists’, we hope that ‘neo-­classicism’ may be allowed to comprise the idea that man is responsible, morally responsible, for his present and his immediate future.” As we have already observed, Eliot rejected the term “neoclassicism,” which smacks of the merely fashionable, and declared his intention to continue using the word “classicism.” But responding to an editorial note in the Calendar dismissing “neoclassicism,” he came to its defense, noting that the New Criterion was the first English review to publish “the work of three of the four French writers

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whose names are most closely associated in the public mind with the ‘reactionary Latin philosophy’ in question” (284). He ridicules any linking of Comte’s positivism with that reactionary philosophy and “the clash of permanently antagonistic cultural values” (285) and dismisses the critique by pointing out that those professing classicism can never win the argument. If they confine themselves to criticism, they are always reproached for “their lack of creative power”; but if they do create, “then it is immediately said that their precept and practice are utterly in divorce.” If the work cannot be denied its merit, then “you can always deny that it has any of the characteristics of ‘classicism.’ ” Eliot also lamented the fact that the process of democratization, criticized earlier by Valéry and others, had in education contributed to the increasing neglect of the classics and to the “folly of pretending that one subject is as good as another for study, and that Latin and Greek are simply no better than a great many others.”53

In Germany and Austria the situation differed somewhat thanks to the emphasis on Greek antiquity, in contrast to the pronounced latinité and romanità of classicism in France and Italy. This emphasis is due largely to the so-­called Third Humanism, which was intended to extend the achievements of the earlier humanisms of the Renaissance and Weimar Classicism around 1800. The term was coined in 1921 by the Berlin philosopher and pedagogical theorist Eduard Spranger (1882–­1963) in a lecture for Friends of the Humanistic Gymnasium (a locally based Austro-­ German organization) on “the present state of the humanities and education” (Der gegenwärtige Stand der Geisteswissenschaften und die Schule, published 1922).54 It was subsequently championed in Europe and later the United States by the distinguished classicist Werner Jaeger (1888–­1961)—­initially in Berlin and after his emigration at Harvard—­with his notion of paideia. The “Third Humanism” is contaminated in the minds of some through an imagined association with the Nazi “Third Reich.” Certainly its conservatism overlaps at points with early Nazi ideology. Essen-

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tially, however, it is based on three humanistic ideas: the repeatability of high points of human history; the merging of tradition and present; and the ennobling of the present national character by incorporation of Greek antiquity in its broadest sense.55 We immediately recognize the similarity of these ideas, apart from the virtually exclusive emphasis on Greece, to those of contemporary French, Italian, and English thinkers. A leading representative of this tendency in Austria was the poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who had moved beyond the skepticism of his trip to Greece and the more ecstatic views of his earlier librettos for Strauss. He begins his 1926 address “The Legacy of Antiquity”—­also for a celebration of the Friends of the Humanistic Gymnasium in Vienna—­by alluding to the material repercussions of the catastrophic war that shattered Europe. “The spirit is wounded,” he says, quoting an unnamed French writer (presumably Valéry); “Our world is in decline,” citing an unspecified German (presumably Spengler); “The European of today stands alone,” alluding to a Spaniard (presumably Ortega y Gasset).56 Yet in this Europe, which is undergoing the most profound process of dehumanization ever imagined, the audience is preparing to celebrate the spirit with a proclamation of faith in tradition, intellectual order, and humanism. They are living at a critical moment of the world, he points out, in which the wars of peoples and conflicts of classes have developed into new wars of religion and wars of the spirit, which are all the more murderous since they are “carried out in the half-­night of reciprocal non-­acknowledgment” (315). Yet the audience maintains its belief in “the spirit of antiquity,” which provides the basis of all Western civilization: the foundation of the church, the language of politics, and “the myth of our European existence” (316), that is, the positing of cosmos against chaos. Classical antiquity is a magnificent whole, embracing Homer, Heraclitus, the tragedians, Orphic utterances—­both a strong stream and an ever virgin spring. In his essay on “literature as the spiritual space of the nation” (“Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation,” 1927)

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Hofmannsthal further expounds his belief, rejecting the romantic flight from reality, in “the wholeness of life” and “synthesis,” where “spirit becomes life and life spirit, in other words: the political grasp of the spiritual and the spiritual of the political, for the cultivation of a true nation.”57 “In this basic attitude is anticipated the security of the spiritual space, just as in the romantic attitude the waste of space and in the attitude of the cultural philistine the narrowing of space is implied.” Although he uses the word “classicism” in neither piece, referring instead to “the spirit of antiquity” and the “conservative revolution” (in the 1927 essay), Hofmannsthal defines humanism and the spiritual space in terms that precisely echo the Italian, French, and English writers we have cited.

We may conclude this survey with the views of two prominent scholars who reviewed the twenties in Europe generally. In an article entitled “Restoration of [the] Reason” (1927), which appeared in Eliot’s Criterion, Ernst Robert Curtius—­a perspicacious critic of contemporary French literature but later known best for his magisterial work European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 1948)—­asks, “Has something been destroyed in the world?” and goes on to wonder whether “it has perhaps been reserved for our age to restore Reason to her place.”58 He notes that “we hear much about a return to classicism,” referring to Cocteau in France and to Eliot’s Criterion in England. But like Hofmannsthal he prefers to speak of reason rather than classicism. For decades, he argues (not unlike Valéry), intellectuals have been accustomed to yield to all delights and to exercise little self-­control. As in economics, where individualism and unlimited production are condemned by evolution, the intellectual world has experienced “hypertrophied production” (391). Now critics must control “the unfathomable vanity of authors,” he maintains. “The intellectual conscience of the European élite must of itself come to the rescue here” (391). One means of recovering from the spiritual

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chaos, he believes, is irony, which “disperses the gloomy fogs of pathos” and defeats “the monsters of the subconscious” (392). In addition, analysis must have free play. The “anarchical condition of European intelligence today,” he claims, stems from the intrusion of democracy into the realm of the intellect. Curtius is not opposed to democracy in the political and social sphere, but, like Valéry, he is convinced that it is alien to the realm of intellect, where it sweeps away all standards. Reason, he insists, is older than Descartes: it was the means, for instance, by which the Gothic architects imposed form on matter. It is necessary to set aside the historical form of neoclassicism and get at its essence: “the organization of the human domain by means of Reason that assigns values, imposes standards, decides and directs” (396). The task confronting European intellectuals is not to resuscitate the classical form artificially but “to create a form of Reason proper to the 20th century.” Finally, in a lengthy article on aesthetics written for the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1929–­39) the distinguished Italian aesthetician Benedetto Croce summarized succinctly his argument with the statement “The problem for aesthetics today is the reassertion and defense of the classical as against romanticism.”59 Following discussions of such issues as artistic qualities, art in its relation to other forms, the science of aesthetics, intuition and expression, expression and communication, the beauty of nature, literary kind and aesthetic categories, and rhetoric-­grammar-­philosophy of language, he turns to the opposition of “Classical and Romantic.” Romanticism, he explains, asserted “a duality of two fundamentally different arts.” Advocating feeling, passion, and fancy, it rebelled against the classical as such: “against the idea of the serenity and infinity of the artistic image, against catharsis and in favour of a turbid emotionalism that could not and would not undergo purification.” Later, when many observers believed that romanticism had run its course, it simply changed its name and reappeared under such labels as realism, verism, symbolism, artistic style, impressionism, sensualism, imagism, decadentism, and, most extremely,

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expressionism and futurism. All these doctrines attack the very conception of art, Croce believes, replacing it by one form or another of nonart. In its latest modern form, for instance, it is connected with industrialism and the psychology produced and fostered by industrialism. Real poets, in contrast, continue to work as they always have, expressing their feelings in harmonious forms and emphasizing the synthetic and formal elements as opposed to the merely affective. Croce’s article recapitulates essentially the central aspects of classicism, both eternal and modern, that were set forth by earlier theoreticians of the twentieth century in the major European lands: reason, restraint, form, order, submission of the individual to the work, and more generally opposition to romanticism. It will be our challenge to see how this classicism, heralded by many as the solution to the disintegration of spirit and art produced by the First World War, manifested itself in works of the various arts during the interbellum decades and how they differed from the works of the prewar and wartime years that, as we saw, were sometimes superficially “classical” without exemplifying the true spirit of classicism.

The Turn to Antiquity When thoughtful Europeans in the twenties looked to the ancient past for a sense of continuity and stability, their gaze focused most often on ancient Rome. In Italy and France, where the traditions of romanità and latinité had remained essentially unbroken, it amounted simply to a revitalization. In England, too, the Roman tradition constituted a steadfast part of the cultural atmosphere, albeit without the special affinity felt in the Latin countries. In Germany, in contrast, where “the tyranny of Greece over Germany” (according to the memorable title of E. M. Butler’s 1935 book) had resulted in a pronounced neglect of the Roman tradition, these years brought forth a fresh and reinvigorated reconsideration of Roman antiquity.

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The turn to antiquity is evident, first of all, in the Roman analogy that constitutes a central theme in works from Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918–­22) to Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History (1933–­39).60 Spengler, setting out to determine the “morphological” situation of modern Euro-­American civilization, found the closest analogy in ancient Rome (in his introduction, section 10). Rome, he suggested, is the true alter ego of our culture, which between 1800 and 2000 was attaining a similar stage of cosmopolitan imperialism. Toynbee also determined that modern Western history conforms to that of Rome—­but in an alarming manner. Writing in 1939 (in the introduction to volume 4), only a few weeks before World War II erupted, he confessed that “the contemporary atmosphere in which the present three volumes were produced was painfully appropriate to the themes of ‘breakdown’ and ‘disintegration’ which these volumes have for their subjects”—­a disintegration for which he discerned the cardinal example in the Roman Empire, from the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE to the fall of the empire in CE 378. The Roman analogy was not limited to the historians. Adolf Hitler referred constantly to Roman history, drawing parallels between the political turmoil in late Roman antiquity, from which Christianity emerged, and the chaos of the 1920s, from which Communism gained its vitality. “Roman history, properly comprehended in its broad outlines,” he maintained in Mein Kampf (1925–­27), “is and remains the best teacher not only for today, but indeed for all times”61—­a view held widely in Nazi Germany.62 In Italy the Fascists, through their school reform of 1923, introduced their ideology into the course of instruction: through compulsory study of Latin as well as Roman history. Mussolini called the fascio littorio, appropriated by the Fascists from ancient Rome, the symbol of unity, power, and justice63 and was fond of having himself portrayed in Roman garb and sculpted after the model of Roman busts. In 1930 the French cultural journal Latinité reprinted a two-­page Latin paean by the Dante scholar Joannes de [i.e., Giovanni di] Casamichela addressed to VIRO

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EXCELLENTISSIMO BENITO MUSSOLINI, congratulating him on his election in 1922 and dated Anno I a fascibus restitutis. The most immediate literary beneficiaries of this turn, albeit for wholly different reasons, were Virgil and Ovid. Other Latin poets of course had their advocates. In his poem “The Scholars” (1919) William Butler Yeats wondered what the classicists of his day—­“Bald heads, forgetful of their sins, / Old, learned, respectable bald heads”—­would say “should their Catullus walk that way.” That same year Ezra Pound published his “Homage to Sextus Propertius” (1919). And eight years later, in his essay “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation” (1927), T. S. Eliot complained that “in modern times, few Latin authors have been more consistently damned” than Seneca, who in the Renaissance was more highly esteemed than Virgil. But during these two decades Virgil and Ovid received more attention by far than any other Latin authors. Between André Bellessort’s Virgile: Son oeuvre et son temps (1920) and W. F. Jackson Knight’s Roman Vergil (1944), over a score of often immensely popular, and often ideologically slanted, lives appeared in German, French, Italian, Spanish, and En­ glish.64 Bellessort begins with an apology to professional Latinists but goes on to present a highly knowledgeable “works and times” written with all the skill of a popular novelist and experienced biographer. A reactionary critic of the social and political institutions of France and a radical Germanophobe—­and, to that extent, an intellectual colleague of Maurras—­Bellessort took up arms against the false image that he believed German historians had created. Virgil, he states in his introduction, is “the most noble inspiration of our art, the father of our modern poetry, whose oeuvre reflects, like the shield of Aeneas, all the glory and the humanity of Latin civilization.” With its veneration of traditional order and opposition to the anarchic quest for originality that he deplored in contemporary France, his Virgile exemplifies perfectly the widespread crisis of history and the Roman analogy. John William Mackail, a professional writer with socialist inclinations, undertook his Virgil (1922) for the series Our Debt

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to Greece and Rome, whose editors noted in their preface “the remarkable similarity between our own times and the days of the Roman poet” and heralded Virgil’s message “that lives with spirit and power for us at the present moment.” In 1930 Walter Wili published the first German biography of Virgil in the hope of reestablishing the line of continuity to the Roman poet that had been shattered in the Graecizing German-­speaking countries. The originality of his book is evident not so much in his portrayal of the life itself or in his literary and historical judgments but rather in the pattern that he imposes on both: an “inner bio” and a “Virgilian psyche”: a pattern according to which the poet’s life and the history of Rome reveal a movement leading from a bucolic period of romantic dreams and myths, by way of a pastoral epoch of agricultural plans, to a final affirmation of community embracing the acceptance of cosmic, historical, political, and religious forces.65 By far the greatest number of modern “lives” was produced in Italy. From introductions written for a general audience to pamphlets turned out according to the formula of inexpensive series, Italian writers kept the presses busy. Typical of these is Paolo Fabbri’s Virgilio: Poeta sociale e politico (1929), whose subtitle anticipates his depiction of Virgil as a protofascist. In his preface Fabbri presents it as his task to resolve the confusions surrounding Virgil and to “relocate him in his proper sphere, both material and ideal, both civil and political”—­a task that he achieves in what amounts to a paean of over two hundred pages. By all odds the most curious biography of these decades is Présence de Virgile (1931) by Robert Brasillach, the brilliant young intellectual whose romantic fascism led him into an unapologetic collaboration with the Nazi occupation, for which he was tried and executed in 1945. At the time he wrote his Virgile, the twenty-­year-­old normalien was still in the process of shaping his political-­social views, which were largely negative: anticapitalist, antiliberal, anti-­Marxist, and antibourgeois. As a result, his book presents us with a Virgil who is part bohémien and part protofascist. Despite the authenticity of the details and atmosphere,

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Brasillach had no desire to write a conventional historical novel. Rather, he “wanted the reader to begin the book as though it were the story of a young Italian of the year 1930.”66 Ultimately, of course, this technique of modernization—­the portrayal of the ancient world as though it were being experienced by a young Italian of 1930—­ serves Brasillach’s as yet inchoate political objectives. His Virgil, like Brasillach himself in 1930, is a protofascist, a man who senses that power and a strong man are necessary to preserve a country in political disarray and lacking order. Following his initial exposure to the romanticism of power in the person of Julius Caesar, Maecenas enables Virgil to understand how he can later assist Octavian in his political plans and agrarian projects—­a turn that leads to the outline of a political theory evident in the Aeneid: a traditional monarchy involving patriotism, nationalism, and political conservatism. Nothing could be more unlike the protofascist Virgils than the proto-­Christian poet who appears in another enormously popular work. Theodor Haecker, who in 1923 published a translation of the Eclogues in a luxury edition, wrote his Vergil: Vater des Abendlands (Virgil: Father of the West, 1931) as a series of chapters that lent themselves readily to separate delivery in his well-­attended lectures. Rejecting the all-­too-­easy constructs of Romanitas, Latinitas, and Germanitas, he aspires to expose “Virgilian Man” not as a limitedly nationalistic type but as Western Man par excellence.67 The larger question that concerns Haecker is: How was it possible for a Christian Rome and the Christian West to emerge from pagan Rome? How could this adventist pagan, this anima Vergiliana exemplifying the loftiest soul of ancient Rome, anticipate the Christian mysteries of grace and freedom? Haecker foregrounds the fourth Eclogue, in which he sees “a mythic presentiment of divine salvation history” (136) that qualifies Virgil as an anima naturaliter christiana (140) and explains his appeal to other animae Vergilianae through the centuries, from Augustine to Cardinal Newman. The poets did not lag behind the historians and biographers. Between the wars, leading poets in several literatures devoted

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their energies to translations of Virgil.68 In the 1920s Rudolf Alexander Schröder presented the public with excellent versions of the Georgics (1924) and Eclogues (1926) and went on later to publish what is widely regarded as the finest German rendition of the Aeneid (1953). In France, meanwhile, the journal Latinité commissioned for its September–­October issue of 1930 a collective translation of the Eclogues by ten well-­known literary figures. In addition to translations, various works that were pronouncedly “Virgilian” in tone appeared. Louis MacNeice opens his volume of Collected Poems, 1925–­1948 with four somberly satirical “eclogues” written in the mid-­1930s that are modeled on Virgil’s example and introduce his figures as speakers. Vita Sackville-­West’s The Land (1927), which a prominent authority has called “probably the most Vergilian of all recent poems,”69 bears a Latin motto from the Georgics and, like Virgil’s work, is divided into four books stressing the universal aspects and common humanity of the farmer’s life.

The interbellum obsession with Virgil reached its culmination with the worldwide bimillennial celebrations of his birth in 1930, which inspired many of the translations (e.g., the collective effort in Latinité ), biographies (Haecker, Wili), poems, and lectures. Up to that point, however, and for wholly different reasons, his popularity was at least equaled by that of Ovid.70 During most of the nineteenth century, while some of Ovid’s works were considered useful as school texts and as a source for myth, he was generally overshadowed by Virgil and regarded by scholars as too lightweight to deserve serious attention. (In fact, scholars began to dedicate their attention seriously to Ovid only toward the end of the twentieth century, stimulated by the celebrations of his bimillennial in 1982.) Nevertheless, he found advocates among many writers, who looked to Ovid not for the social and political reasons that caught the attention of Virgil’s admirers. James Joyce alluded to Ovid in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; published serially in 1914–­15): not only in the

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epigraph (from Metamorphoses, 8.188) but also in the name of the hero, Stephen Dedalus, in Stephen’s vision of the “hawklike man flying sunward above the sea” (which more accurately suggests Icarus than Daedalus), and in Stephen’s appeal in the last line to the Daedalus of antiquity: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” But it was above all the notion of metamorphosis that attracted writers to Ovid. In 1922 Ezra Pound called Ovid’s Metamorphoses “a sacred book” because it represents metamorphosis as a means of transcending death.71 During the years immediately follow­ ing the war, many people sought eagerly, even desperately, for change and transformation—­of the self as well as society. Precisely during these years the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung as stated in his Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1912) was gaining influence; in Germany the transformational notions of such thinkers as the so-­called Cosmic Circle (Alfred Schuler, Karl Wolfskehl, Ludwig Klages, and others) attracted wide attention and influenced such writers as Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke was directly stimulated to his Sonnets to Orpheus (1923, but written in February 1922) by a Latin-­French edition of the Metamorphoses that he received at Christmas 1920 from his lover.72 (As a schoolboy he had read at least some Ovid in the original.) As he summarizes his theme in the final sonnet: “Go in and out of transformation. What is your most painful experience? If you find drinking bitter, turn into wine.” (“Geh in der Verwandlung aus und ein. / Was ist deine leidenste Erfahrung? / Ist dir Trinken bitter, werde Wein.”) During that same year, and only a short distance across the Swiss Alps, Hermann Hesse, a lifelong admirer of Ovid since his schooldays, wrote and illustrated his fairy tale Pictor’s Metamorphoses (Piktors Verwandlungen, 1925), in which Pictor (Hesse’s own name for himself as painter and illustrator) through the power of a magical stone undergoes various transformations—­from tree into deer and fish, man and serpent, cloud and bird—­and is ultimately united with his beloved in an unending stream of transformations: as a twin river through the lands and as a double star in the sky.

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Artists also turned to Ovidian themes: notably Pablo Picasso with his folio of thirty vivid etchings illustrating scenes from the Metamorphoses (1931). While the poets and painters turned more often to Virgil, Ovid, and Latin literature, musicians tended to look at Greek mythology for their topics. Darius Milhaud composed a suite of three “minute operas” on the Minoan themes of L’enlèvement d’Europe (1927), L’abandon d’Ariane (1928), and Le délivrance de Thesée (1928). Ernst Křenek looked to Ovid for his Orpheus und Eurydike (1926) but to Greek tragedy for his Leben des Orest (1930), as did Igor Stravinsky for his Oedipus Rex (1927) and Arthur Honegger for his Antigone (1927).73

In sum, the turn to antiquity, which was prompted by the desire for tradition and order discussed earlier, manifested itself not only in theoretical and historical works of the interwar years but also in a conspicuous turn to classical themes and writers in literature, painting, and music of the period. Here I disagree fundamentally with Gilbert Highet, who argued that the “Symbolists”—­among whom he includes Eliot and Joyce—­do not have “a classical sense of form” and that “they do not think of Greek and Latin literature as a discipline to train the mind, or as a storehouse of wisdom.”74 If Highet had taken Eliot’s essays into account or the many contributions to Criterion or Nouvelle Revue Française, he would surely not have been so assured in his conclusions. Of course, as Eliot knew, “it is much easier to be a classicist in literary criticism than in creative art—­because in criticism you are responsible only for what you want, and in creation you are responsible for what you can do with material which you must simply accept.”75 At this point, therefore, we should shift our attention from theory to practice and seek to determine to what extent the practitioners actually followed the theorists. As Peter Bürger astutely observes, “whether the recourse to past formal schemata merely reproduces them or they are made into a convincing means of expression for a current expressive need cannot

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be decided by theory, but only by meticulous, detailed analysis of individual works.”76 By what actual standards of practice can we define the classicism of the twenties? I realize that some scholars in the fields of music, art, and literature are skeptical about the possibility of interdisciplinary generalizations. A respected German musicologist argues that any “cultural-­historically unified image” is achievable only at the cost of producing a “caricature of a differentiated, contradictory reality.”77 The literary theorist René Wellek expresses skepticism at determining anything more than vague “similarities in the theories and formulas behind the different arts,” arguing that “theories and conscious intentions mean something very different in the various arts and say little or nothing about the concrete results of an artist’s activity: his work and its specific content and form.”78 We can reach our own conclusions only by examining the textual, visual, and scored evidence.

3 Three Exemplary Figures Leonard B. Meyer observes with considerable insight that the artists, writers, and composers “who have found the substance, forms, and procedures of the past most fruitful and who have used them frequently and freely”—­notably Stravinsky, Picasso, and Eliot—­are those “for whom creation is an act of impersonal discovery, a skillful ordering of objective materials rather than an expression of personal feeling”:1 almost precisely a definition of classicism of the twenties as it emerged in the preceding chapter. These three masters, all born in the 1880s, are often linked by commentators on the modern cultural scene. Harry Levin makes the point that all three were “successful iconoclasts” who end as “image-­makers,” problematic experimentalists who emerge as “living embodiments of tradition.”2 This view is consistent with Gregory Wolfe’s claim that Eliot, Picasso, and Stravinsky are all essentially conservatives who wanted “to break out of a lifeless and complacent materialism”3—­that is, to move beyond revolution to recognition of lasting values. Levin continues in that same essay (287) to note that all three share another trait: they had their major careers as expatriates outside the lands of their origin—­an observation that leads one to wonder if their turn to antiquity amounted in part to the search for a new tradition to replace their lost cultural roots in Russia, Spain, and the

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United States. In his “anatomy of creativity” Howard Gardner took the three as his examples for “artistic masters of the twentieth century,” analyzing in detail the psychological similarities and differences among them.4 By now the comparison has become virtually a commonplace, as in Louis Menand’s review of Eliot’s correspondence, where his poetry is twice compared, albeit without reasons, to The Rite of Spring and Les demoiselles d’Avignon,5 or in Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, where the concluding chapter on Stravinsky alludes both to Picasso and, more extensively, to Eliot.6 All three knew and respected the work of one another. Stravinsky and Picasso famously collaborated on the ballet Pulcinella (1920), the first major (neo)classical work in the career of either. Picasso made three drawings of Stravinsky, who in 1932 wrote a “Tribute to Picasso” that appeared in Cahiers d’Art.7 In 1921 Eliot rose from his seat to cheer at the conclusion of Le sacre du printemps when he heard it for the first time.8 It was not until thirty-­five years later that they met personally, but their acquaintance had important consequences: Eliot arranged for the publication of Stravinsky’s conversations, while the composer set Eliot’s lines “The Dove Descending Breaks the Air” (from part 4 of “Little Gidding”) in his choral Anthem (1962) and in 1965 wrote his Introitus in memory of the poet. All three, finally, are regarded as the representative “classicists” in their respective media. According to The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, “neoclassicism” is “a stylistic classification most commonly applied to the works of Stravinsky from Pulcinella (1920) to The Rake’s Progress (1951).”9 Picasso, derided by his modernist contemporaries for his “classicism,” has been called by a recent critic “the best and most unabashed neoclassicist.”10 And Eliot famously styled himself “a classicist in literature.”11 The following discussions are not intended as original contributions to the musicological, art-­historical, or literary-­critical understanding of the three figures. They focus, rather, on an aspect that has hitherto been largely ignored: the common factors that, transcending specific genres, may be seen to link their

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various “classicisms.” I believe, along with Béla Bartók—­who suggested in 1926 that Stravinsky’s “switch to new classicism is intimately bound to current developments in other arts,” and notably to Picasso—­that “the arts have been developing concurrently ever since romanticism.”12

The Composer: Igor Stravinsky The Stravinsky of the 1920s, who surprised and sometimes dismayed his audiences with such works as his Octet, Oedipus Rex, and the Symphony of Psalms, was no longer the composer who, only a decade earlier, had scandalized the Parisian elite at the premiere of The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps, 1913).13 That ballet quickly became recognized as “perhaps the emblematic oeuvre”14 of the twentieth century and its premiere as possibly “the most important single moment in the history of twentieth-­century music,”15 and his early ballets, The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911), conquered European and American theaters to become popular standards. But Stravinsky had realized, by the time he published his autobiography in 1935, that “in the course of the last fifteen years my written work has estranged me from the great mass of my listeners,” who, accustomed to the sound of those early works, “are astonished to hear me speaking in another idiom.”16 The new idiom is immediately apparent if we compare the two superficially similar ballets, one using puppets, the other clowns: Petrushka and Pulcinella (1920). Petrushka, which takes place on St. Petersburg’s Admiralty Square during a Shrovetide fair, features a variety of typically Russian dances set to Stravinsky’s modernizations of Russian folk songs with traditional sets and costumes designed for the premiere by Alexandre Benois. It recounts the story of a traditional (actually early nineteenth-­ century) Russian puppet figure, which along with two fellow puppets—­the Ballerina and the Moor—­is brought to life magically by the Magician. (The motif of animated puppets was already a familiar one from such ballets as Leo Délibes’s Coppélia and Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, both based on a story by the

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German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, as well as Offenbach’s opera Tales of Hoffmann.) Falling in love with the Ballerina, Petrushka is ultimately slain by the Moor. Scored for an expanded full orchestra, the work is memorable for its leitmotivic use of the strikingly dissonant “Petrushka chord” (a combination of C major and F-­sharp major triads) and for the eerily ambivalent ending, in which Petrushka’s ghost appears and terrifies the puppet-­master or Magician.17 Pulcinella, in stark contrast, is based on a conventional eighteenth-­century Italian commedia dell’arte—­of the sort that Stravinsky had seen three years earlier in Naples in the company of Picasso—­featuring the traditional harlequin Pulcinella, his girlfriend Pimpinella, and their companions and, following various misadventures, ending happily with the marriage of several couples. The scenery and costumes, unlike the characteristically Russian garb and sets in Petrushka, featured creations by Picasso based on eighteenth-­century Italian models. (The same combination—­a traditional tale and adaptations of older tunes—­had already been successfully tried by Vincenzo Tommasini in his 1917 ballet Le donne di buon umore, based on a comedy by Goldoni and music of Domenico Scarlatti and performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.) The music, in turn, scored for a thirty-­three-­ piece chamber orchestra with solo voices, comprises Stravinsky’s reworkings of eighteenth-­century themes by or attributed to Pergolesi—­reworkings accomplished with “love” for “a musician for whom I felt a special liking and tenderness.”18 (Stravinsky’s fondness for Pergolesi moved him during those years to use material from that same composer as the basis for a Suite for Violin and Piano that was reissued in 1932 as his Suite italienne.) Unlike his rhythmically bolder early works, Pulcinella largely retains traditional meters; Stravinsky’s changes are evident mainly in the modern harmonies. “The remarkable thing about Pulcinella, he noted, is not how much but how little was added or changed.”19 The result, he believed, was one of those rare productions “where everything harmonizes”—­subject, music, dancing, and artistic setting—­to “form a coherent and homogeneous

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whole.20 But unlike Petrushka, which enjoyed an immediate and enormous success, Pulcinella received the “hostile reception” that Stravinsky had anticipated.21 To summarize: an ethnically Russian subject (like those of the roughly contemporaneous Firebird and Rite of Spring) in a typically Russian setting versus a classic Italian one in essentially traditional scenery and costume: the one scored for a large orchestra in a polyphonically modern style versus the other featuring typically (and recognizably) eighteenth-­century melodies modernized lovingly for a chamber orchestra. Pulcinella is commonly cited as the transitional work leading to Stravinsky’s second or “neoclassical” phase. It would be an oversimplification to regard the shift as radical and unprepared. Many continuities and developments can be traced during the decade 1910 to 1920.22 Yet the composer himself stated that “Pulcinella was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course—­the first of many love affairs in that direction—­but it was a look in the mirror, too.”23 What caused this shift? Pulcinella was the final work that Stravinsky completed during his five-­year ( June 1915–­June 1920) sojourn with his young family in Morges, a picturesquely lovely village on the northern shore of Lake Leman with a splendid view across the lake and the nearby mountains to Mont Blanc. (The towns along Lake Leman from Lausanne to Geneva attracted many writers and musicians in those years, among them the Polish composer and pianist Ignaz Paderewski as well as Stravinsky’s friends the Swiss writer Charles-­Ferdinand Ramuz and the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet.) It was from Morges that Stravinsky, on May 24, 1917, sent a telegram to his mother in St. Petersburg, expressing his joy at the liberation of Russia through the Revolution: “Toutes nos pensées avec toi dans ces inoubliables jours de bonheur que traverse notre chère Russie liberée.”24 The euphoria did not last long. The Russian living snugly abroad found himself suddenly transformed into an expatriate, dispossessed of the property and wealth that had assured him

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and his family a degree of comfort and security. The end of 1917, he confides in his autobiography, was one of the hardest periods he ever experienced. I was now also in a position of the utmost pecuniary difficulty. The Communist Revolution, which had just triumphed in Russia, deprived me of the last resources which had still from time to time been reaching me from my country, and I found myself, so to speak, face to face with nothing, in a foreign land and right in the middle of the war.25

One result of this new sense of alienation was a turn, though not yet absolute, away from the Russian themes underlying The Firebird, Petrushka, and Rite of Spring  —­all part of Stravinsky’s earlier ambition to introduce Russian culture and folklore to the West—­toward more generally European ones. Stravinsky was not alone among Russian artists in his turn to antiquity and classicism in reaction to the turmoil of the revolution and the early years of the Soviet Union. The poet Viacheslav Ivanov, a translator of classical Greek literature, regarded Bolshevism as a new barbarism and moved in 1924 to Rome, where he wrote his nine “Roman Sonnets.” The dramatist Marina Tsvetaeva, herself the daughter of a classics scholar, began in 1923 as an expatriate in Czechoslovakia composing her plays about two ancient Greek émigrés, Ariadne and Phaedra. And Osip Mandelstam, while choosing to remain in a Soviet reality that he could not accept, turned from his earlier “Greek” poems, in which he explored his classical heritage, to “Roman” poems, in which he sought to expose the relevance of the past for the present: notably the poems in the volume Tristia (1922), several of which—­e.g., “Tristia” (1918)—­deal with Ovid during his years of exile.26 A second effect was his conscious rejection of the nationalistically Russian art music as practiced by the mighty coterie of The Five in St. Petersburg: his own teacher and sponsor Nikolai Rimsky-­ Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, Modest Mussorgsky, César Cui, and their leader, Mily Balakirev. Stravinsky later regarded himself musically as a “double emigré” inasmuch as he

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was “born to a minor musical tradition and twice transplanted to other minor ones. I myself, and not political circumstance or the Revolution, helped to exhaust and scuttle the limited tradition of my birthright, but the dead end of ‘Russian music’ was the reason for my removal to ‘French music,’ which, at the time, was almost as eclectic as ‘Russian music’ and even less ‘traditional.’ ”27 (The second removal, he adds, came after his emigration in 1939 to the United States.) The move to “French music” was accompanied by a shift toward the more “Europeanized” music of  Tchaikovsky, whom he had admired since his boyhood and for whom he often expressed his affection in such works as his 1921 orchestration (from the piano reduction) of additional numbers for the ballet Sleeping Beauty and the allegorical ballet Le baiser de la fée (1928), which is based extensively on borrowings from various works of  Tchaikovsky. Both of these tendencies are clearly evident in Pulcinella. Stravinsky’s collaboration in Diaghilev’s production of Sleeping Beauty (1921) reveals another characteristic. Stravinsky had become increasingly convinced of the centrality of order—­again a fundamentally classical idea. He tells us that he found some consolation at the outbreak of World War I in reading Russian folk poems: not, he emphasizes, for the stories or images but for the musical cadences of the verse. Music, he avers, is by its very nature essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether feelings, attitudes, moods, or phenomena of nature. “The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time. To be put into practice, its indispensable and single requirement is construction.”28 It was this love of order that informed his admiration of classical ballet, which “by the beauty of its ordonnance and the aristocratic austerity of its forms so closely corresponds with my conception of art.”29 In classical dance, he continues, he sees the triumph of rule over the arbitrary, the haphazard—­in sum, the eternal conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Stravinsky, recognizing in classical ballet the perfect embodiment

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of the Apollonian principle, comes down (without naming him) at the opposite extreme from Nietzsche and his affirmation of the Dionysian. “The latter assumes ecstasy to be the final goal—­ that is to say, the losing of oneself—­whereas art demands above all the full consciousness of the artist.”30 These thoughts, while Stravinsky insisted that they constitute no aesthetic doctrine or philosophy of art,31 are absolutely consistent with the views expressed by the contributors to Eliot’s Criterion. Indeed, in defining the differences between himself and Schoenberg, Stravinsky later spoke of his own “reaction against ‘German music’ or ‘German romanticism’ ” in contrast to Schoenberg’s claim to “the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.”32 Schoenberg, for his part, had nothing but contempt for Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, which he expressed musically in his Three Satires for mixed chorus (1926), of which the second is directed specifically against his Russian contemporary. Ja, wer tommerlt denn da? Das ist ja der kleine Modernsky! Hat sich ein Bubizopf schneiden lassen; sieht ganz gut aus! Wie echt falsches Haar! Wie eine Perücke! Ganz (wie sich ihn der kleine Modernsky vorstellt), ganz der Papa Bach!33 Well, who’s drumming along there? Why, it’s little Modernsky! He’s had his hair cut in a boyish bob; Looks quite good! Like real false hair! Like a wig! Exactly (as little Modernsky imagines him to be), Exactly Papa Bach!

At least since Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik (1958), the two parts of which are “Schoenberg or Progress” and “Stravinsky or Reaction,” it has been widely recognized that

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those representative composers exemplified the two main poles of reaction entre deux guerres against the aesthetic lawlessness of modernism and expressionism: the discipline of classicism and the rigor of the twelve-­tone system.34

While Stravinsky’s classical or “neoclassical” period is commonly held to have extended for some thirty years from Pulcinella (1920) to The Rake’s Progress (1951), it should not be imagined that the shift wholly excluded other styles. In 1923, following a ten-­year period of gestation, he completed what has been called “the crowning glory” of his “second” Russian period:35 the dance cantata Les noces, which depicts a Russian peasant wedding with a Russian text (compiled from Pyotr V. Kireevsky’s standard anthology of folklore) and a score that in its relentless rhythms (pounded out here by four pianos and percussion) is reminiscent of Rite of Spring. To this extent Stravinsky may be called polyphonic not only in his harmonies but also in his musical styles. It is unnecessary for our purposes to discuss all the works that the prolific composer produced during these decades. In order to ascertain the principal characteristics of these “classical” works it will suffice to look in detail only at a few of the principal ones. Stravinsky himself marked the “turning point in the evolution of my musical thought” with Mavra (1922), the one-­act opera buffa that was initially regarded as “a disconcerting freak of mine, and a downright failure”36 but that the composer always regarded as one of his own favorites. The satirically comic plot, in a libretto by Boris Kochno, was taken from a rhymed story by Pushkin, “The Little House in Kolumna”—­Pushkin, who according to Stravinsky wrote “pure poetry” of  “matchless lucidity” and whose “poetic structure of rhymes interested me much more than the abstract ideas which one could draw from the story itself.”37 In a small town in mid-­nineteenth-­century Russia the daughter, in love with her neighbor, a handsome hussar, tricks her mother into hiring him, disguised as a woman, as the household cook. When mother and daughter go out for a walk one day, the hussar

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decides he needs a shave. The mother, returning unexpectedly, catches him in the act, and, fleeing, he leaps out the window. By this choice of subject Stravinsky asserted his position in the ongoing strife in Russian culture between the Slavophiles and the Occidentalists: he regarded Pushkin as the most perfect representative of “that wonderful line . . . which, by a fortunate alloy, has united the most characteristically Russian elements with the spiritual riches of the West.”38 Pushkin, in turn, led him to Glinka and Tchaikovsky, “and I resolutely took up my position beside them”39—­in opposition to the stated nationalism of The Five. Stravinsky presumably claimed this work as a turning point because, in contrast to the slightly earlier Pulcinella, it involved original compositions rather than reworkings of themes by older Italian composers. However, the experience with compositions attributed to Pergolesi had awakened his historical interest and persuaded him that many techniques of older music could be adapted to his own purposes.40 In any case, these two works from the early 1920s signal a pronounced change in his style: a shift from Slavophilism to Occidentalism, a turn from Russian nationalism to a cosmopolitan classicism in subject and form. The piece generally regarded as Stravinsky’s first fully classical composition is his Octet for wind instruments (1923). Its classicism is announced by its very title because the wind octet—­ normally for two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, and two horns, a grouping known in the later eighteenth century as a “Harmonie”—­was used conspicuously by Mozart (Serenade in C Minor), Haydn (Octet in F Major), and Beethoven (Octet in E-­flat Major). (Well-­known later octets by Schubert and Mendelssohn involved strings.) Aaron Copland suggested that the octet provided “an incentive to experiment with timbres outside the well-­known groupings of string quartet, woodhorn quintet,” and so forth41—­a view apparently confirmed by Stravinsky in 1924 in his comments on his Octuor, which begin with the statement that his work is not an “emotive” work but a “musical object. . . . [It] has a form and that form is influenced by the musical matter with which it is composed.”42 Stravinsky varied

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the instrumentation by scoring his composition for flute, clarinet, two bassoons, two trumpets, and two trombones. “Wind instruments seem to me to be more apt to render a certain rigidity of the form I had in mind than other instruments—­the string instruments, for example, which are less cold and more vague.” Form, he continues, “derives from counterpoint. I consider counter­point as the only means through which the attention of the composer is concentrated on purely musical questions” (576). Despite the change in voicing, the score is recognizably classical. Although certain themes occurred to Stravinsky as early as 1919, the three highly conventional movements of the twelve-­ minute piece were composed in 1922 and contain recognizably similar thematic material. The Sinfonia of the first movement displays a classical sonata form: the opening lento is followed by an exposition of the two themes, which are then developed at length and finally briefly recapitulated; but the form is modernized to the extent that the traditional harmonic relationships of tonic and dominant are translated into a context of majors and minors. At the same time, the polarity (whether tonic and dominant or major and minor) leading to a harmonic synthesis, which is essential to sonata form, is preserved and explains the appeal of this form to Stravinsky, in whose oeuvre polarity and synthesis are central.43 The long middle movement, Tema con variazioni—­another form popular with classical composers from Bach to Brahms—­ consists of a leisurely statement of the theme followed by seven variations. The first variation is repeated as a ritornello in variations 3 and 6, separating a march (2), a waltz (4), a cancan (5), and a fugato (7) with slow eerie harmonies that seem to anticipate Stravinsky’s later Symphony of Psalms. The third movement or Finale establishes a staccato ostinato that is repeated several times by the different instruments like variations. While the classical form is obtruin fugue-­ sive from the title on, it is manipulated with modern harmonies and rhythms—­for instance, the clashing minor keys of the Sinfonia and the syncopation of the Finale, familiar from Rite of

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Spring  —­that create a sense of ironic detachment enhanced by such devices as the cancan among the variations. Aaron Copland, who attended the 1924 premiere in Paris, which was conducted by the composer, has described the “general feeling of mystification” of the audience, which was unable to understand why Stravinsky would exchange his Russian heritage, which after all had accounted for his previous fame, for “a mess of 18th-­century mannerisms” and regarded the Octet as “a bad joke” that elicited the “unanimous disapproval of the press.”44 Today, of course, the Octet is widely viewed as a key work of Stravinsky’s classicism and enormously influential on other composers of the period. Joseph Straus has suggested that Stravinsky turned to such eighteenth-­century forms as the sonata out of anger—­“anger at the continuing tyranny of that music over our concert halls, our standard repertoire, and our musical imagi­ nation”—­and that he used those forms “as much out of defiance as out of reverence . . . in order to satirize and mock them, not to perpetuate them.”45 That statement is perhaps somewhat harsh. One might refine it more modestly by proposing that sonata form and other classical forms are always manipulated not with anger but with an irony that combines respect with an awareness that the past cannot simply be repeated. Stravinsky’s classicism is strikingly evident in the so-­called Greek Trilogy consisting of the opera-­ oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927), the ballet Apollo (1928), and the melodrama Perséphone (1934). After Pulcinella and Mavra Stravinsky became increasingly aware of the “need to compose a large-­scale dramatic work.”46 At the same time, ever since his political and cultural deracination he had entertained the notion that “a text for music might be endowed with a certain monumental character by translation backwards, so to speak, from a secular to a sacred language.” Indeed, he speculated, “an older, even an imperfectly remembered, language must contain an incantatory element that could be exploited in music.” These ruminations were catalyzed when, in 1925, he read a biography of Saint Francis of Assisi,47 who as a child heard Provençal songs from his French mother

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as well as the troubadours who traversed Italy in the late twelfth century. Regarding himself as “half Provençal” (23), he produced writings that even in their simple Latin are noticeably influenced by the chansons de geste and tales of the Round Table (17) and designated his friars as the Lord’s jongleurs (   joculatores Dei in his Speculum Perfectionis). “French was for him the language of poetry, the language of religion, the language of his best memories . . . and, essentially, the maternal language of his soul” (43).48 In his search for “a universal plot” Stravinsky contemplated various Greek myths before he finally settled on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, a work about which he had been “furiously excited” in his late teens.49 In particular, the plot was so familiar—­by the 1920s, as Paul Griffiths has remarked, “it had ceased to be a myth and become a complex”50—­that it would require little exposition, allowing the composer to focus on its dramatic essence. He invited Jean Cocteau, whom he had known for over a decade and whose Antigone (1922) he admired, to write a libretto, which was then translated into the “sacred language” Latin by Cocteau’s friend the Abbé Jean Daniélou.51 An additional benefit of Latin—­in the mind of Stravinsky, who denied the ability of music to express thoughts, ideas, feelings, and the like—­was that in an older language that was not spoken or understood by modern audiences he could focus on the sound and not the meaning of the words. This accounts for the often unusual accentuation of individual words—­for instance, Oedipus—­and the spelling of many vocables with a k rather than a c (kaedit or kito instead of caedit and cito) to ensure that the words would be pronounced as in classical Latin and not with a soft c as in Church Latin or Italian. (Stravinsky, who studied Latin and Greek from age eleven to nineteen,52 points out certain non-­Ciceronian infelicities in Daniélou’s rendition.) The distancing effect, similar to the epic theater being practiced at this time by Bertolt Brecht in Germany, is enhanced by “Le Speaker,” or master of ceremonies, in evening dress—­Cocteau’s invention to ensure his own intrusion into the performance—­who introduces the various scenes with a brief recapitulation in modern French. These

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various devices exemplify “the formalistic principle of parody and alienation [“Verfremdung”]” that Hermann Danuser finds representative of neoclassical music, and notably Stravinsky’s.53 Stravinsky made it clear to Cocteau that he wanted no action drama but a “still life”: a conventional libretto with arias and recitatives54—­a form that inevitably invites comparison, even if as parody, to Handel’s opera-­oratorios.55 He expected the masked actors to stand unmoving on pedestals—­“ living statues,” in the words of the score’s preface—­speaking not to one another but directly to the audience and illuminated individually during their arias: “vocally, though not physically, galvanized statues.” (Only the Speaker interrupts the tableau by entering immediately before pronouncing his lines and then exiting.) For that reason the work is often presented simply as an oratorio. The inaction of the plot and actors is reflected in the music, whose rhythms are “more static and regular than in any other composition of mine to that date” (29). “If I have succeeded in freezing the drama in the music,” he concludes, “that was accomplished largely by rhythmic means” (29). The voices—­six soloists and a male chorus—­are accompanied (in the 1948 revision) by an orchestra of three flutes, two oboes, English horn, three clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, harp, and strings. Oedipus Rex was a failure at its premiere. Schoenberg, observing that it “sounds like a Stravinsky-­imitation by Krenek,” wondered “what I am supposed to like in Oedipus.”56 His protégé Adorno, who had nothing but contempt for Stravinsky, attended the dress rehearsal and remarked that the work resembled a “pre-­Handelian oratorio, robbed of its flesh, its skeleton exploded into the air, the fragments reassembled according to the plan of the skeleton, filled out with concrete, and bound.”57 Even a half century later Stravinsky felt that “the Oedipus music is valued at about zero by present progressive-­evolutionary standards.”58 Leonard Bernstein, however, expressed a view more widely held today when in his extensive analysis of the work59 he called it the most “awesome product” of Stravinsky’s classical

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period and pointed out its many allusions to earlier composers (Bach, Handel, Mozart, Bizet, and Verdi, among others). With regard to “neoclassicism,” Stravinsky sought in the year of its premiere to distinguish his understanding of the term from that of more superficial critics who take note only of certain technical devices.60 In serious works it is, rather, “a quest that probes deeper than a mere imitation of the so-­called classical idiom.” For Stravinsky, classicism requires “a quality of interaction between constituent parts, interrelation of the building material”—­ that is to say, “musical form.” Everything else is “extra-­musical.” By these terms, which correspond closely to those of the other classicists of the twenties, Oedipus Rex may surely be defined as classical, for it subordinates all else—­actions, persons, and even the words—­to the music itself, which in principally minor keys follows clear lines of harmony and rhythm that are easily comprehended by the audience. The choice of a classical subject for his ballet Apollo (1927; originally Apollon musagète or “Apollo, Leader of the Muses”) was, Stravinsky writes, “natural after Oedipus Rex.”61 The first scene (prologue), “Apollo’s Birth,” features Apollo’s mother, Leto, and two attendant goddesses, who conduct him to Olympus. In the second and principal scene, “Apollo and the Muses,” we see Apollo both collectively and individually with three of the Muses: Calliope, Polyhymnia, and Terpsichore, who display their respective arts: poetry, mime, and dance. Their individual dances with him, or “variations,” are concluded by an “Apotheosis,” in which Apollo leads the Muses away to Olympus. However, the real subject of Apollo, Stravinsky continues in his Dialogues, is “versification, which implies something arbitrary and artificial to most people, though to me art is arbitrary and must be artificial.” How does versification enter a wordless ballet composed for a thirty-­piece string orchestra? Through the rhythmic patterns, which are basically iambic. The pas d’action—­the initial dance of Apollo with all three Muses, a canon whose main theme appears simultaneously in augmentation and diminution—­is “the only dance in which patterns of iambic stress are not immediately

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apparent, being introduced with the subsidiary key and then developed when the original key returns.” The rhythm of the cello solo in the Calliope variation, he writes, was suggested by the Russian Alexandrine verses in a couplet by Pushkin. As for the harmonics of the piece, “Apollo was my largest single step toward a long-­line polyphonic style” and “a melodism free of folk-­lore.” As in Oedipus Rex, then, we again find a classical subject—­the birth of the arts—­treated in a manner that the composer calls “artificial” but that we may confidently term aesthetically artful: a melodic polyphony with a straightforward underlying rhythmic pattern using a narrow instrumental range limited to strings with ornamentations suggesting the Baroque (for instance, the coda begins with a string arpeggio imitating the “Mannheim rocket”). In its subject as well as its disciplined treatment the ballet constitutes a perfect example for Stravinsky’s exaltation of the Apollonian over the Dionysian: what he called “the clarity and plasticity of the musical line.”62 At the same time, the dissonances make it clear that Stravinsky’s vision is no simple effort to achieve classical harmony. Again the work, though well received by the premiere audience, was dismissed by European and American critics, as excessively derivative as well as “light and empty.”63 Gradually it established itself as a keynote work for Balanchine, who choreographed the dances exactly as the composer envisaged them: “that is, in accordance with the classical school” with “lines of great dignity and plastic elegance as inspired by the beauty of classical forms.”64 The melodrama Perséphone (1934)—­in music the term “melodrama” has a technical meaning, designating a work in which spoken text alternates with or is recited against music—­while formally quite different, adds no new dimensions to our understanding of Stravinsky’s classicism beyond the first two works of the Greek Trilogy. It should be noted, however, that Stravinsky’s continuing use of traditional titles and designations, as Arnold Whittall has observed, “demonstrate his belief in the extent to

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which such models could be reshaped without losing their essential identities.”65 The work depicts in three scenes the myth of Persephone as re-­visioned by André Gide for the libretto: the “Abduction,” recast here as Persephone’s vision of the wandering Shades and her voluntary (rather than forced) descent to the Underworld to bring them solace; in the “Underworld,” her longing for the world left behind; and her “Rebirth” when she returns bringing springtime to the world, where she is reunited with her mother, Demeter, with the knowledge that she must regularly return to the Underworld. Here, the narrative is not pronounced by a Speaker but sung by the tenor Eumolpus (the legendary founder of the Eleusinian Mysteries), while a mixed chorus accompanies Persephone’s actions. She, the actress/dancer, has the sole speaking role, commenting on her initial vision of the Underworld, her subsequent experiences in the Underworld, and her ultimate reunification with her mother. Again, then, a classical myth provides the subject. Although the language here is Gide’s modern French verse, Stravinsky again takes liberties with the accentuation, as in Oedipus Rex, subordinating—­much to the poet’s displeasure—­the written words to the music. Perséphone, with its lovely classical landscape, springtime setting, and melodic harmonies, represents a radical counterpart to the primitive Slavic rituals and violent rhythms of Rite of Spring: another dramatic manifestation of Stravinsky’s shift from East to West. In his own comments on Perséphone Stravinsky restated his conviction that music is “regulated by time and tone, in contrast to the confused sound in nature,”66 emphasizing again that “music is not thought” and explaining that emotion, the moment it becomes conscious, is already cold and formal. For some time, he relates in his autobiography, he had entertained the idea of composing a symphonic work of some length but was not attracted by the conventional form of the symphony as known from the nineteenth century, which had become wholly alien to him. “I wanted to create an organic whole

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without conforming to the various models adopted by custom, but still retaining the periodic order by which the symphony is distinguished from the suite, the latter being simply a succession of pieces varying in character.”67 A commission by the Boston Symphony Orchestra to compose a work for the celebration of its fiftieth anniversary in 1930 provided the incentive and opportunity: his Symphony of Psalms. Desirous of composing a work with “great contrapuntal development,” he decided on an ensemble for chorus and orchestra in which both elements would be of equal weight and importance, as in much of Bach. To this end, since words would have to be sung, he required a text, and it occurred to him to select one from the Psalms. He had recently become a regular communicant of the Orthodox Church, and the incantatory first movement—­Exaudi orationem meam—­“was composed in a state of religious and musical ebullience,” he later recalled.68 Stravinsky stresses the fact that the Holy Scriptures may serve as inspiration even without reference to specific religious faith and that the music based on them does not need to communicate emotions or ideas. “Music would not be worth much if it were reduced to such an end.”69 For his purposes Stravinsky selected for the first two movements (Prelude and Double Fugue) brief verses from Psalms 38 and 39 and for the third movement (Allegro symphonique), the fast-­tempo sections of which were actually composed first, the whole of the popular Psalm 150.70 Although he began composing the Psalms in Old Church Slavonic, he soon switched to the Latin of the Vulgate71—­yet another signal of his shift from Russia to the West. Again, as in Oedipus Rex, the words are distanced by the fact that they are sung in the older language unspoken in the modern world, a circumstance that enables the composer to treat the words with total rhythmic freedom, subordinating them wholly to the music. The “periodic” order among the three movements is maintained by such motifs as the minor thirds, which in the Prelude occur in the ostinato accompaniment and then reappear in the trumpet-­harp motif at

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the beginning of the Allegro and, most strikingly, in the soprano theme: Laudamus dominum. The contrapuntal development that Stravinsky desired is strikingly clear in the Double Fugue, reminiscent of Bach, which opens with what he termed “an upside-­down pyramid of fugues”:72 a two-­minute fugue of flutes and oboes in which the theme is passed back and forth four times before the chorus enters a capella with a second fourfold fugue. The Allegro symphonique, which begins and ends with a gentle “Alleluia,” was inspired, the composer writes, “by a vision of Elijah’s chariot climbing the Heavens”73 and uses a series of triplets for horns and piano to suggest the horses and chariot. (Here too, he adds, he was concerned principally with the sounds of the syllables rather than their meaning.) The whole movement is quite remarkable for its musical realization of the words of the Psalm, notably when the chorus sings Laudate eum in sono tubae as the trumpets blare their rapid triplets and as the timpani pound out the rhythms to Laudate eum in tympano et choro. The movement, and the entire symphony, ends with one of the most ethereally lovely passages in music, classical or modern, as the sopranos sing a simple line of six bars—­Laudate eum in cymbalis, bene sonantibus—­against an enormously complex orchestration (albeit without cymbals!) of mostly woodwinds in high registers over the four-­note basso ostinato.74 Leonard Bernstein calls the Symphony of Psalms “one of the most sublimely moving works ever written.”75 The works we have discussed by no means mark the end of Stravinsky’s classical period, which extends by common agreement at least through The Rake’s Progress of 1951 and includes such late works as the ballet Orpheus (1947). Even in his late “serial” period Stravinsky continued to set Latin texts, as in his Canticum Sacrum (1956) and his final Requiem Canticles (1971). But, representing the apex of that period, the works treated here should suffice to enable us to define what is understood under his (neo)classicism. Some writers reject the term, maintaining “how little classicism there is in neo-­classicism” and arguing

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that “Stravinsky never lost his thick Russian accent.”76 Leonard Bernstein also reduces the definition of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, seeing its “essence” in the “quasi-­plagiaristic principle” according to which the composer is reduced to “the great eclectic, the Thieving Magpie, La Gazza Ladra, unashamedly borrowing and stealing from every musical museum.”77 Yet even these critics acknowledge certain characteristics that we have noted: Stravinsky’s conscious use of past musical forms and adaptation of existing music as well as classical models of harmony and the imitation of particular composers.78 In Pulcinella he adapted not only the traditions of commedia dell’arte but also specific themes from Pergolesi and other eighteenth-­century Italian contemporaries. In Mavra he applied those techniques to Russian themes while distancing himself from the Slavophilic nationalism of  The Five by turning to the “classic” models of Pushkin and Tchaikovsky, by subordinating the words to the music, and by explicitly denying any possibility of a message or meaning. In his Octet he adapted for the first time such explicitly classical forms as sinfonia and tema con variazioni for the characteristically classical ensemble of the wind octet. With the works of his Greek Trilogy Stravinsky turned even more emphatically away from romanticism to classical themes—­one of them, Oedipus Rex, even composed to a Latin text—­and to musical forms that represented a conspicuous departure from the violent rhythms and disharmonies of his earlier Russian works. The Symphony of Psalms again appropriated a Latin text in which the words are wholly subordinated to the pure music and where the integration, the absolute harmony, of words and music is complete. If classicism has any meaning as the second stage in Stravinsky’s development from Russian through classical to serial music, then classicism involves, first and thematically, a turn to subjects, often but not always from classical antiquity; second and formally, the adaptation of traditional forms, sometimes even the music of specific older composers, to the composer’s modern purposes; third and philosophically, the imposition of

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Apollonian order and harmony upon the Dionysian disorder of the material along with the absolute integration of subject and form; and fourth, the constant awareness, necessitating a certain ironic yet respectful detachment, that the past can never be simply repeated since history, and music, have developed and changed. In these characteristics we recognize the “rappel à l’ordre” advocated by many of Stravinsky’s French contemporaries of the 1920s. As Stravinsky put it in his comments on the Symphony of Psalms: “To me, the relation of tempo and meaning is a primary question of musical order.”79 Stravinsky’s classicism of the twenties, in sum, is far from being simply an eclectic gathering of elements from the past or an attempt to write music strictly according to an older pattern: it is explicitly an effort to conjoin past and present, to demonstrate through example the relevance of the past for the present, to enrich the present through the past while maintaining an ironic and even parodistic distance to that past.

The Artist: Pablo Picasso Despite the glaring differences between Stravinsky’s Apollonian restraint and Picasso’s Dionysian swagger, many similarities are evident in the respective classicisms of the two friends and contemporaries. Like Stravinsky with The Rite of Spring (1913), hailed as “the emblematic oeuvre” of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso (1881-­1973) made his mark with his prewar masterpiece, Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), which has been acclaimed as “the most important work of art of the last 100 years.”80 Following the melancholy isolation of the figures from his so-­called Blue period (e.g., The Embrace, 1903) and the actors and acrobats from his Rose period (e.g., Les saltimbanques, 1905), all of which are still recognizably realistic or illusionist, the distorted postures of the five women and features marked by the influence of African face masks signified a pronounced turn away from the traditional European standards of ideal beauty and grace. Although initially many knowledgeable people—­the critic Félix Fénéon, the art

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dealer Ambroise Vollard, and such friends as the writers Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire81—­failed to understand or appreciate Picasso’s achievement, it is now generally recognized as the pioneering work of cubism, the movement that revolutionized art in the Western world. Imagine, then, the dismay of his cubist friends when, in late 1918, having recently married the Russian ballerina Olga Koklova with her grand social aspirations, Picasso moved from the artists’ quarter on the Left Bank to an apartment on the rue la Boétie, the center of the Paris art trade,82 where he began sporting fancy clothes and which he abandoned every summer in favor of the Côte d’Azur or a rented house in such places as Fontainebleau. With that move he not only left behind many of his friends from his years of bohème; he also moved beyond—­or, more precisely, expanded his artistic horizons beyond—­the cubism that he, along with Georges Braque, had put firmly in the modernist center of the international art world. With the classicism that now increasingly marked his style, he appeared to have returned to a past rejected so contemptuously by the avant-­garde. As early as 1917 Robert Delaunay had nothing but derision for Picasso’s “so-­called classic . . . drawings which have neither father nor mother.”83 In a snide 1923 review of an exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants, Francis Picabia labeled Picasso’s classical work “painting for antiques dealers.”84 When people no longer know what to do, he continued, they cry, “Vive le classicisme!” Even in more recent times the Marxist-­humanist critic John Berger criticized Picasso as a “bourgeois revolutionary” who played the romantic role of genius in order to win public success, calling those works a caricature of the classical ideal and “performances by an impersonator of genius.”85 What prompted this shift? As early as 1914 Picasso had looked to Ingres “to wean himself off the fragmentation and illegibility of cubism.”86 The art dealer Daniel-­Henry Kahnweiler recalled that in the spring of 1914, Picasso showed him two beautifully drafted drawings of a seated man and asked rhetorically,

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“They’re better than before, aren’t they?”87 And the journalist Michel Georges-­Michel reported that Picasso, weary of the now routine comparisons to Ingres, remarked in 1917, with a touch of irony, “At present I’m going to paint in the tradition of Ingres.”88 Ingres’s purity of line is indeed evident in many of the drawings that Picasso made during the war years: in his Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire with Head Bandaged (1916), in his 1917 bust portraits of Stravinsky and the choreographer Léonide Massine, in his magisterial Portrait of Max Jacob (1917), or in the Self-­ Portrait of 1917. Always a skilled draftsman and the earliest and foremost practitioner of traditional drawing amidst the expressionistic deformations of the war years, after the war, according to Kenneth E. Silver, he was “the best and most unabashed neoclassicist.”89 Picasso’s “classicist” or “neoclassical” period is commonly dated from 1917 to 1925, but actually it began earlier and, like Stravinsky’s, lasted much longer.90 It is also vital to remember that classicism did not simply displace other styles in the artist’s oeuvre. What is remarkable about Picasso is the lifelong ability to maintain several styles simultaneously—­what Georges-­ Michel termed his “acrobatisme”91—­which distinguishes him from most of his contemporaries, who moved from style to style. As Picasso stated in 1923—­anticipating William Faulkner’s remark in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”—­and never tired of repeating, he denied the notion of “evolution” in art, arguing that “the art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.”92 Accordingly, “the several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution. . . . All I have ever made was for the present.” What might be called Picasso’s visual polyphony—­or, anticipating Eliot, his heteroglossia—­is strikingly evident in the painting Studies (1920), a composite work or “gallery picture” comprising ten different images, ranging from cubist constructs by way of a “Greek” profile head to two enlarged hands of the

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figure 2. Pablo Picasso, Studies (1920). © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York. Photograph © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York.

kind seen in his “giantess” paintings (fig. 2). Elizabeth Cowling points out that on the day when World War I was declared, Picasso was in Avignon, where he painted two pictures—­one cubist (Portrait of a Young Girl) and one naturalistic (The Painter and His Model  )—­that differ so radically that it is hard to believe they were painted by the same artist at the same time.93 Ken-

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neth E. Silver has noted the striking correspondences between two well-­known paintings of 1921: the cubist Three Musicians and the classicizing Three Women at the Spring.94 The same stylistic polyphony is still unmistakable in so famous a later work as Guernica (1937).95 The critical turning point came during the trip to Rome that Picasso undertook with Jean Cocteau in early 1917 to work on the “cubist ballet” Parade (it would premiere in Paris in May), which, conceived by Cocteau and produced by Diaghilev, was being choreographed by Massine to music by Satie against sets and costumes by Picasso. Like the Russian Stravinsky, who spent the war years in Switzerland, Picasso as a Spaniard was an alien in France and not subject—­as were his friends Braque, Apollinaire, Fernand Léger, and others—­to military service. Although free to pursue his art, he felt the effects of the nearby war, including the deaths of friends on the battlefield and the disdain of those who saw in him a presumed draft dodger of military age in the streets of Paris. So he was doubly relieved to be able to leave wartime Paris at least for a brief period and to enjoy Rome, still relatively untouched by the war. The truly formative experience of his stay in Rome, next to the acquaintance with Stravinsky, whose portrait he drew at the time and who became his lifelong friend, stemmed from the excursions to Naples, where Picasso encountered the spectacular Farnese collection of Greek and Roman sculptures in the Museo Nazionale and where his response was utterly different from that depicted in Henry Fuseli’s ( Johann Heinrich Füseli) drawing, Artist Moved by Grandeur of Antique Fragments (1778–­80), who crouches at the base of a gigantic antique foot, despairing at his inability to emulate or match such greatness. Picasso felt challenged to match or even outdo those antique masterpieces. Among those monumental works it was especially the celebrated Farnese Hercules that excited him with its gigantism: the disproportion of parts evident in the enlarged nose, eyelids, and fingers—­and the bearded head that anticipates the features of the sculptor that shows up in so many of Picasso’s later

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drawings.96 Indeed, almost alone among his classicizing contemporaries, who took their models from the French classicism of Poussin, Ingres, David, and others—­notably Léger, Severini, and Ozenfant—­Picasso looked back to classical antiquity, and especially to the works of late Hellenistic Greece and Rome, for his themes and formal models.97 But he shares with them the desire for forms that are harmoniously integrated with a subdued palette and emphatic lines. John Richardson suggests perceptively that the powerful impact antiquity made at that time on both Picasso and Stravinsky was due at least in part to the fact that both men came from cultures—­Spanish and Russian—­that had experienced no Renaissance, leaving them directly exposed without mediating transitions to Greek and Roman monuments in their full power and glory.98 (Although Picasso never went to Greece, Cocteau reports that “the frieze of the Parthenon decorated the staircase of  the apartment” in rue Schoelcher where the artist lived during those war years.)99 Clearly, as we have seen in other cases, antiquity represented for the pronounced pacifist an escape from the turmoil of the present. Another Italian experience that Picasso shared with Stravinsky, as we have already had occasion to observe in connection with Pulcinella, for which Picasso designed the costumes and sets, involved performances of the commedia dell’arte, which served in his painting as a viable alternative to classical myth (since it was also Latin in its roots).100

Classical themes show up earliest and most emphatically in Picasso’s drawings, such as the eight pencil or pen drawings of September 1920 depicting the assault of a woman by a centaur, based on Ovid’s account (Metamorphoses, 9.101–­33) of the centaur Nessus, who sought to rape Hercules’ wife, Deianira). Picasso’s powerful line drawings show a mighty centaur raising a nude, full-­bodied woman who tries vainly to push away his bearded, grinning face.

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John Richardson has argued persuasively that “the Latin poet Ovid had begun to exert a far more radical influence on Picasso’s choice of theme and imagery than any contemporary poet.”101 Picasso was by no means unique in his admiration and adaptation of Ovid. Many writers, musicians, and artists, as we noted in the preceding chapter, shared that enthusiasm. Ovid attracted Picasso in particular by the depictions of violence and lust evident in many of the roughly 250 mythic tales recounted in the Metamorphoses, in contrast to the more restrained nobility of Virgil’s Aeneid. If Virgil represented the Apollonian aspect of Greco-­Roman classicism—­the “noble simplicity” and “quiet grandeur” that, pronounced in the mid-­eighteenth century by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, determined the view of classical antiquity for decades—­then Ovid epitomized the Dionysian impulses proclaimed by Friedrich Nietzsche and appropriated by many modern artists.102 Themes from Ovid continue to appear for many years: for instance, in the welded sculpture Woman in the Garden (1932), based on Ovid’s tale of Daphne turning into a laurel tree (Metamorphoses, 1.452–­552), which had fascinated Picasso ever since he saw Bernini’s sculpture of that moment in the Villa Borghese. In 1929 the publisher Albert Skira commissioned Picasso to create the illustrations for a deluxe edition of the Metamorphoses, which appeared in 1931 with thirty engravings by the artist (two for each book: a half-­page illustration at the beginning and a full-­page one within the text).103 Here, in contrast to the earlier centaur drawings, in which violence predominates, the illustrations—­ presumably in response to the publisher’s wishes—­show far more classical restraint. The half-­page scenes are essentially decorative with no specific reference to the book they precede: often two or three heads in profile, in tranquil contemplation, or (as in books 4 and 7) small groups of women or men in quiet conversation. In a few cases these images are more specific, as in the dashing maenads of book 10 (the story of Orpheus) or, at the beginning of book 14 (the tale of Ulysses) a few

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lines adumbrating the sinuous hips of Circe. The full-­page illustrations within the texts become somewhat livelier, as in those depicting Phaethon plunging from the skies with his fiery steeds (book 2) or the death of Orpheus at the hands of the maenads (book 11). As we know from several drawings not included in the published work, Picasso omitted, or used less drastic versions, for a number of the more violent scenes: for instance, Tereus’s rape of Philomela.104 In addition, he sometimes depicted the moment before a violent action rather than the act itself (Polyxena’s death). Oddly, Picasso rarely portrays any of the actual transformations for which the Metamorphoses are most famous. (That he sketched some of them we know, for instance, from an unpublished drawing of Actaeon being transformed into a stag.)105 In general, however, Picasso saved the explicit violence and sexuality for the many drawings of the Minotaur that he made during these same years and published among the hundred engravings of the famous Suite Vollard (1930–­37).106 Following Sir Arthur Evans’s discovery and excavation of Minos’s palace at Crete in 1900 and his illustrated publications of his findings over the next thirty years, notably in the six volumes of The Palace of Minos (1921–­35), the principal myths of Crete—­Europa and the Bull, the Minotaur and his labyrinth, Daedalus and Icarus—­ which had been largely ignored during the nineteenth century, enjoyed an enormous surge in popularity and adaptation in literature, art, and music.107 The myth of the Minotaur emerged later than the other two, but by the 1930s it had assumed central importance among artists: as a symbol, among other things, for the growing fascist tyranny and brutality. The avant-­garde cultural journal Minotaure, published in Paris from 1933 to 1939 by Albert Skira and E. Tériade under the unnamed editorship of André Breton, featured in each of its thirteen issues a striking cover depicting a Minotaur and/or labyrinth in the typical style of contemporary artists: Picasso, Gaston-­Louis Roux, André Derain, F. Borès, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, René Magritte, Max Ernst, André Masson, and

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Diego Rivera. So Picasso was by no means isolated in his obsession with the Minotaur. But for Picasso the Minotaur had a special, essentially autobiographical meaning.108 Indeed, his understanding of the hybrid monster was so profoundly personal that his Minotaurs show little or no trace of their mythic source. How did his view develop? Clearly it was colored by the image of bullfighting, a pervasive theme in Picasso’s oeuvre since his earliest works. This obsession was given a historical-­classical context through the frescoes from the palace of Knossos featuring bullfights, with which Picasso was familiar from the journal Cahiers d’Art (1926), edited by his friend Christian Zervos. In any case, the Minotaur rapidly emerged as an ironic alter ego in the artist’s imagination and from 1928 to 1937 provided one of the principal themes in his work, notably in the more intimate genres of drawing and engraving rather than in the paintings. In his late forties and early fifties, Picasso, trapped in an increasingly passionless marriage, had embarked on a new and ardent love affair with the much younger Marie-­Thérèse Walter. The Minotaur provided, initially at least, a lively exemplification of his rejuvenated animal energy. His first representation of a Minotaur-­like figure appears in a collage of January 1928, depicting two human legs surmounted by a bull’s head taking a gigantic stride. That same year produced an oil painting based on the collage, Running Minotaur, but it was not until April 1933 that a Minotaur quite literally burst onto the scene, entering the artist’s studio and engaging the models in orgies. Its dominance in Picasso’s work for the next three years was evidenced first in a series of five etchings entitled Minotaur with a Dagger, one of which was used for the collage on the cover of the first issue of Minotaure, where the image of the monster is superimposed on a white paper doily and decorated with ribbons and tinfoil—­all on a piece of corrugated cardboard pinned to a block of wood. (The other images were printed facing the first page.) In all of them the figure of the powerful naked male with the majestic bull’s

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head incorporates in its various poses lasciviousness and sexual lust along with animal brutality. Almost immediately Picasso went on to create a series of irony-­tinged drawings in which the Minotaur takes possession of a woman in violent rapes. The next month saw further etchings in which the Minotaur exhibits a more restrained sexuality toward his lover: caressing her gently, toasting her with a glass of wine, and dozing peacefully beside her.109 But the inherent violence continued to emerge from time to time in rape scenes and others in which the Minotaur is himself wounded in an arena. That summer and fall produced more drawings, etchings, and watercolors featuring Minotaurs in a variety of erotic or ferocious scenes, sixteen of which were included among the one hundred engravings of the Suite Vollard, which constitutes a grand summation of Picasso’s classicism. All in all, and varying with Picasso’s own emotional state, the hybrid continued to reflect the artist’s feelings of strength coupled gradually with underlying fears of impotence. As his sense of weakness increased, along with a sense of guilt about his neglectful treatment of his soon-­to-­be-­divorced wife, Olga, a new and more poignant motif appeared in 1934: a series of ten drawings and etchings depicting a blind Minotaur clutching a staff in his hand and led by a small girl (with the features of his lover Marie-­Thérèse)—­a scene reminiscent of the aged Oedipus guided in his blindness by his daughter Antigone. (The Oedipus theme, partly in response to Freud’s influence, had enjoyed considerable popularity during the preceding decade and had been treated, as we saw earlier, by his friend Stravinsky in his opera-­oratorio.) These dozens of works from the years 1933 and 1934 prepared the way for what is widely regarded as one of the finest graphic works of the twentieth century: the Minotauromachy of 1935. The large work is dominated by the figure of a Minotaur with his powerful body and massive head, which occupies the entire righthand third of the print. He faces a group of figures whom he appears to be warding off with his right hand: a young girl holding up a lighted candle and grasping a bouquet of flowers; between

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them a mortally wounded mare with its entrails exposed, and on its back the body of a pregnant woman dressed in toreador’s garb and apparently dead; a near-­naked bearded man climbing a ladder; and two women observing the scene from a nearby window. We realize instantly that this Minotaur is no longer the jovially brutal beast of the earlier erotic etchings but rather, like the blind Minotaur of the preceding year, a figure of pathos. Despite his powerful body and monumental head this Minotaur, grasping in his left hand a cape flung over his shoulder, wears a wide-­eyed expression of openmouthed dismay and extends his arm in a defensive gesture. What does he reject? The girl, who resembles the girl guiding the blind Minotaur in the earlier works, illuminates with her candle the central scene of suffering and death: in the presence of witnesses—­the two women in the window and the Christ-­like figure ascending the ladder—­the Minotaur is summoned to acknowledge his guilt in killing not only the horse in the corrida but also, through the violence of his passion, the pregnant woman. The work thus represents a striking moment of painful self-­appraisal. The Minotaur is not the only classical image represented in the Suite Vollard. Many of the engravings fall into the category known generally as the Pygmalion group, from Ovid’s tale (Metamorphoses, 10.243–­47) of the youth who, disgusted with the shamelessness of the women surrounding him, carves an ivory figure of a beauty more perfect than that of any mortal woman. Venus, answering his prayers, transforms the lifeless statue into a living woman and blesses their marriage. For Picasso, Pygamalion—­ often depicted with the features and beard familiar from the Farnese Hercules—­exemplifies the artist and, specifically, himself as artist, always viewed with the ironic distance that characterizes Picasso’s classicism.110 In many of the drawings he is shown in various positions with his model and the statues he has carved of her loveliness. In one drawing, indeed, Pygmalion is depicted together with the Minotaur and two nude women (fig. 3). Again, then, as with the Minotaur, a classical image is adapted repeatedly to exemplify aspects of Picasso’s own

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figure 3. Pablo Picasso, Bacchanal with Minotaur (1933/34). © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York. Photograph © RMN/VG BildKunst Bonn.

character. Strikingly, all these images based clearly on classical mythology are present almost exclusively as drawings with the economical and intensely expressive lines of which Picasso was so singularly capable. When we turn to the paintings of these years, we immediately notice several conspicuous differences. First, while the garb of the figures gives them a generally Greco-­Roman appearance, there are no specific references to Ovidian or other classical myths. Second, the figures are almost wholly female. And, third, with few exceptions the figures are portrayed in a state of quietude, with little or no action. The one major exception is the gouache Two Women Running on the Beach (1922), which provided the design for the drop curtain designed by Picasso for the Diaghilev

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ballet Le train bleu (1924) and subsequently gained wide recognition as the logo for the Ballets Russes.111 The painting features two maenads, breasts exposed and hair streaming out behind, racing hand in hand along the beach in Dionysian ecstasy (fig. 4). Noteworthy are the disproportionately huge arms and legs of the two giantesses, especially the one leading on the right, as well as the seaside setting. The Mediterranean setting, which occurs in several of the classical paintings of these years, along with the white drapery, suggests the Arcadian harmony and innocence of the ancient world as portrayed by Virgil in his Eclogues.112 The women in many of Picasso’s classical paintings display massive limbs that, more Roman than Greek, remind us of the statues that the artist studied in Naples. (At the same time, we should also recall the discordantly large proportions of figures in several of Picasso’s early drawings—­for instance, the Seated and

figure 4. Pablo Picasso, Two Women Running on the Beach (1922). © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York. Photograph © RMN–­ Grand Palais/ Art Resource, New York.

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Standing Nudes of 1906—­which betray the influence of the ancient Iberian sculpture with which he had become acquainted.) This exaggeration has suggested to some critics that the artist is actually parodying classicism.113 Wyndham Lewis remarked unkindly that Picasso’s “giantess” is “a beautifully executed, imposing, human doll. Its fixed imbecility of expression, its immense, bloated, eunucloid limbs, suggest the mental clinic immediately. They are all opaque, fat, without nerve or muscle.”114 Gertrude Stein, in her idiosyncratic study of Picasso, even regarded them as the artist’s way of  “really purg[ing] himself of  Italy” and, oddly, of moving beyond naturalism to classicism.115 But, taking into account the melancholy expressions that dominate the faces in almost all the paintings, it is also possible to view those distortions in another light: namely, as the artist’s elegiac recognition that the harmony of antiquity is hopelessly past and has no meaning for the present.116 In either case the outsized limbs, hands, and noses, which mirror the muscularity that impressed Picasso in the Farnese Hercules and other ancient statues, contribute to the sense of sculptural mass and geometric volume that characterizes what John Richardson has defined as the “volumetric classicism” of these paintings.117 There is no need for the present purposes to discuss all the classical paintings in detail, because the common characteristics are present in all of them. In Two Nudes (1920) the two monumental figures, seated before a drab gray background, gaze not at each other but, with a melancholy air, into space; in this case the white garb is draped over the back of the chair in which one figure is sitting. The giantess in Large Bather (1921) might well be the woman on the right in the preceding painting, seated in a chair covered in white drapery and against the same plain gray wall. In Three Women at the Spring (1921)—­a setting based on the Napoleon Fountain near Picasso’s rented house at Fontainebleau118 and a grouping of three that occurs often in the paintings of these years—­the women are clad in the usual white gowns and exhibit the same oversized hands, all six of which are prominently displayed; again they gaze not at one another but

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figure 5. Pablo Picasso, Three Women at the Spring (1921). © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York. Photograph © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York.

vaguely and with a timeless melancholy into space (fig. 5). The woman in The Source (1921) has the same dark hair and white off-­ the-­shoulder garb as the others, but here she is resting against a rock on the seacoast, holding in her mighty lap a large urn from which water pours: a symbol for the source of humanity and creativity but also, given its position and vaguely phallic form, a typically Picassian hint at sexuality. The clearly delineated,

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long-­limbed, and nude women of Three Bathers (1920) are portrayed on what might well be the same sandy stretch of seacoast: one lies outstretched in front on the usual white drapery, reading a book; another sits beside her, gazing up at a remote bird flying on the horizon; the indistinct third swims in the distance. In few of these paintings—­we note a rare exception in Two Nudes, where one woman has her hand on the other’s knee—­do the figures make any human contact, by touch or sight: another suggestion by Picasso that the harmony of classical antiquity has given way to a modern alienation.119 Kenneth E. Silver suggests that “the new classicism was a lament rather than a celebration” and “the most appropriate fiction for a nation overwhelmed by grief.” The drastically reduced palette of these classical paintings, which contrasts vividly with the lively coloration of Picasso’s cubist works, is even more evident in the Bust of a Woman, Arms Raised (1922) and Woman in White (1923), in which the brown-­ haired woman, dressed again in white and gazing pensively away from the viewer, as though she were listening to Stravinsky’s (still to be composed) Symphony of Psalms, is shown against a plain grayish-­white background. Again, however, the lines of the body, as well as the thoughtful face with its prominent nose and dark-­shaded eyes, are clearly articulated (fig. 6). In several of these works, such as Reading (1921), the ironic detachment is suggested by the fact that the woman in classical garb is seated at a table and perusing what is clearly a modern book. Essentially the same characteristics are evident in Pipes of Pan (1923), which features, exceptionally, two young men rather than the more frequent women. The figures, while heavy and simplified, are more natural in their proportions than the colossal women; only the prominent noses and deep-­set eyes are reminiscent of the women’s features. But again the classical garb is suggested by the white loincloths worn by both, and antiquity is indicated by the panpipes played by the seated youth. Like the women, they make no visual contact with each other: the standing figure on the left gazes almost timelessly past the viewer

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figure 6. Pablo Picasso, Woman in White (1923). © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York. Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Licensed by Art Resource, New York.

into space while the seated one concentrates on his music. In the background the dark-­blue plane of sea, framed between two flat ochre walls, stretches out to the horizon, where it meets an equally flat azure sky. The apparent simplicity of the painting resulted from the rigorous geometrical planning that is evident

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in the roughly twenty preliminary studies that Picasso made as he was refining his conception.120

If we pause now to recapitulate, we note many similarities between Picasso and his friend Stravinsky, whom he admired even though he admitted to having no ear for music.121 (Both were passionately addicted to ballet, where Picasso presumably appreciated the human movement more than the score.) Born less than a year apart, they belonged to the same generation. Respectively Spanish and Russian, they were both aliens in the French culture where they made their careers. Both came to maturity in cultures that had experienced no Renaissance; so when, together, they first encountered classical antiquity in the powerful form of the sculptures in Naples, they were overwhelmed and soon turned in their respective genres to classical mythological themes (Picasso to such Ovidian themes as Daphne, the centaur, the Minotaur, and Pygmalion, and Stravinsky to Oedipus, Apollo, and Persephone) and to the generally Latin genre of commedia dell’arte in Pulcinella, for which Stravinsky composed the score and Picasso designed the costumes. By this turn they shocked the admirers of the early works through which they had left their mark on the century—­Les demoiselles d’Avignon and Rite of Spring—­and were disparaged for their “neoclassicism.” Both looked back to earlier “classic” models such as Ingres and Pergolesi for inspiration and for the pure linearity that characterizes Picasso’s drawings and paintings as well as Stravinsky’s melodic lines. At the same time, both continued in their aesthetic “polyphony” to cultivate other styles alongside their classicism, as evident in Picasso’s Studies or in Stravinsky’s Mavra. To achieve their classicism both simplified their previous aesthetic arsenals: Picasso, conspicuously eliminating from his palette the riot of color marking his cubist works, limited himself to a few basic tones, while Stravinsky drastically reduced his scores from the huge orchestra of The Rite of Spring to the chamber ensemble of Oedipus Rex. At the same time, both modified the

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classical models by characteristically contemporary deformations: Picasso’s monumental giantesses and Stravinsky’s modern harmonies and rhythms. Finally, they differed through emphasis in their classicism: Picasso’s violent and sexual Dionysian exuberance motivates his maenads on the beach as well as his centaurs and Minotaurs, while Stravinsky’s Apollonian restraint typifies both the stiff monodrama of Oedipus Rex and the gracefulness of Apollon musagète. At the same time, both were aware that classicism in its ancient purity and harmony, while a desirable goal, was ultimately unachievable in the twentieth century. This insight accounts for the melancholy that predominates in Picasso’s paintings of the period as well as the distancing effect achieved by Stravinsky: for instance, by his use of Latin for the texts of Oedipus Rex and Symphony of Psalms. In addition, the disengaged gaze of Picasso’s figures reminds us of the forward stare of the actors in Stravinsky’s opera. While their classical phase was predominant in the twenties, in both cases its development may be traced back into the war years, and its effect lasted well into the 1930s.

The Writer: T. S. Eliot Although T. S. Eliot (1888–­1965) is routinely grouped with Stravinsky and Picasso as one of the key figures of modern neoclassicism, he was not personally acquainted with them—­at least not in the 1920s. An early admirer of The Rite of Spring, Eliot met the composer only late in their lives—­an acquaintance of mutual respect confirmed by Stravinsky’s oratorio Introitus: T. S. Eliot in memoriam (1965). His wife Valerie allegedly hinted that “the stuffed men” in line 2 of “The Hollow Men” (1925) alludes to the figures in Stravinsky’s Petrushka.122 He appears to have only fleetingly encountered Picasso, who is not mentioned in his letters and plays no role in his biography.123 But Eliot’s familiarity at least with Picasso’s reputation, if not his paintings, and his association of the two great contemporaries is exhibited in his “London Letter” for September 1921 in the Dial, where Eliot

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observed that Stravinsky had been “the Lucifer of the season” and “the greatest success since Picasso.”124 Eliot spoke, as we have seen, more explicitly than Stravinsky or Picasso of his classicism. Already in 1916 he was hoping for “a return to the ideals of classicism.” Later, as editor of Criterion, he stated that the journal, while it claimed no specific program, exemplified a “tendency” toward classicism—­that is, “toward a higher and clearer conception of Reason, and a more severe and serene control of the emotions by Reasons.” (For reasons already discussed, he disliked the term “neoclassicism,” of which the journal was sometimes accused.) And in 1928 he frankly called himself “classicist in literature” as well as, in that famous self-­ definition, “royalist in politics, and anglo-­catholic in religion.”125 To this extent he resembles Stravinsky, whose sympathies lay with the White Russians and who also underwent a religious conversion around the same time (in the late 1920s) following his most pronounced classical phase. While the religious conversion is missing in Picasso, as a Spaniard he long regarded himself as a monarchist—­at least until the revolution and Guernica. What does all that mean as far as Eliot’s poetry is concerned?

Like his two older contemporaries, Eliot was an expatriate, an American living abroad, an outsider in a culturally conservative England. Like Stravinsky and Picasso, he also made his mark with a work-­of-­the-­century. Andrew Motion, the former British poet laureate (1999–­2009), was widely cited in 2009 as having called The Waste Land “one of the most important poems of the 20th century.”126 Even more recently and trendily, an advertisement for the iPad version of The Waste Land (on iTunes) labels it “the most revolutionary poem of the last hundred years.” So Eliot can claim a rightful place alongside his two older contemporaries, whose achievement, standing, and conjunction he early acknowledged. But, unlike their early masterpieces, Les demoiselles d’Avignon and The Rite of Spring, which underscored through cubistic deformations and rhythmic-­harmonic dislocations the

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potential disharmonies of traditional Western society and culture before the First World War, The Waste Land (1922) shocked its readers because it depicted a Western civilization actually in total disarray in the years following that war. While not Eliot’s earliest poem, it was the first work that brought him wide recognition. Edmund Wilson opened his review with the observation that “Mr T. S. Eliot’s first meagre volume of twenty-­four poems [containing Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917, and Poems, 1920] was dropped into the waters of contemporary verse without stirring more than a few ripples.”127 He went on immediately, to be sure, to remark that those works had turned out to be “unforgettable poems, which everyone was trying to rewrite.” As in the pre-­1920 works of Stravinsky and Picasso, the classical influence is present though not pervasive in those early poems. Eliot had enjoyed a sound classical education, having begun Latin and Greek at age twelve at the Smith Academy in St. Louis, where he won a gold medal for achievement in Latin. At Harvard he continued in particular his Latin studies, taking a course in the Silver Age writers Petronius and Apuleius as well as a course in Latin poetry with the distinguished classicist E. K. Rand. And his study of the Latin classics continued for years after college. “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation” (1927), one of his essays on Elizabethan drama, deals knowledgeably with its subject. Later he issued two major pronouncements on Virgil: “What Is a Classic?” (1944), an address to the august Virgil Society in London; and a radio talk, “Virgil and the Christian World” (1951), in which he sought to demonstrate the Roman poet’s relevance for the modern world.128 Not surprisingly, three of the early poems bear epigraphs from Greek or Latin sources suggesting the kind of ironic contrast between antiquity and the present that we observed in the composer and the artist. In “Mr. Apollinax” the quotation from Lucian (in Greek)—­“O what a novelty! What a marvel! An ingenious man!”—­suggests maliciously the inappropriateness of the priapic and centaur-­like foreigner in a sedate Boston drawing room. Similarly, In “Sweeney among the Nightingales” the

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passage (also in Greek) from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon—­“Alas, I’ve been struck a mortal blow”—­highlights the difference between “Apeneck Sweeney,” who, declining the prostitute’s advances, leaves the brothel intact as nightingales sing from a nearby convent—­the same nightingales who “sang within the bloody wood” as Agamemnon was struck down by his murderous wife in Greek antiquity. A similar effect of ironic contrast is achieved by the title of the unfinished poem “Sweeney Agonistes,” which links the harlequinesque Sweeney with the title figure of Milton’s tragedy Samson Agonistes. And the lines from the Aeneid prefixed to “La figlia che piange”—­“O what should I call you, maiden?”—­suggest the Virgilian theme of the poem, in which a lover, like Aeneas deserting Dido, leaves his beloved standing at the top of the garden staircase.129 Several of the poems, notably from the 1920 Poems, display other images from antiquity, sometimes mixed indiscriminately. Thus Sweeney “among the nightingales” is not only a contemporary caricature of Agamemnon; he also “guards the hornèd gate,” which in the Aeneid provides exit from the underworld for true dreams. And in “Sweeney Erect” we find passing allusions to Aeolus and Ariadne, to Nausicaa and Polypheme. In addition, the Sweeney poems contain repeated echoes of a slapstick commedia dell’arte, as when (in “Sweeney among the Nightingales”) the woman in the Spanish cape tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees and manages to pull the tablecloth and spill a cup of coffee.130 However, in these early poems, with the exception of “La figlia che piange,” the classical images are not developed systematically. They are included almost decoratively, suggesting an atmosphere rather than any precise analogy.

What do we find when we turn to The Waste Land (1922), a poem written just as Eliot was about to found the journal Criterion with its proclaimed classicist tendency—­a poem that, if any, might be expected to exemplify Eliot’s classicism in practice? Like the earlier poems, it includes several explicitly classical references from

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Greco-­Roman mythology. Indeed, one of the five sections, “A Game of Chess,” is clearly though allusively based on the Dido theme (as earlier in “La figlia che piange”), which Eliot in 1944 called “one of the most civilized passages in poetry.”131 The chair in which the nervous lady sits, queenlike in “the glitter of her jewels,” is like “a burnished throne”; and the “coffered ceiling” of her drawing room features “laquearia,” which—­lest we miss the reference—­Eliot explains in his notes as an allusion to the ornaments in Dido’s palace in the first book of the Aeneid. Above the mantel hangs a painting displaying another scene from classical mythology: the transformation of the raped Philomela into a nightingale (here from Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Although, like Dido, she appeals to her unnamed friend or lover to stay and talk to her—­“My nerves are bad tonight”—­and asks him to identify the noise of the wind under the door and to share memories, he simply departs—­like Aeneas, leaving his betrayed lover behind to her own fate. The following section, “The Fire Sermon,” features the Greek sage Tiresias, whom Eliot in his notes calls “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest.” (As if to confirm this statement, in his marginal comments on the manuscript of the poem Ezra Pound addressed Eliot himself as “you Tiresias.”)132 Tiresias, according to Ovid’s account, had experienced both male and female sexuality: encountering two huge serpents copulating in the forest, he struck them with his staff and, in retribution, was transformed by them for seven years into a woman. When Jupiter asked him to settle a quarrel with his wife, Juno—­ who finds greater satisfaction in the sexual encounter: man or woman?—­he sides with Jupiter, who argues that the woman enjoys it more, and for that reason is blinded by the infuriated Juno. In compensation, Jupiter bestows upon him the power to know the future. In Eliot’s poem Tiresias, “old man with wrinkled female breasts,” is witness to the loveless encounter between the exhausted typist and her lover, a lowly clerk in a real estate office. The scene is deliciously ironic for two reasons. First, and most obviously, it constitutes a contrast between the lofty divinity of

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the classical deities and the squalid lives of the modern urban lower class, between a glorious antiquity and a sordid modernity, with further echoes of the harlequinesque humor familiar from Eliot’s earlier poems. Second, it involves a further irony to the extent that Tiresias and Jupiter are proved wrong in their assessment, for here the situation is reversed: when the young man, “flushed and decided,” has enjoyed his hasty encounter with the tired and unresponsive women and left with “one final patronising kiss,” she glances into the mirror and thinks: “I’m glad it’s over.” Gareth Reeves has argued that the poem is “a sustained allusion to the Aeneid,” involving a journey like Aeneas’s, with a visit to the prophetess (Madame Sosostris, whose Tarot cards foretell several of the subsequent episodes: the encounters with Belladonna, the nervous lady; with Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant; with Phlebas, “the drowned Phoenician Sailor”), detention by Dido (“A Game of Chess”), a descent to the underworld (“The Fire Sermon,” which begins with fingers clutching and sinking and “the rattle of the bones”), the drowning of Palinurus (“Death by Water”), and the eventual return to the upper world.133 In addition to these two major classical allusions and its general analogy to the Aeneid, the poem famously includes virtually a catalog of other “classics” of world culture and literature, with quotations in the original Latin, German, French, Italian, and even Sanskrit, from Wagner’s operas, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Shakespeare, Webster, and Buddha, not to mention Dante and the Bible. For modern man, Eliot implies, world culture has become nothing more than “a heap of broken images” that repeatedly highlight by contrast the devastation of  Western civilization that has been shattered to its foundations by the political and social repercussions of the world war.134 At the same time, as he argued in his seminal 1923 review of Joyce’s Ulysses, the “continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity . . . is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy

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which is contemporary history.”135 Again, then, as in the classical works of Stravinsky and Picasso, Greco-­Roman mythology and the trappings of antiquity are appropriated, albeit in fragmentary form, to illuminate the deficiencies of the modern world—­a modern European world that Eliot, along with his two contemporaries, sees with the sharpened vision of the alienated expatriate in a strange land. To what extent is all this “classical” or “neoclassical”? The lines of Eliot’s poem surely fulfill Hulme’s prophesy that “a period of dry, hard, classical verse is coming.” But I believe that Eliot himself wrote the best commentary on the “classicism” of his poem twenty years later in his essay “What Is a Classic?” In part, of course, the essay—­a talk delivered initially as the Presidential Address to the Virgil Society in London in 1944—­constitutes a eulogy to Eliot’s favorite Latin poet and poem: Virgil’s Aeneid and its hero, with whom as “an exile”136 and “the original Displaced Person”137 Eliot found it easy to identify. But only about one-­quarter of the essay actually deals with Virgil; for the most part it constitutes Eliot’s effort to define “classicism” per se, and that definition applies at least as well to The Waste Land as to the Aeneid, by the writer whom Eliot calls “our classic, the classic of all Europe” (73). Leaving aside the heated contemporary controversy over classicism and romanticism, Eliot seeks to enumerate the qualities that he expects the classic to display—­and that he finds par excellence in Virgil’s oeuvre. First of all, he cites “maturity,” which can “only occur when a civilization is mature; when a language and a literature are mature; and it must be the work of a mature mind” (54). This maturity of mind, he explains more specifically, requires “history, and the consciousness of history” (62). Beyond the history of one’s own people one needs “the knowledge of the history of at least one other highly civilized people, and of a people whose civilization is sufficiently cognate to have influenced and entered into our own” (62). Eliot cites as example the Roman consciousness of Greece and its past, but The Waste Land also exemplifies the point. The poem, to be sure, portrays

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a devastated civilization. But in its entirety it amounts to a fragmented history of world culture preceding that decline and an attempt to expose the connections relating those fragments both among themselves and with the present: for instance, in the narrator’s encounter with Stetson (“The Burial of the Dead”) the implicit comparison in their conversation between the Punic Wars (the Battle of Mylae) and the world war that they have both just experienced; in the list of falling towers in such capitals of civilization as Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and London; or, in the last eight lines, the close conjunction of lines from a children’s poem, Dante’s Purgatorio, the late-­classical Pervigilium Veneris, a sonnet by Nerval, Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, and the Upanishads. Surely the mind that is capable of drawing these analogies, even if they serve the purpose of ironic contrast, may be called mature and conscious of a broader history that connects both East and West, past and present. Maturity of mind is succeeded, second, by “maturity of manners.” For Eliot, Aeneas’s encounter in the underworld with the shade of indignant Dido, who does not deign to respond to his entreaty for forgiveness but simply turns away and retreats into the shadows, is “one of the most civilized passages in poetry” with “the most telling snub in all poetry” (63–­64). Yet Eliot also cites the Augustan Age of Congreve as a society that, while coarse and brutal, was at the same time polished and sophisticated: “its mind was shallower, its sensibility more restricted” (56). Eliot could almost be speaking here of the society depicted in The Waste Land, which pairs the delicacy of an elegant London drawing room with the sordid lodgings of the typist, and the conversation with a noblewoman in the Munich Hofgarten with the gossip of two lower-­class women in a London pub at closing time. The maturity of language that accompanies maturity of mind and manners means, in literature, that “the poet is aware of his predecessors, and that we are aware of the predecessors behind his work” (58). Could there be a better exemplification of this “maturity of language” than Eliot’s own poem, which, as we have seen, depends for its meaning upon our recognition of the

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various predecessors to whom he repeatedly refers by quotation or allusion? The persistence of literary creativeness in any people, accordingly, consists in the maintenance of an unconscious balance between tradition in the larger sense—­the collective personality, so to speak, realized in the literature of the past—­and the originality of the living generation. (58)

Eliot believes that we have no classic age or classic poet in English (60) or, indeed, in European literature since antiquity. But is his irony not still here at play? Does not his own major poem fulfill precisely the requirements that he sets forth as the definition of a classic? In this sense, then, classicism does not depend upon imitation of Greek or Roman models but, rather, upon creation of modern works in which maturity of mind, manner, and language—­or, mutatis mutandis, musical and artistic techniques—­are evident and reflect the culture that has produced them. The fact that they are used ironically is beside the point: irony belongs, one might say, to the maturity of mind characteristic of the twenties.138 This, I suspect, is what Ernst Robert Curtius had in mind when he called Eliot “an Alexandrine poet in the strictest sense of the word”: erudite, highly aware, and learned in mythology.139 Just as Eliot’s classicism emerged before The Waste Land, it continued for years beyond: both in his contributions to Criterion and in such essays as those on Seneca and Virgil. It is also evident in some of his later poems, notably “The Hollow Men” (1925), where we observe many of the characteristics noted in The Waste Land. It begins with an epigraph: not from antiquity but, here, from the English classic of Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. And it ends with the famously ironic lines: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” In between we hear reminiscences of Virgil’s underworld: the hollow men are “those who have crossed . . . to death’s other Kingdom,” where they “grope together / And avoid speech” on the banks of the “tumid river.”140 And again we hear echoes of language from

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the most polyphonous spheres: from the nursery rhyme (“Here we go round the prickly pear”) to the Bible (“For Thine is the Kingdom”). (In the concluding section of “Ash-­Wednesday” we find a reference to “the ivory gates”—­opposite the “hornèd gate” cited in “Sweeney among the Nightingales”—­through which in the Aeneid false dreams emerge to the world above.)

Most critical studies of “The Hollow Men” tend to focus on Eliot’s various sources: notably, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the children’s verses for Guy Fawkes Day and other occasions, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Dante’s Divine Comedy.141 But if we ignore the sources and turn our attention, instead, to the form, we note that Eliot has used various devices in order to lend order and shape to the five (separately published) poems that constitute the whole—­devices similar to Stravinsky’s use of counterpoint and recurrent themes. Among the various recurrent images, the most important comprises no doubt the kingdoms of death: “death’s other kingdom” (I and III), “death’s dream kingdom” (II) and “twilight kingdom” (II and IV), and the kingdom of God in the Lord’s Prayer (V). Beyond that, we detect images that lend continuity to the poem as the poet looks in his dream to the “other kingdom” of those who have escaped the “dead land” of the “hollow men”—­that is to say, the reality of postwar Europe. Those so blessed have “direct eyes” (I) and “eyes I dare not meet in dreams” (II): “eyes [that] are not here” in the “dead land” but that “reappear as the perpetual star” giving hope to the sightless men “gathered on this beach of the tumid river” (from Aeneid 6 and Dante’s Inferno 3). The “cactus land” of part III is suggested again in the child’s verse of part V: “Here we go round the prickly pear.” And the “hollow men” with their “shape without form, shade without colour” (I) can be seen in the “Shadow” that falls “Between the idea / And the reality,” “Between the conception / And the creation,” and “Between the desire / And the spasm” of the concluding lines (V)—­that is, between the kingdoms of earthly death and true death.

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The “hollow men” of the title and opening lines reappear in the “empty men” in the last line of IV. The “dried voices” (I) are given sound by the “voices . . . in the wind’s singing” (II), just as the “rat’s feet” in the dry cellar of  I show up in the “rat’s coat” worn by the dreaming poet in II. Similarly, the “fading star” of II and III becomes a “dying star” in IV. While the first four parts with their vivid images are tightly unified by these images and others, the final poem, between the children’s verses at its beginning and its ironic end and the line from the Lord’s Prayer dividing the strophes, is wholly abstract but make it clear that the poet, apart from his dreams, never attains death’s (God’s) true kingdom. In sum, “The Hollow Men,” in which Edmund Wilson discerned “a more advanced state of the condition of demoralization” than in The Waste Land and the “desperate condition of Europe since the war” in its “mood of helplessness and impotence,”142 displays once more the formal control and the ironic contrast of present and past that we noted as characteristic of his classicism in The Waste Land—­a classicism that, following Eliot’s conversion, soon gave way to a new sense of religious confidence and hope evident in “Ash-­Wednesday” (1930) and other later poems. The classical allusions continue in other forms. From Eliot’s Criterion essays of the 1930s down to “Virgil and the Christian World” we hear pronounced references to Virgil’s Georgics, in which Eliot, though himself a totally urban creature, praised Virgil for his affirmation of “the dignity of agricultural labour, and the importance of good cultivation of the soil for the well-­ being of the state both materially and spiritually.”143 Eliot also pointed to the classical inspiration for his later plays: notably Aeschylus’s Choephoroe (for The Family Reunion) and Euripides’ Alcestis (for The Cocktail Party).144 As in the poems, there is no direct postfiguration of the classical sources, as there was, for instance, in Joyce’s Ulysses, which Eliot admired and whose method he praised in his 1923 essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.”145 Instead, he takes the situation and questions of the Greek play as his starting point and then develops them with modern characters and modern problematics.

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However, given Eliot’s exceptionally small corpus of poetry, especially in comparison to the vast productivity of Stravinsky and Picasso, The Waste Land occupies the position of the classic work par excellence.

Summary If we now look back at our three representative classicists of the twenties, we see that they all share certain characteristics in their music, art, and poetry. First, all of them refer explicitly to classical—­that is, Greco-­Roman—­antiquity through their frequent use of classical myth: ranging from Stravinsky’s Oedipus, Apollo, and Persephone by way of Picasso’s maenads, Minotaurs, and Pygmalions to Eliot’s Virgilian Aeneas and Dido and Ovidian Tiresias. All three, moreover, share a fascination with the late-­Latin commedia dell’arte. Second, in all three cases that antiquity is appropriated ironically: that is, with the critical detachment necessary to highlight the difference between past and present and to express their common conviction that any truly “classical” harmony in the ancient sense is unachievable in the postwar Europe of the 1920s. In his chapter “Stravinsky and Neo-­ Classicism” Eric Salzmann highlights parody—­ “the use and transformation of pre-­existing material”—­as a fundamental characteristic of the neoclassical tendency in all the arts: “the use of Homeric materials in James Joyce, the quotes and references in T. S. Eliot, Picasso’s paintings after Delacroix.”146 Similarly, W. Bronzwaer claims that “the new Classicism of Stravinsky and Eliot is basically an effort to use traditional types not as dead, but as live models”;147 and here, as we saw, we could easily include Picasso. Third, all three achieve their effect with their respective musical, artistic, and literary techniques: Stravinsky’s dislocation of classical scenes with disruptive dissonances and rhythms; Picasso’s grotesque enlargements of allegedly “classical” limbs and features; Eliot’s literary polyphony or heteroglossia of voices from radically different periods and social levels.

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These are the characteristics of classicism of the twenties if we disregard all the theoretical statements and look simply at the defining works themselves. And what works could be more defining than Stravinsky’s Octet and Greek Trilogy, Picasso’s drawings of Minotaurs and paintings of classical figures and scenes, and Eliot’s The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men”? All of them strive for order and reason. But their order is a modern one involving the integration of disparate pieces isolated by a powerful sense of irony and a recognition of historical distance. And their reason is a modern one that has been informed and transformed by such developments as the theory of relativity and Freudian-­ Jungian psychology. These conclusions qualify Hermann Danuser’s view cited at the end of the preceding chapter: that any “cultural-­historically unified image” can be achieved only at the cost of producing a caricature of the reality of an epoch. While that view surely holds true for any epoch as a whole, it is equally true, as Leonard B. Meyer has demonstrated, that every epoch comprises multiple styles.148 The twenties witnessed not simply classicism but also expressionism, surrealism, dada, and various other aesthetic movements, each characterized by its own style. Our investigation of the actual musical, artistic, and literary practice of the three classical masters has exposed common characteristics that define classicism of the twenties—­but only classicism and not modernism more generally. It will now be our challenge to determine whether the same criteria apply to test cases of other composers, artists, and writers of the decade.

4 The Writers Ancient myth was a staple of literature, music (opera), and art from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. For several reasons, however, the nineteenth century turned away from myth to history, and the classics were pursued principally in translations for school instruction.1 This change, fostered in part by the new sense of conservative nationalism that arose during and following the Napoleonic Wars, is evident in Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy (1797 –9­ 9), which along with Shakespeare’s historical dramas provided the model for many historical dramatists of the nineteenth century in Austria, Germany, and France, including Heinrich von Kleist (Die Hermannsschlacht, 1808–­9; Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, 1810), Franz Grillparzer (König Ottokars Glück und Ende, 1825; Libussa, written 1848), Alexandre Dumas (Henri III et sa cour, 1829), Victor Hugo (Hernani, 1830), Alfred de Musset (Lorenzaccio, 1834), Friedrich Hebbel (Agnes Bernauer, 1852), and others. When myth was required, national myths and folklore fulfilled the need more than adequately, from Richard Wagner’s operas (from Der fliegende Holländer, 1841, and Tannhäuser, 1845, through Tristan und Isolde, 1865, to the Nibelungen tetralogy, 1848–­74) to Stravinsky’s early ballets (The Firebird, Rite of Spring).

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A second motivating factor was no doubt the new sense of history that inspired the nineteenth century, notably in Germany, from Barthold Georg Niebuhr and Leopold von Ranke down to Theodor Mommsen and Heinrich von Treitschke.2 A certain sense of history had by no means been absent in eighteenth-­century Europe, whose historians—­David Hume, Voltaire, Ed­ward Gibbon, and others—­while still largely unsystematic, achieved the secularization of a history that had previously been religiously eschatological. But several revolutions—­political (French Revolution), social and technological (Industrial Revolution), and intellectual (the Epistemological Revolution that shifted the philosophical emphasis from external reality to human consciousness with its Kantian categories)—­produced a complete refocusing of our vision of history. This new consciousness contributed to the enormous popularity of such historical fictions as Walter Scott’s Waverley novels (from 1814), Edward Bulwer-­Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and Rienzi (1835; the source for Wagner’s opera), Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers (both 1844), Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), and Felix Dahn’s Battle for Rome (Ein Kampf um Rom, 1876). Following an initial surge of interest inspired by such thinkers as Nietzsche and Freud, the First World War brought a radical reordering of priorities. Shattering the old nationalistic beliefs, it left a political-­social-­intellectual vacuum that was rapidly filled, as we saw earlier, by the turn to antiquity, which could be used purely formally, to give shape to the perceived chaos of modern reality, or as an indirect metaphor for modern experience. This turn took various forms in the different arts. Writers appropriated antiquity in forms ranging from adaptations and straightforward historical dramas and fictions to postfigurations in which the ancient work provided the pattern for the modern action. The motivation of the writers ranged, in turn, from a serious classicism to mere imitation. The most famous example of postfiguration, coupled with a serious classicism, is provided by James Joyce’s Ulysses.

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James Joyce Joyce (1882–­1941) is often linked to his contemporaries in classicism. “The creative artist, Joyce or Picasso, Eliot or Stravinsky,” wrote Harry Levin in 1941, “must be coldly and deliberately exceptional.”3 Earlier, Eliot himself by implication called Joyce a classicist when, in his essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923), he cited “classicism” as the “goal toward which all good literature strives”4 and then adduced Joyce as his example. And in the first decade of the century, writing Stephen Hero, the discarded first draft of his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce has Stephen compose an essay in which, in compliance with the aesthetic opposition of that decade (as sketched above in chapter 1), he favored the “classical temper” over the “romantic temper.” A classical style, he said, is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country: it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience.5

Criticism conventionally assigns A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; serially 1914–­15) to the naturalistic tradition and classifies Finnegans Wake (1939) as “a symbolistic experiment.”6 But, despite the association with Stravinsky, Picasso, and Eliot, critics rarely go on to locate Ulysses (1922), moving as it does between the extremes of realism and fantasy, explicitly within the classicism of the twenties. Are we justified in calling this “classic” work, which appeared in the same year as The Waste Land and during the high period of Stravinsky’s and Picasso’s classical works, “classical”?

The classical theme is announced by the very title of the work: Ulysses. At least since Valéry Larbaud’s early review (April 1922) readers have been aware of the Homeric structure of the novel.7 Two months later Ezra Pound also called attention to the Homeric parallels.8 The following year Eliot claimed famously that

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Joyce, with his “parallel use of the Odyssey,” had accomplished a literary achievement with “the importance of a scientific discovery.” In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. . . . It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.9

The topic had become so commonplace that in July 1922 Mary Colum complained that “one of the chief occupations of critics of the book is making parallels between the sections and characters of Ulysses, and the Odyssey.”10 We know today that this association by the early readers was due initially to Joyce’s own hints. As early as September 1920 he sent to the Italian novelist and translator Carlo Linati a “summary-­key-­skeleton-­schema” listing “Schlagworte” (catchwords) for his novel, including its classical figures and dominant symbols.11 A year later Joyce shared with Valéry Larbaud and several others a revised schema, swearing them not to make it public until, in 1930, he authorized its publication by Stuart Gilbert in his study of the novel—­again, however, specifying that it should be presented as Gilbert’s own analysis rather than as the author’s plan.12 As a result of many years of further research into the most remote details, every reader—­even those whose acquaintance with the novel is limited to Cliffs Notes—­knows that the immense novel is divided into three major parts: the Telemachus episodes (parts 1–­3) featuring Stephen Dedalus; the Odyssean episodes (parts 4–­15) depicting Leopold Bloom’s wanderings through Dublin; and the homecoming (parts 16–­18), in which Stephen is reunited with his surrogate father, Bloom, while Bloom’s wife, Molly, recalls in an extended interior monologue episodes and impressions from her life. At the same time, it is essential to remember, as a German Joyce scholar has stressed, that the Odyssey correspondences do not emerge organically from the action but,

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instead, point to the author’s own manipulations: “the parallels are a means of suggesting insights to the reader that go beyond the self-­understanding of the figures and the narrative commentary.”13 In other words, the Homeric parallels do not contribute to our understanding of the psychology of the figures but only to our comprehension of the form of the work. For instance, Joyce’s Telemachus is named Stephen Dedalus, a name from a wholly different mythological context (the Cretan myth of Daedalus) and from Ovid rather than Homer. Joyce retained the name from his earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where it has very specific associations culminating in Stephen’s appeal to the Daedalus of antiquity as the image of the artist: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”14 However, the classical parallels alone, while they relate Joyce’s work to those by Stravinsky, Picasso, and Eliot, do not suffice to justify the label “classical” for the novel. For, as we shall see, the decade brought forth many works with themes from classical antiquity that, for a variety of reasons, do not qualify as classical in the sense of the twenties. We must establish, rather, the desire for order and the presence of irony in the work and its manipulation of its classical elements. Joyce himself reportedly told Djuna Barnes that “there is not one serious line in it,”15 and this is certainly borne out by his treatment of the classical parallels. Readers soon become aware of the extreme irony with which Joyce treats these Odyssean figures and episodes: in the Cyclops episode the one-­eyed giant Polyphemus in his cave is reduced to an angry drunk with a bloodshot eye in a tavern who hurls a biscuit tin at the departing Bloom; the enchantress Circe’s island becomes a brothel, where the men are animalized by their basest instincts; and Molly Bloom, quite unlike her epic model, the faithful Penelope, has on this same day enjoyed an extramarital affair in the bed that she later shares with her husband. Indeed, every “Homeric” figure in the work appears under a similar ironic veil. Many serious critics have feared, along with the German poet Ivan Goll, that unsophisticated readers would assume, in view

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of such comic parallels as these, that Joyce intended nothing more than a spoof of Homer, not understanding that the novel is rather “the most formidable parody anyone has ever written on the universe of God and man.”16 This view has been echoed by Mary Colum, who saw in it “a satire on all literature,”17 and by most subsequent critics down to the present. The narrative itself constitutes a parody of various literary forms, which reach from the straightforward realistic narrative of the opening episode to Molly’s extended interior monologue in the closing one. In between we find such varieties as the hallucinatory, almost film-­like sequences of the brothel scene and the impersonal question-­and-­answer catechism of Bloom and Stephen in the Ithaca episode. The Aeolus episode, which—­for its rhetorical windiness—­takes place fittingly in a newspaper office, comprises, as Stuart Gilbert pointed out, “a veritable thesaurus of rhetorical devices,”18 while the “Oxen of the Sun,” which occurs in a maternity hospital, exemplifies a history of English prose from early Germanic alliterative style by way of Anglo-­ Saxon, Chaucer’s Middle English, and Shakespeare down to the modern scientific manner and the writings of Dickens, Ruskin, and other nineteenth-­century classics. The novel constitutes, then, “a satire on all literature.” At the same time, the satire and parody extend beyond the literary form to the institutions depicted in the various episodes and their representatives: the Irish school system, the newspapers, the popular culture of the day (the Siren episode), the pubs and brothels. Along with literature, Dublin and Irish society generally are treated with unerring irony. What about order? Like his three classical contemporaries, Joyce was also an exile, moving between 1904 and 1941 from Trieste by way of Zurich to Paris and back to Zurich again.19 Deprived, like them, of the social order of home and country—­ Dublin, Ireland, and its Catholicism—­Joyce had what has been called “a desperate and rather untidy passion for order of any kind.”20 Transformed into his literary activity, this meant that Joyce had to find a means of disciplining the rich material at

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his disposal. As Harry Levin put it, “the esthetic problem [of the book] is to work out an arrangement for disorder.”21 Joyce accomplishes this by imposing “a static ideal upon kinetic material”: in other words, by using the Homeric pattern to order and harmonize the incredible abundance of factual detail crammed into its 750 pages. This accounts for the obsessive meticulousness with which he kept his extensive note-­sheets recording minutiae: words, for instance, connected with the magical herb “Moly,” by which Odysseus was protected against Circe’s wiles.22 Above all, it explains the various schemata on which he outlined with virtually manic detail the eighteen episodes of the novel including its (Homeric) title, time, symbolic color, persons, literary technique, science/art, symbol, and so forth. In sum, Joyce shared with the other “classicists” of the twenties the “rappel à l’ordre” that was central to their convictions. More specifically, Joyce fulfills almost perfectly the criteria that Eliot propounded in his essay “What Is a Classic?” In such episodes as those taking place in the library (Scylla and Charybdis) or the tavern (Cyclops), Ulysses displays a profound awareness of “history, and the consciousness of history.” In its depictions of the whole of Dublin society, Joyce’s novel is analogous to The Waste Land in its “maturity of manners.” And maturity of language is brilliantly evident in the hospital episode (Oxen of the Sun), which reenacts the entire history of the English language. Among his classical contemporaries Joyce knew only Eliot: he met Stravinsky on one occasion, but they did not become acquainted; Picasso even refused to draw his portrait because Joyce did not belong to the circle surrounding Gertrude Stein.23 Yet Joyce fully deserves his place alongside Stravinsky, Picasso, and Eliot as a representative of the classicism of the twenties.24

Jean Cocteau Unlike Joyce, Jean Cocteau knew and actively pursued everyone of cultural significance and never saw a bandwagon onto which he could resist jumping. A fervent Picasso groupie—­although

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the artist, disdainful of his pretentiousness, treated Cocteau as a whipping boy25—­and early aware of the turn to classicism of Picasso and Stravinsky, he was not slow in seeking to emulate the masters. In 1922, inspired by a friend’s account of a trip to Greece, he created his so-­called contraction of Sophocles’ Antigone with the notion of  “restitching the hide of classical Greek tragedy, and setting it to the rhythm of our age.”26 With his customary audacity, he presumed to present the celebrated text in such a manner that “everyone believes to hear it for the first time.”27 In a note on his play (1926) he explained why Antigone was “ma sainte.”28 Creon, like the revolutionary tribunal in France, acts hastily to change the laws and, in the process, replaces false laws with other false ones. “The entire role of Antigone is a cry of revolt and of reason.” Robespierre, he continues, should have recommended her as a model for David’s historical paintings. In that case, “the mania of copying antiquity would find its proper account and France would possess a true image of liberty.” Cocteau’s adaptation amounts to a radical acceleration in prose of the original text, which he knew mainly through translations. This was necessary, he believed, because “what seemed short to an attentive and calm epoch appears interminable to our agitated times [“trepidation”].”29 Accordingly he presents the audience with the drama “refreshed” (“rafraîchi”) and with its patina removed. While the opening scene between Antigone and her sister, Ismène, reproduces every single exchange of their dialogue, each speech is drastically abbreviated in prose. The following scenes are often not so faithful in their reproduction of the exchanges. According to one recent critic, the dialogue of Antigone and Creon sounds “less like the tragic stichomythia it was trying to emulate than the vicious give-­and-­take of Parisian literati in a salon.”30 The hundred lines following Antigone’s disappearance toward the end of the play—­including Creon’s reappearance, the messenger’s detailed report of Antigone’s suicide, and Creon’s lamentation—­are concentrated into roughly a quarter of the space. The most severe cutting affects the lovely choral odes for which the play is justly celebrated: notably, Sophocles’

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great Ode to Man, which recapitulates human development from savagery to civilization and culminates in praise of those who succeed in interweaving secular laws with the oath-­bound justice of the gods, is reduced to a prosaic paragraph beginning “L’homme est inouï” (“Mankind is extraordinary”). Cocteau claimed, in his prefatory remarks: It’s tempting to photograph Greece from an airplane. One discovers a wholly new aspect. That’s how I have sought to translate Antigone. From a bird’s-­eye view some great beauties disappear while others surge forth; unions (“rapprochements”) are formed, blocks, shadows, angles, unexpected reliefs.

In sum, Cocteau’s adaptation amounts to a total de-­poeticization of Sophocles’ text—­an effect intensified by his instruction to the actors: “The extreme rapidity of the action does not prevent the actors from articulating much and moving little.” The chorus, reduced to a single coryphaeus, recapitulates the action “in a high-­pitched voice that speaks very rapidly as it if were reading a newspaper article.” (The role was taken at the premiere by Cocteau himself, who declaimed the lines with a megaphone through a hole in the backdrop, just as later he insisted on functioning, in evening dress, as the Speaker in Stravinsky’s Orpheus.) The de-­classicization of the work was further achieved by the costumes of the two actresses, which were created by Coco Chanel because, as Cocteau explained in his marginal remarks, “she is the greatest couturière of our epoch and I cannot imagine the daughter of Oedipus badly dressed.” (This is the same Cocteau, a well-­known dandy, who commissioned fancy uniforms for himself when he briefly drove an ambulance during the war.) Cocteau, who had already enlisted Picasso’s art (and his fame!) for the set and costumes of Parade, appealed to him to design the set for his Antigone—­a design that amounted to little more than three columns drawn hastily, on the eve of the premiere, with ink and red chalk on the backcloth.31 And the action was accompanied by a “modest” music for one instrument by

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Arthur Honegger—­“a little score for oboe and harp”32—­  which according to Cocteau “does not superpose itself on the words but plays the role of a gesture or an accessory.”33 (This background music should not be confused with the full operatic version that Honegger composed for a later production in 1927). Cocteau’s Antigone, then, offered absolutely nothing new and contributed nothing thematically, poetically, or psychologically to contemporary literature. The theme was already very much in the air. In 1916 Romain Rolland had issued a pamphlet entitled À l’Antigone éternelle with a pacifistic appeal to the women of the world, and the following year the German expressionist Walter Hasenclever adapted the legend into a successful antiwar play in his free-­verse drama Antigone (1917). Cocteau’s work amounted, like his later reduction of Oedipus Rex, to a watering-­down of a classic work to appeal to the taste (and often to the ignorance) of his audience and to highlight the political implications of the piece. In the process he distorted the classical balance of the drama, which achieves its effect precisely through Sophocles’ equitable depiction of Antigone and Creon.34 The play was booed at the premiere by Cocteau’s enemy the surrealist André Breton, and some spectators besieged the stage. In his journal André Gide wrote contemptuously that he had “suffered intolerably” from the “ultra-­modern sauce” that Cocteau had applied to Sophocles’ “pièce admirable,” which remains beautiful “despite Cocteau rather than thanks to him.”35 In an afterthought, which he apparently shared with Cocteau, he noted that “the patina,” which Cocteau boasted of having removed, “is the reward of masterpieces.” The work exemplifies the term “classical without classicism.” Despite the shortcomings of Cocteau’s text, it enjoyed a hundred performances, thanks largely to the contributions of Picasso, Honegger, and Chanel and to the almost dadaist stylization of the action. In any case, Cocteau always strove less for art and more for spectacle. Ernst Robert Curtius, who appears to have been captivated by Cocteau—­“a charmer,” “an enchanter”—­called him a classicist, but in order to do so he had to redefine “that much misused

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term: classicism,” which he viewed as “no cautious retreat, but rather an assertion of self.” Cocteau remains charmingly unreasonable. His poetry, even though it makes use of classical forms, retains the bewildering and softly intoxicating fragrance of the era which today is the present for a few thousand people.36

It was precisely that unreasonable charm and intoxicating fragrance that irritated Stravinsky and Picasso, whom he so assiduously courted.

Hans Henny Jahnn Only three years later, in Germany, a wholly different adaptation of a classical drama created a sensation. Hans Henny Jahnn (1894–­1959) is best known for his fictional trilogy Fluss ohne Ufer (River without shores, 1949–­61), but he had already made a name for himself with his scandalous play Medea (1926), in which the heroine is depicted as a sex-­driven black woman.37 (The German text routinely uses the word “Neger.”) The idea of a black Medea was, of course, not unheard of. Already in antiquity Pindar had described the Colchians as kelainôpessi (Pythian Odes 4.212) “black” or “dark-­faced,” but also “gloomy” or “melancholy”). In the visual arts of antiquity they are rarely, for all their exoticism, characterized as Negroes, and Medea is normally just as white as the Greek women, even though sometimes clad in Eastern garb. But in the premiere of Jahnn’s play her darkness was depicted much more drastically. King Creon—­“I don’t like foreigners!” (811)—­is the mouthpiece of the racism, reviling Medea as an “animal” and “non-­Greek barbarian” (809) and reproaching her by saying, “Your deed is just as black as your skin.”38 He despises her children as half-­ breeds and mocks Medea because she had dared to presume that he would tolerate a marriage between her son and his daughter. “I would never have approved of giving my dearly beloved child to a half-­Negro.”

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In 1929 Jahnn explained his view of racial issues: “What the barbarians were for the Greeks—­for us Europeans of today are Negroes, Malayans, Chinese.”39 (In the list of characters of the play Medea is designated, in contrast to the “Greek” Jason, simply as a “barbarian.”) He justified his statement as follows: “Why must the Negroes, for us, be barbarians as Colchis was for the Greeks? Perhaps simply because we deny the history of humanity and its great addictions—­something the Negroes and Chinese still did not do.”40 He also concedes a contemporary relevance. “I have not tried to conceal the fact that in Europe a race-­evaluation has been cultivated that perhaps is based not only on the color of skin but, more deeply, on religious beliefs.” In fact, around this time it became quite a theatrical vogue to criticize Western racism through the figure (or name) of Medea. In Henri-­René Lenormand’s avant-­garde play Asie (1931) she is an Indo-­Chinese princess, who along with her two children is brought to Paris by her French husband and then abandoned. In the prose adaptation of Euripides’ Medea (1935) by Countee Cullen, poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, she is an African woman who is betrayed by a white man. And in the 1960s, as a protest against apartheid, the same method was taken up again by the South African Guy Butler in his Demea (premiered 1990). There, in the early nineteenth century, a black princess is deserted by a British officer, who has become a trader. Rather than subject her children to oppression under apartheid, she prefers to send them to their deaths.41 Jahnn, who was familiar with Euripides’ Medea in translation, believed contemptuously that Euripides had “degraded the Medea-­drama to the background of a divorce trial.”42 It was his hope to take the legend back to its origins—­“Barbarization and Archaicization,” as his project has been labeled43— ­which he thought he detected in the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh and in Egyptian myths: “Greater Colchis is located in black Africa, where there was a Benin and an Egypt, where the legends still today appear to be present in the practices of the natives, which for us are virtually incomprehensible.”44

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For Jahnn, however, the theme of racism takes second place. Foremost stands what he called “the ur-­tragic problem of aging.”45 His Medea is not only a black; Jason calls her “a grayed night-­ghost from hell” (829), “that fat, black-­gray woman” whose breasts are “both fat and drooping” and who walks with a clubfoot and whose flesh “sloshes around” (847; “schwappt”). Even her sons are disgusted by her kisses, and Jason, although no racist like Creon, says insultingly: “I am not crying out for white breasts, only for youth!” (824). Jason, in contrast, has remained youthful through Medea’s magic: “Your loins bloom as always, only more luxuriantly” (785), she tells him. What offends her as a woman is the fact that he now avoids her out of disgust at her body. Any slave, any whore, would suffice for him—­only not his Colchian wife. Lecherous sexuality determines the action of the play. Even Medea—­formerly the lovely temple servant of the sun deity Helios, who slept with thousands of men and even with her own brother—­feels herself humiliated as a woman by Jason’s betrayal. For two weeks he has not visited her bed at night, and she is driven to the extreme when he breaks his promise to spend this night with her. The lust of the parents has been transmitted to their children: the younger brother is jealous of the older one, who already has homoerotic relationships with older men and even his own father, whereas his own sexuality has just been awakened. In Jahnn’s play the action moves rapidly and almost breathlessly forward without breaks for scenes or acts. In an early scene the older brother’s mare is mounted by the excited stallion of Princess Kreusa, whereupon the two young riders are sexually aroused by the surrogate rape. The brother rushes home and pleads with his father to woo in his name for the hand of the princess. Jason promises to do so, and Medea is also pleased because she already anticipates the pleasure of her voyeuristic right as mother of the bridegroom to hold the candles when the newly wed couple has sex for the first time. So her disappointment and chagrin are doubly keen when the

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king’s messenger announces that not the son but the father will wed the princess. The indignant Medea has the messenger’s eyes torn out because he claims to have witnessed the desire of Jason and the princess: she still cannot believe in Jason’s betrayal. It is only when Kreon confirms the report and announces his intention to banish her with her two sons that, as an apparent sign of resignation, she sends the fatal gifts: the magical ring, which strangles the king and then cuts him in half; and the golden bridal gown, which transforms Kreusa into a stinking carcass, in the course of which she undergoes the stages of aging that repel Jason in Medea. When the unsuspecting Jason continues to deny any responsibility for Medea’s crimes, she proceeds to the most extreme deed: she stabs her two boys, whom she catches in an incestuous-­sodomitic embrace. (The elder is sexually frustrated as a result of his failed wedding plans, and the younger one is supposed to celebrate his manhood on the following day.) She takes the corpses into her chariot—­drawn not by dragons but by white horses—­in order to bury them at an unknown spot where Jason cannot find them for any future consolation. As she disappears from the hall, the entire palace collapses behind her. In this manner the traditional action is dragged violently into the twentieth century: through Jahnn’s anthropological interest in the ritual sources of myth; through the motif of racism, at which Euripides only gently hints; through Jahnn’s obsession with aging; and through a sexual-­pathological intensification of passion according to the psychoanalytical theories of the 1920s, which determine the behavior of the principal figures. Jahnn’s play, while immeasurably more powerful and original than Cocteau’s little abbreviation, still shares certain characteristics with it. Both writers believed rather high-­handedly that they were improving on their classical models: Cocteau was convinced that Sophocles was too slow for a modern audience, while Jahnn felt that Euripides had trivialized his subject. And both writers adapted their classical subjects essentially as vehicles for modern concerns: for Cocteau, Antigone embodied an intellectual and political “cry of revolt and of reason,” while for Jahnn,

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Medea offered the occasion for both social criticism and psychosexual analysis. In both cases we are dealing in exemplary fashion with “classical without classicism.” Cocteau had not yet reached the point of his later “rappel à l’ordre”; and Jahnn, betraying absolutely no interest in the classicism of his contemporaries, appropriates the classical plot simply as a handy tool. Medea was, moreover, his only venture into the field. In other words, a simple listing of works—­novels, plays, operas, or paintings—­with “classical” subjects, of the sort readily found in various handbooks and studies, tells us very little about any serious concern with the concern for order and reason and the ironic detachment that motivated some writers, composers, and artists of the twenties.

Paul Valéry Paul Valéry (1871–­1945), whose seminal essay La crise de l’esprit (1919) we encountered earlier (chapter 2), is often cited in the same breath or context as other classicists of the twenties. Edmund Wilson treats Valéry along with Joyce, Eliot, and others as “the culmination of a self-­conscious and very important literary movement” that he calls, generalizing, “symbolism.”46 Ernst Robert Curtius cites Joyce and Valéry, along with others, in his essay on Eliot (1927) as “artists of intellectualism.”47 Valéry was casually acquainted with Joyce, who knew and admired his poem La jeune Parque, and Valéry returned the favor by signing the protest against the pirated edition of Ulysses.48 Curtius states elsewhere that Valéry’s poetry represents the “sublime essences” of the refinement, elegance, rationality, style, and form associated with French classicism.49 But to what extent does Valéry’s classicism correspond to the classicism of the twenties as represented by Joyce, Eliot, and others? His works, to be sure, contain more allusions to classical antiquity than most other French poetry of the period. From such early poems as “Orphée” (1891), “Naissance de Vénus” (1890), and “Narcisse parle” (1891), which he collected and published in his Albums de vers anciens (1920), his works teem with titles, allusions, and

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epigraphs taken from Greek and Roman classics. Toward the end of his life, in response to the horrors of  World War II, he completed a remarkable translation of Virgil’s ten eclogues, Les bucoliques (first published posthumously in 1953), in French alexandrines with astonishing textual precision. His brilliant introduction, “Variations sur les Bucoliques,” moves from a purely poetic consideration of Virgil’s language and craft by way of his own personal identification with the poet and his problematics to the raw political circumstances of the age, concluding with a meditation on the relation of the poet to power, which culminates in an astonishing justification of political collaboration.50 Earlier in his career, following two decades during which he wrote virtually no poetry, the ancient poet to whom he turned was not Virgil but Ovid.51 In La jeune Parque (1917), his stunning poetic meditation on the development of a young female consciousness, we hear unmistakable echoes of several characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The poem begins when the Young Fate, like Eurydice, is first awakened to consciousness and awareness of death by a serpent’s sting. Following that awakening, other figures exemplify stages of her emotional growth: Daphne transformed into a “misty tree” (“je m’apparus cet arbre vaporeux”); Ariadne, whose thread led Theseus out of the labyrinth (“Ce fil dont la finesse aveuglément suivie / Jusque sur cette rive a ramené ta vie”); Leda ravished by the swan god (“Ni, par le Cygne-­Dieu, de plumes offensée / Sa brûlante blancheur n’effleura ma pensée”). The form of this dramatic monologue of over five hundred lines, which Valéry in his comments sometimes called a recitative in the manner of Gluck’s operas, can be traced back ultimately to Ovid’s Heroides. In 1917, following the publication of La jeune Parque, Valéry was casting about for a topic that would enable him to come to grips with “the experience of my sensibility.”52 On that same page of his notebooks he writes that “a lovely topic” occurred to him, which he tentatively called “O. chez les Barbares” or “Ovide chez les Thraces”—­a poem in which Ovid would represent the intellectual cast into an environment of mediocrity where no one

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comprehends the true profundity of his nature. The projected poem was never written, but elsewhere we find further evidence of  Ovid. Even the title of his memorable volume Charmes (1922) is indirectly indebted to Ovid: the word “charmes” is derived from the Latin carmen, and Valéry added to a later edition the epigraph deducere carmen (“to spin out the song”), a phrase most familiar from the opening lines of the Metamorphoses (1.3–­4). One of the most illuminating of the volume’s twenty-­one poems, “Fragments du Narcisse,” bears a motto from Ovid’s Tristia (2.103): Cur aliquid vidi (“Why did I see anything?”), in which the poet laments the error that caused his relegation to the Black Sea. In sum, then, a serious commitment to the classics is evident in Valéry’s poetry, and his own language was “classical” in form to the extent that it cultivated order, attention, consciousness, and discipline. Hence his use of the strict alexandrine in La jeune Parque and his fondness for the rigorous genre of the sonnet, which shapes over half of the twenty-­one poems of Album de vers anciens (in later editions) and six of the twenty-­one Charmes. “Eternal glory to the inventor of the sonnet,” he exclaimed, whose structure “tends to give to each verse of a finite and brief system a distinct function and a role in a progression.”53 As he put it in an autobiographical fragment written during the First World War: One of the advantages of observing traditional forms in the construction of verse consists in the extreme attention which is developed by this discipline, conceived as an ordering toward continuous musicality and the charm of sustained perfection.54

Poetic order is achieved only by constant revision and lengthy elaboration, motivated by an “ethics of form” of the sort, he recalled, that was not uncommon among poets before the turn of the century. “Neither the Idol of Beauty nor the superstition of literary Eternity had yet been ruined, and the belief in Posterity had not been fully abolished.”55 For Valéry, poetry replaced religion as the new theology: poetry, which constitutes a world unto itself, an absolute place, or—­to use the term he favored—­its

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own “universe.”56 What inspires the poet to create such a poetic universe, an absolute system of language? “Disorder is essential to ‘creation,’ ” he maintained in the first sentence of  “L’invention esthétique” (1938), “inasmuch as the latter defines itself through a certain ‘order.’ ”57 This was not the war alone but, we know from the essay “La crise de l’esprit,” the disorder of modern civilization. No poem more vividly exemplifies both Valéry’s general theory of poetry as a self-­enclosed universe and the specific themes and images of that essay than his most popular and most frequently anthologized and interpreted poem, Le cimetière marin, which he was composing at the time he was writing the essay and which was published in Charmes (1922) in the same annus classicus that welcomed Ulysses and The Waste Land. The first strophe announces the three essential elements of the poem: nature (the sea and sun), death (the cemetery), and the poet’s consciousness. Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes, Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes; Midi le juste y compose de feux La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée! Ô récompense après une pensée Qu’un long regard sur le calme des dieux! This quiet roof, where the doves are walking, trembles between the pines, between the tombs; equitable midday composes there with its fires the sea, the sea, ever renewed! O what a reward, after a thought, a long gaze at the calm of the gods!

The seemingly paradoxical opening line becomes instantly clear when one looks at Valéry’s ink drawing of the cemetery as viewed from a vantage point higher on the hillside.58 To anyone gazing down across the vaults and trees, the sea, dotted with small white sails, appears to hover above the cemetery and, in fact, fills the upper two-­thirds of the drawing. The doves on the roof in

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the poem, accordingly, are the sails on the sea in the drawing. The luminous noonday sun is “equitable” because at the midday solstice it is perfectly still and in balance as glimpsed between the pines and the tombs. The poet, troubled by his thoughts, turns for solace to timeless nature. The twenty-­four six-­verse strophes of the poem (with the recurring rhyme scheme aabccb) fall easily into three groups of eight. The first elaborates, in a series of brilliant images, the theme of a sparkling nature that in the calm of midday is timeless, peaceful, still—­a Temple of Time (“Temple du Temps”) that the poet, casting off the concerns of human life, seeks to enter. In the second group of strophes his attention shifts from the sea to the cemetery. Wondering what attracts him to this bony ground, he realizes that the thought of the departed ones, lying there enclosed in white tombs that remind him of a flock of sheep, is reassuring. In this “perfect diadem” of nature, the single intrusive element is the human consciousness of the poet: he realizes that the dead, who previously seemed to him to be so peaceful in their tombs, have actually dissolved into a dense absence (“fondu dans une absence épaisse”), drained by the red clay of the earth. In the sublime impersonality of death, what happens to everything singular and personal? In the last group of strophes the poet turns from the departed dead to his own consciousness. Will his soul still sing when it too has been transformed into vapor? Gazing at the empty skulls of his forefathers, he realizes that immortality is nothing but a lovely lie and a pious ruse (“Le beau mensonge et la pieuse ruse”). Recalling Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, the poet decides that logic alone cannot satisfy the mind that has been pierced by the arrow of consciousness. In the last three strophes he hails life and the future. “The wind is rising,” the final strophe begins, and “one must try to live” (“Le vent se lève! . . . Il faut tenter de vivre!”). It seems evident, first, that Le cimetière marin amounts to a precise poetic response to the problems raised by Valéry’s essay

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on the spiritual crisis of Europe. In its rigorous form the poem exemplifies a symbol of order as a defense against the disorder of war and the postwar turmoil: the “récompense après une pensée” of the opening strophe. The absolute and totally self-­contained nature of the pure realm of poetry to which the poet retreats is signified, first, by the circular form of the work, which begins and ends with the identical phrase “ce toit tranquille.” The poetic universe is governed by its own system of relationships, which are sustained by a series of images and metaphors. Initially carried over to the realm of death, the cemetery, it is gradually qualified by images of enclosure, absence, and dissolution. The consolation of death and the dream of immortality have been exposed as illusory. The poem, which began as a retreat into an aesthetic order in the face of disorder in the historical world, leads the poet at the end back into action. Stillness has given way to movement, timelessness to temporality, and death to life. The poem has affirmed its epigraph from Pindar’s third Pythian ode: “Dear soul, do not seek everlasting life, but exhaust what is practicable.” Valéry’s poem appears to meet all the criteria of classicism in the sense we have defined. It not only adheres to a rigorously classical form, but it also contains references to classical antiquity in the epigraph from Pindar and the allusion to the Greek philosopher Zeno. At the same time, the allusions are made with ironic detachment: “cruel Zeno” has pierced the poet with the feathered arrow of consciousness in a modern world that cannot return to antiquity. Valéry sought the “rappel à l’ordre” not so much in his poetic oeuvre, which was remarkably slight and restricted to two relatively brief periods of his life, but rather in architecture, the sciences, and especially mathematics, to which he devoted thousands of pages in his notebooks and essays: for instance, his dialogue Eupalinos ou l’architecte (1921), which features a lively discussion between Socrates and Phaedrus on the art of architecture. His particular hero was Descartes, to whom he dedicated several essays and who,

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at twenty-­ three, was already marvelously sure of his powers as a mathematician; and being convinced of the effectiveness of his method by its great successes in geometry, he “promised himself that he would apply it to the difficulties of the other sciences as usefully as he had done to those of algebra.”59

To the pursuit of what Joseph Frank has termed his “aesthetic rationalism”60 he dedicated thousands of pages in his notebooks over the course of fifty years. For in mathematics, he believed, it was possible with greater assurance than in poetry to create the absolute place or universe of order to which he aspired.

5 The Artists Giorgio de Chirico In late 1919 Giorgio de Chirico famously declared: “Pictor classicus sum.”1 Already in 1914 his friend Guillaume Apollinaire had found his works “classical”2—­a judgment repeated in 1919 by the writer and critic Giovanni Papini.3 But was De Chirico “classical” in the sense of his friend Picasso or of the writers and musicians we have considered? Certainly, as in the cases of the others who followed the “rappel à l’ordre” in the early 1920s, De Chirico’s classicism resulted from a certain break with the past.4 Like his contemporary Hindemith, he even went so far as to reject his earlier works,5 but, as we shall see, the break was by no means absolute. Like Picasso, he maintained various styles simultaneously during the latter decades of his career. De Chirico made his reputation with paintings from the years 1911 to 1917, upon which his fame still largely rests: his so-­called pittura metafisica. In February 1919, in one of his several articles on “metaphysical” art and aesthetics, he still counted himself among, and indeed presented himself as the leader of “Noi Metafisici” (We Metaphysicists).6 He traced the metaphysical impulse back to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who liberated art from the bonds imposed by such rationalists as Voltaire, “the horrible philoso-

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phizer of Ferney,” by suppressing the sense of logic in art. “We metaphysicists have sanctified reality” (273). He takes pains to distinguish his art from that of the French Cubists and Italian Futurists. His opponents, he notes, have sought to discredit the label “metaphysical,” which was first applied to his paintings several years earlier while he was living and working in Paris—­initially by Apollinaire in 19137—­by attributing its invention to the hated Germans. He emphasizes, however, that he perceives nothing obscure (“tenebroso”) in the word “metaphysics” but, rather, a kind of tranquility and pure beauty (“insensata bellezza”) characteristic of objects whose clarity of color and precision of proportion represent the antipode of all confusion and nebulousness. De Chirico’s much debated “break” with his earlier metaphysical art was triggered in the summer of 1919 when, in the Villa Borghese in Rome, he experienced a tremendous epiphany before Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love: “a revelation of what great painting was.”8 The experience prompted him to undertake a careful study of the older painting of the Renaissance, which soon led to his veneration of Raphael and the purity of his draftsmanship. De Chirico’s response to attacks on his new works by the Futurists and their “confused dannunzianism”9 prompted him—­in the article that ends with his declaration Pictor classicus sum—­to criticize the neglect of basic artistic skills by most avant-­garde artists in their desperate search for originality. Quoting Ingres in his support, he issued an appeal for a “return to craftsmanship.” Within a few months he proclaimed his own turn to a “Classicismo Pittorico,” which was dominated by “the linear daemon.”10 As antecedents he cites the ancient Greek painters as well as Ingres and fifteenth-­century Italian artists. All of them grasped “the mysticism of the line, which characterizes a truly classical art,” as well as the subtlety of the stylet, which assumed for them “the value of a magical instrument” (309). He asserts that “the classical power of a painter can be measured by the intelligence and emotion of his line” (310). Fortunately the daemon of classicism has not wholly disappeared, for even today, “in the

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grand confusion of contemporary art, it appears here and there” (312). He ends with the hope that modern painters can still be “sufficiently mystical for a rebirth of classicism.” “We, without disorder or agitation, shall follow the call, insisting on works with ever greater clear-­sightedness and love.” De Chirico’s (1888–­1978) veneration of the line was nothing new. Born to Italian parents in Greece—­in Volos on the coast of Thessaly, where, as he later noted, the Argonauts set sail on their quest for the Golden Fleece—­he was educated privately at home, where his drawing master taught him at an early age “the love of clean, beautiful lines, fine contours and well-­modeled forms.”11 When the family moved to Athens, he enrolled soon after 1900 for art courses at the Polytechnic Institute.12 There, before he was allowed to put paint to canvas, he spent two years drawing copies of ancient sculptures and learning the value of pure draftsmanship. Half a century later, in his essay “The Technique of Painting,” he still asserted that “the one cause of the decadence in painting today is the total loss of skill, technique.”13 This veneration of craftsmanship and the pure line ties him closely to Picasso and other classicists of the twenties. Following his years in Athens the artist moved in 1906 with his mother and brother (the musically gifted Andrea, who later assumed the pseudonym Alberto Savinio) to Munich, where he pursued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. There, besides immersing himself in the works of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, he became acquainted with the paintings of the German Romantics, and notably Arnold Böcklin, whom he imitated in several of his early works. He was also indelibly impressed by the arcades of the Hofgarten and elsewhere in the city.14 Two years later he joined his mother and brother in Milan and then accompanied his brother to Florence, where at the impressionist exhibition of 1910 the young artist was first exposed to works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, and Van Gogh. Excited by these developments in France, in July 1911 he moved with his mother to Paris, stopping on the way for two days in Turin. The city resonated for him with strong associations with

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Nietzsche, and he admired its arcades, its broad piazzas, and the many statues set on low plinths, recommended to his attention by Schopenhauer’s writings as bringing the statues closer to the viewer than those set on lofty pedestals. In Paris he soon met Guillaume Apollinaire and was included in the cénacle of young poets and painters who came together every Saturday in the poet-­critic’s apartment. The paintings that he undertook there—­and that were labeled “metaphysical” as early as 191315—­ were continued when in May 1915, following Italy’s commitment to the allied Triple Entente, he returned to Italy and was drafted into the army. Like Stravinsky, Picasso, and Eliot, then, De Chirico had every reason to consider himself an exile: first as an Italian in Greece, then as a foreigner in Munich, and finally as an expatriate from a still neutral Italy in wartime Paris. Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the figure of the isolated Ariadne, deserted by Theseus and contemplating her own fate, held for De Chirico a uniquely personal appeal.16 A further factor motivating his adaptation of the Ariadne figure stems from his obsession with Nietzsche, whose thought and works are permeated by Ariadne. (Among the many references see notably “Ariadne’s Lament” [“Klage der Ariadne”] in Nietzsche’s Dionysos Dithyrambs.) In any case, the figure of Ariadne, always on a low plinth as in Turin, shows up in a series of eight paintings that De Chirico executed in 1912–­13 and that were displayed at an exhibition in his studio and then in the Salon d’Automne of 1914, where Apollinaire saw and admired them. Ariadne, to whom De Chirico returned obsessively over the course of his long career—­notably in over one hundred works (mainly from the 1950s) known as the Piazze d’Italia paintings—­was only one, albeit the central one, among references to classical antiquity in his art. So here again we note the pronounced similarity to the other classicists in music, painting, and literature whom we have discussed. This same focus on antiquity is evident in the works of the “classical” period that followed his pittura metafisica and preceded the later turn to surrealism.

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figure 7. Giorgio de Chirico, The Joys and Enigmas of a Strange Hour (1941). © 2015 Artists Rights Society, New York/SIAE, Rome. Artist’s print of 1913 original oil on canvas. Private collection.

But we quickly note a pronounced difference between the “metaphysical” and the “classical” paintings of his later years in Rome and Florence (1919–­24)—­a difference that is strikingly apparent if we compare two similar works, both focused on a central statue. The Joys and Enigmas of a Strange Hour (fig. 7) and its various copies from the 1912–­13 Ariadne sequence reveal all the characteristics of De Chirico’s pittura metafisica. On the left we see the arcade that appears as background in dozens of his paintings. (This feature is routinely attributed by most scholars to De Chirico’s admiration of Turin’s famous arcades with their Nietzschean associations, but Wieland Schmied has made a persuasive case that the narrow arcades in the paintings, with their unadorned arches and rectangular openings above, more closely resemble the arcades of the Munich Hofgarten.17 Indeed, he has posited it as one of his twelve theses regarding that artist that “De Chirico’s ‘Piazze d’Italia’ should actually be called ‘Piazze di Monaco.’ ”18). But the perspective is distorted: the orthogonal lines constituting the top and bottom of the arcade culminate in

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a point well above the horizon behind the tower, while the line delineating the rounded top of the arches leads to a point roughly in front of the puffing train.19 The arcade, which stands alone with no evident function, is bereft of any human life. Notoriously, the lengthy shadows in De Chirico’s paintings of the period bear no relationship to the time of day: they suggest late afternoon, whereas the clocks that frequently appear on the towers or buildings almost always register early afternoon between 1:30 and 3:00 p.m. While the foreground is dominated by the sculpture, the two human figures are relegated to the background—­here as in all the paintings of this period—­and totally disproportionate in their tininess. The incoherence of the hallucinatory space is enhanced by the temporal juxtaposition of different historical periods: the ancient statue, the Renaissance arcade, the turreted medieval tower, and the modern railway train. If we look in contrast at a painting from the classical period, Roman Villa (1922; fig. 8), the change is immediately striking. Here

figure 8. Giorgio de Chirico, Roman Villa (1922). © 2015 Artists Rights Society, New York/SIAE, Rome. Photograph © Scala/Art Resource, New York.

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figure 9. Giorgio de Chirico, Departure of the Argonauts (1921). © 2015 Artists Rights Society, New York/SIAE, Rome. Photograph © Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/ Art Resource, New York. Private collection.

the statue on its low plinth has been moved back, and a human figure and a horse of proportional size occupy the foreground. The perspective is absolutely accurate, with all the lines focused on a horizon visible behind the tower, and the buildings, unlike the empty metaphysical arcades, are clearly inhabited. The same elements occur in another painting of the period, The Departure of the Argonauts (1921; fig. 9), with its reminiscence of the painter’s birthplace. (As early as 1909, before his metaphysical period, De Chirico had painted a Departure of the Argonauts, including a copy of the statue of Athena, after Phidias, that stands before the train station in Volos.20) The shadows are not so pronounced, the perspective lines lead to the horizon directly behind the tiny sailboat, and human figures dominate the scene: the statue is replaced by the reclining figure of the elderly man in the same pose as the statue in the preceding work, while the sculptures, reduced in size, are relegated to décor in the background façade. In

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another painting, Orestes and Electra (1922), the wholly illusionist brother and sister, shown immediately following Orestes’ murder of his mother and framed against a background of clouds, dominate the entire canvas. (The work, detested by the surrealists because it represented in their eyes a betrayal of De Chirico’s metaphysical principles, was reproduced by André Breton in defaced form—­marred by heavy black lines—­in La révolution surréaliste [March 1926].)21 As defined by Wieland Schmied, De Chirico’s classical art is “that which is at home in our own world, in life on this earth, in a world permeated by the warm breath of life. It is a world in which human beings have not yet lost contact with their gods, and which therefore possesses the ‘classicist’ qualities of order, regularity, a goal and a sense of proportion.”22 But there is another difference as well. In these paintings the sense of ironic detachment that we feel in the metaphysical works as a result of the striking temporal juxtapositions and the contrast of past and present (the ancient statue and the modern train) is missing: the classical paintings are all set in their own time; the trains are gone. To take another contrastive pair: in the well-­known Song of Love (1914; fig. 1, chap. 2) there is a radical and almost humorous juxtaposition of a white classical bust and a ridiculously modern reddish-­yellow rubber glove and green ball—­with the inevitable arcade and train in the background. (The train is among other things a paternal image because De Chirico’s father was an engineer with the Greek railway service.) In contrast, in the several self-­portraits that De Chirico painted during this period he peers out soberly without a trace of irony and detachment. In the Self-­portrait with a Bust of Euripides (1922/23), for instance, the painter is holding a plaque with the inscription nulla sine tragoedia gloria (“no glory without tragedy”); the Self-­portrait with Palette (1924) features an inscription on the wall above his head with the equally sober words mihi fama perennis quaeritur in toto semper ut orbe canar (“I seek eternal fame so that I may be sung forever in the whole world”). Just as continuities may be observed from the metaphysical period into the classical years, the same polyphony of style

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continued for the remainder of De Chirico’s long career, when—­ for mainly financial reasons—­he continued to paint or print multiple copies of his more popular and successful early works: hence the hundred or so Piazza paintings. Among the many self-­ portraits of these “classical” years we also find one in 1920 in which, against a background arcade, he holds a plaque bearing the inscription et quid amabo nisi quod rerum metaphysica est (“and what shall I love except that which is the metaphyics of  being?”). At the same time he experimented with various new styles, including surrealism. In 1924 and 1925, for instance, he designed sets and costumes for several stage productions—­designs that, anything but classical, look more neoromantic.23 And following his return to Paris in 1925 he painted several nude women who, with their heavy limbs, display the clear influence of Picasso’s classical nudes: works that are more accurately labeled “mythological” than “classical.”24 It is tempting, paradoxically, to conclude that the paintings of the “classical” period are lacking in precisely the elements of intertextuality, polyphony, and irony exemplified by the classical paintings of Picasso and the compositions of Stravinsky—­not to mention the writings of Joyce and Eliot. And it would be a stretch to believe that Picasso’s classical paintings contain any hint of the divine attributed to De Chirico’s. In fact, Wieland Schmied wonders rhetorically if De Chirico’s paintings should not actually be labeled “anti-­classical” and concludes, for other reasons, that he may be called classical only with reservations and, in any case, only during the brief period from 1920 to 1922.25

Gino Severini, Fernand Léger, and Others In his introduction to the exhibition Modern Antiquity (2011 at the Getty Museum), Christopher Green proposes that the four artists featured—­Picasso, De Chirico, Léger, and Picabia—­are all quite different and that their paintings “make no case for an authentic classicism as the sign of a dominant tradition dedicated to stable values and aesthetic continuity.”26 He goes on to

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specify that one can detect at most “broadly morphological and sometimes specifically stylistic similarities.” The issue of “inauthenticity” can wait for further discussion, but certainly Green is correct to point to the differences among the various artists—­ differences of the sort that we have noted among the writers. In fact, there is such disunity on the issue among art historians that, apart from Picasso and De Chirico, they hardly agree on the representatives. The volume Modern Antiquity, for instance, includes as one of its four examples the paintings of Francis Picabia, who in contrast is not cited in the exhibitions Canto d’Amore or Chaos and Classicism.27 And only the latter takes Severini briefly into account.

Gino Severini (1883–­1966) was one of the earliest theoreticians of classicism in art. But unlike De Chirico, who put the return to the human figure at the center of his classicism, Severini regarded “the law of numbers” as “the fulcrum of art.”28 His manifesto Du cubisme au classicisme: Esthétique du compas et du nombre (1921) opens with a statement of the familiar belief that artistic anarchy, caused by moral and social factors, was at its peak at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was Severini’s aim to explain to artists of his generation the aesthetic and technical reasons for that disorder, triggered, he believed, by the separation of science and art, which is “nothing but humanized science.”29 The solution, he asserts—­in contrast to Picasso and De Chirico, who criticized his lack of draftsmanship and familiarity with past masters—­can be recapitulated in a few words: “Contemporary artists don’t know how to use the compass, the protractor, and numbers.”30 It should be the goal of art to create a harmony and to reconstruct the universe through the aesthetics of numbers and human spirit, and he hopes in his conclusion for “a new Pythagoras” who will unite and order the positive forces of contemporary art into a new renaissance.31 Two years later, in an essay on “the true meaning of classicism,” he reaffirmed that belief. “It is evident that this order and this discipline manifest

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themselves in practice through the actions of counting, measuring, calculating, anticipating, etc.”32 Accordingly his manifesto, though interspersed with reproductions of cubistic still lifes (from 1919) and two realistic portraits (from 1920), looks more like a textbook of geometry than of art. His own paintings during his period of (neo)classicism in the twenties focused not on classical antiquity but on figures from the commedia dell’arte (which, as we saw, enjoyed a renewed popularity at the time among other classicists). Many years later Severini maintained that the “intellectual abstraction” of synthetic cubism, through its “aspiration to the eternal” and its “notion of moderation [“mesure”] inspired by the classics,” led many painters to concern themselves again with their craft (“métier”).33 This is evident in his paintings of Pierrots and Harlequins, which are executed over elaborate designs that outline the proportions in geometrical detail (as illustrated in the sketches accompanying the paintings in his book). In several works of the later 1920s, for instance, the Pierrots in the foreground are situated before Roman ruins portrayed with classical precision while, overhead, a medieval-­Christian demon (Le démon du jeu, 1928–­29) or angel (Le coup de foudre, 1928–­29) gazes down at them. As fascinating as Severini’s theories and paintings may be, his thematically and temporally mingled works hardly correspond to “classicism” as we know it from the representative classicists of the twenties.

Severini’s ideas would have been sympathetic to Fernand Léger (1881–­1955), who was trained as an architect and who during this same period (1924–­25) developed what he called an “aesthetics of the machine.”34 Like his friend the architect Le Corbusier, he detected in technological and architectural modernity a beauty that matched that of classical antiquity. (We recall the famous illustration in which Le Corbusier equated the development from the temple at Paestum to the Parthenon as analogous to

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the improvement from the Humbert touring car of 1907 to the Delage Grand Sport automobile of 1921.) As a result, his “classical” figures—­the statuesque women with stiffly coiffured black hair framing one side of their perfectly oval faces and gazing straight ahead without expression—­resemble manufactured objects rather than people. It is true that his turn away from the machinery depicted in his preceding works toward the human figure was analogous to, say, Picasso’s move from cubist objects to the human figure. “After the dynamism of the mechanical period, I felt a need for the staticity of large figures.”35 But because of his fondness for tubes and other machine-­like forms—­the term “tubism” was coined by a contemporary critic to ridicule the cylindrical shapes of Léger’s cubism—­the features, limbs, and fingers of his women look more like pipe fittings than parts of the human body. One art historian suggests that breasts are rounded “like a cannonball.”36 A vague classical influence shows up in the poses and groupings of his figures, such as his Kneeling Woman (1921), which is based on the Crouching Venus familiar from many Hellenistic works, or his paintings of three woman reminiscent of Picasso’s classical works—­Three Women on a Red Background (1922) or Three Women by a Garden (1922; fig. 10)—­which suggest groupings familiar from Roman mosaics.37 While in the earlier paintings the women are portrayed within a social or natural context—­although even here the effect is virtually two-­dimensionally flat—­in the later ones they are set against stark backgrounds resembling a factory wall. In contrast to Picasso’s monumental nudes in their natural settings on beaches or at fountains, these dehumanized figures are like machines in a shop. The exaggerations of their limbs and features suggest not ironic detachment from antiquity but utter disinterest. As Christopher Green points out, Léger’s letters during these years to his dealer Rosenberg show him as “resolutely against Rosenberg’s promotion of the Latinity of French culture and determined to demonstrate that art’s progress was more driven by a ‘northern’ acceptance of modernity

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figure 10. Fernand Léger, Three Women by a Garden (1922). © 2015 Artists Rights Society, New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Licensed by Art Resource, New York.

than by a ‘southern’ orientation toward the Mediterranean”38 or the bourgeois culture that, as a Leftist who eventually joined the Communist Party, he detested—­a view that sharply distinguishes him from the latinité and romanità otherwise associated with what we view as classicism, both in theory and practice. Despite the feeling of some critics that the static monumentality of his figures is comparable to Roman mosaics, Byzantine icons, or the majestic simplicity of Greek art,39 Léger was evidently not aspiring to any new “classicism” of mind or spirit. His works are classical without classicism. It is worth mentioning two further examples sometimes labeled “classicist.”40 In the case of Georges Braque, the classicism is limited essentially to his two Canephorae (1922; “basket bearers”), large-­framed women bearing ceremonial baskets—­which he created in obvious imitation of, and as a tribute to, the monu-

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mental women of his friend and former cubist associate Picasso without moving in any systematic manner toward classicism. The same applies to Roger de La Fresnaye, whose series of Palefreniers (1922)—­nude horse trainers in a vaguely De Chirican setting of nonperspectival arcades and towers—­betray a superficial similarity to the two youths in Picasso’s Pipes of Pan.

Francis Picabia An odd example may be seen, finally, in Picabia’s “transparencies” from the years around 1930. The career of Francis Picabia (1879–­1953), the spoiled son of a wealthy family of Spanish descent, constitutes a walking survey of modern art, passing like Cocteau’s at least briefly, and often superficially, through virtually every movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning with impressionist paintings of outdoor scenes in the manner of Sisley and Monet, he moved through fauvism to cubism and then by way of dada and surrealism to his classicizing transparencies.41 In the 1940s, finally, he earned money by painting soft-­pornographic nudes. Although in his dadaist phase he taunted Picasso for selling out to the market and parodied cubism—­notably in 1917 in the periodical he founded, 39142—­he enjoyed an early renown in the United States, where he came for the first Armory Show in 1913, benefited from a solo exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291, was avidly courted by the press, and then later returned in order to avoid military service in France during the war. Although Picabia in 1930 declared, “There is no antiquity,”43 his so-­called transparencies of the years 1928–­31—­a term taken from photographic transparencies—­contain various loose references to classical works.44 Several of his earlier works had contained allusions to antiquity. In The Fig Leaf (1922), for instance, a silhouetted black figure with a large green leaf covering his genitals stands—­with his left foot resting not on a stone but on a sphere shaped with industrial perfection—­in a pose clearly based

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on Ingres’s well-­known painting Oedipus and the Sphinx and thus referring, beyond Ingres, to the Greek legend. Similarly, The Three Graces (1924–­27) constitutes a satirical comment on Rubens’s painting of that title and, beyond Rubens, to the ancient Charites. The later transparencies complicate matters even further, comprising layered drawings in which figures and images from various sources and historical periods are contrasted, as in Mélibée (1931), where the Virgin Mary holds in her hands a figure based on the dispossessed wanderer in Virgil’s Eclogues. (Virgil’s ten eclogues were currently enjoying a particular vogue in France, having been translated by ten different poets in the journal Latinité to commemorate the 1930 bimillennial of the poet’s birth.)45 In Dispar (1929)—­a title presumably from the Latin word meaning “unlike” or “dissimilar”46—­five different faces, one with distinctly classical features, and several unattached hands, one holding a flaming torch, overlap against a background of tree branches and a bird with fierce raptor’s claws. Helias (1929)—­again possibly Picabia’s conflation of “Hellas” (Greece) and “Helios,” the sun deity later identified with Apollo, who appears in Virgil’s Eclogues as the patron of poetry and music—­depicts a face and two hands superimposed above a lyre. The Apollo chitarrista shows, oddly, a female figure holding the god’s lyre (“chitarra” or guitar). Lunaris (1928–­29) depicts two melancholy female faces (with actually three necks and two unattached hands) superimposed over a background of flowers, vines, stars, and moon-­like shapes (suggested by the title implying luna, the Latin word for “moon,” and its goddess, Diana). In the bottom left and with no obvious relevance we see a boy’s head and two serpents. There is no need to discuss Picabia’s other transparencies with classical titles—­Ino (1929–­30), Hera (1929), Briseis (1929), Artemis (1929), and others—­for often there is no obvious connection between the title and the depicted subjects. As Picabia himself put it, his transparencies are simply spaces to express “the resemblance of my interior desires” and “where all my instincts

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may have a free course.”47 It is commonly agreed by most critics that the transparencies are not intended as “mere mockery” of antiquity but “predicated on the impossibility of representing the past in anything other than a distortion.”48 Another scholar defines them tellingly as “antiquity in quotation marks,” arguing that they “maintain a greater distance from any truly classicizing spirit.”49 Again, then, we have an example of what might be called “classical without classicism.” However, Picabia’s transparencies, when rediscovered after the Second World War, had a conspicuous aftereffect, influencing American pop art as well as the Austrian Arnulf Rainer and his Übermalungen (“overpaintings”) of familiar works by Leonardo da Vinci, Caspar David Friedrich, and various contemporaries, or the multilayered engravings by the German artist Horst Jansen.

In sum, with the exception of De Chirico’s paintings during the brief period 1920–­22—­and even there one must have reservations—­very few artistic works of the twenties appear to establish themselves as full-­fledged classicism in the sense implicit in our three models. Severini displays no classical longing apart from his hopes for a reinvigorated Pythagorean geometry in art. Even when classical motifs or themes appear, as in Léger or Picabia, we are dealing with works that are “classical without classicism” since the artists themselves ascribe no appropriate intention to their works. With the utterly self-­centered Picabia we hear no “rappel à l’ordre.” Léger specifically rejected the “Mediterranean” view of classicism in favor of a technological present. And in De Chirico’s “classical” works we miss the ironic detachment that was evident in his earlier metaphysical paintings. If the term “classicism” is to have any meaning in art, as in music and literature, then it needs to be defined more rigorously than has sometimes been the case. While Christopher Green’s “inauthenticity” may well characterize Léger and Picabia and the

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latter’s denial of antiquity, it hardly applies to Picasso, where we might more accurately speak of a respectful if ironic awareness of distance. In any case, we should continue to stress the difference among the so-­called classical artists of the twenties if we hope to achieve any basis for a meaningful comparison among the arts.

6 The Composers Paul Hindemith Paul Hindemith (1895–­1963) is often cited, as in The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, as the leading German representative of (neo)classicism and his oeuvre as “the quintessence of German neoclassicism.”1 Born in the decade after Stravinsky, Picasso, and Eliot, Hindemith was an enormously prolific composer who wrote essays and theoretical works as well as the libretti to several of his major operas (notably Mathis der Maler) and also had a lifelong habit of sketching and decorating the rooms of his houses with his drawings.2 A musical prodigy, he early mastered the violin and piano and, later, the viola, on which instrument he became a renowned performer. Born to a father without means but with musical ambitions for his children, Hindemith supported himself during his studies at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main by playing in cafés, taverns, and movie theaters. In the summers of 1913 and 1914 he obtained professional engagements as violinist in small orchestras at resorts in Switzerland. The following year, at age twenty, he was engaged as first violinist in the orchestra of the Frankfurt Opera, a position he held until 1917 while continuing his studies. His experience as second violin in the

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well-­regarded Rebner String Quartet encouraged his composition of quartets, for one of which in 1916 he won a conservatory prize. Conscription in the summer of 1917 did not put an end to his activities as composer and performer. While still based in Frankfurt, he continued playing for operas and concerts. When he was sent to France in 1918, he won a position—­as bass drummer—­in the military band and also, while continuing to compose, performed in a string quartet sponsored by his commanding officer. Even though Hindemith’s early compositions—­mainly lieder and sonatas3—­betray the gifted musician, they were for the most part derivative and hardly went beyond the late romanticism of Debussy and Richard Strauss. The postwar years changed everything. On his return in 1919 Hindemith immediately assumed his chair again in the Frankfurt Opera orchestra as well as the Rebner Quartet, but the cultural atmosphere was now utterly different. The young artists, musicians, and writers, many of whom like Hindemith had witnessed the horrors of war at first hand, turned away from what they regarded as the cloying sweetness of late romanticism, striving instead for a more blatant, often propagandistic style in their creations—­a style evident in the German expressionistic dramas, many of which were premiered in Frankfurt, and in the early works performed at the newly established (1921) Donaueschingen Festival. In Hindemith’s case this change showed up initially, and briefly, in the three short operas that he wrote from 1919 to 1921 based on texts by expressionist authors.4 In Oskar Kokoschka’s Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (1916; Murder, hope of women), often regarded as the first expressionist drama, the Woman is ultimately murdered by the Man for whom she passionately longs, but Hindemith’s score is still essentially late romantic with echoes of  Wagner and Strauss. The longest piece (one hour), Das Nusch-­Nuschi by Franz Blei, announces itself as “a one-­act play for Burmese marionettes”: the emperor of Burma discovers that his four wives, each of whom introduces herself with a solo aria, have been seduced during the previous night, but he punishes

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(by castration) the wrong man: not the handsome Zatwai, the actual seducer, but his faithful general Kyce Waing, who has just slain the monster Nusch-­Nuschi, because Zatwai’s servant Tum Tum, who escorted the wives to Zatwai’s residence, has joined the entourage of the general and now names the latter as his master when the emperor interrogates him.5 The action, which amounts in part to a parody of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, is delightfully enhanced by the Wagnerian echoes in Hindemith’s score, which puts into the mouth of the emperor, at the moment when he discovers the betrayal, the words and notes of King Mark from Wagner’s opera (3.3): “Mir—­dies?” (a parodistic gesture that infuriated traditional Wagnerites). The operatic version of August Stramm’s Sancta Susanna depicts in a series of musical variations a nun whose religious ecstasy before the statue of Jesus turns violently sexual, affecting the other nuns, who end the work with rapturous cries for “Satana.” Audiences were scandalized but also titillated by the works, which exemplified the ambition of the young expressionists to jolt the public out of its cultural complacencies with their radical ideas, words, and sounds. While these performances won for Hindemith his first broader public recognition, he soon became dissatisfied with the self-­ indulgent displays of his expressionistic associates and undertook a series of radically different compositions that are now conventionally regarded as his “neoclassical” works. This period in his career began in the annus classicus 1922—­the year of Ulysses, The Waste Land, Picasso’s Two Women Running on the Beach, and Stravinsky’s Mavra. Hindemith, having tasted success, soon negotiated a contract with the Schott publishing company which assured him a regular income. He resigned his position in the orchestra of the Frankfurt Opera in order to devote more time to his compositions and to performances with the Amar Quartet, which he founded and in which he now played viola. These changes reduced his earlier contacts with the local bohème as Frankfurt expressionism came to an end.6 His situation during the next few years is aptly symbolized by his move, shortly before

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his marriage in 1924 to Gertrud Rottenberg, into the so-­called Kuhhirtenturm (“cow-­herder’s tower”) in the original city wall of Frankfurt-­Sachsenhausen, where he lived from 1923 until his relocation to Berlin in 1927. His more settled existence on the top floor of a tower cut off from the surrounding world—­Hindemith’s analogy to the exile of the other classicists—­exemplifies the classical style that now characterized his work and represented a rejection of his earlier compositions. In 1922 he wrote: “As composer, I have chiefly written pieces I don’t like any more: chamber music for the most diverse ensembles, songs and piano pieces. Also three one-­act operas, which will probably remain the only ones since as a result of rising prices on the manuscript paper market only small scores can now be written.”7 Three years later Hindemith asked his publishers to suppress most of his earlier works because they offered enemies of modern music an opportunity to attack it. “People will have good reason to say (since in such cases everything gets generalized) that young musicians have no sense of style and no feeling for substance and effect.”8 He continued then with a statement redolent of the generational “rappel à l’ordre.” I am of the opinion that in the next few years the utmost orderliness will be called for in such matters, and I myself will do all I can to achieve it. . . . You will, I hope, have noticed that in all my recent things I have been striving for the highest degree of purity and orderliness, and it is of great significance to me to see some slight rec­ ognition of my efforts coming from outside.

The ideal toward which he was striving, and which he later promoted in theoretical works—­notably The Craft of Musical Composition (Unterweisung im Tonsatz, 1940)—­advocating tonality as the basic law of music and nature—­is represented by none other than Johann Sebastian Bach. Hindemith had been devoted to Bach’s compositions at least since age seventeen, when he played Bach’s challenging Chaconne for solo violin in fulfillment of his conservatory studies—­a work that he later performed to win the

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position of concertmaster with the Frankfurt Opera9—­and to whose Well-­Tempered Clavier he later paid his respects in his Ludus Tonalis (1942). In 1950 Hindemith dedicated a commemorative address to Bach, calling his music “the summit of musical greatness, a summit which has not been clouded through interference of the human, personal, time-­conditioned, in short the profane problems of the composer’s personality.”10 The summit, he acknowledges, is unattainable, but “it must always serve us as a supreme beacon.” In his discussion Hindemith stresses a point that helps to explain the new style of his works in the early twenties. Citing “the lucidity of Bach’s polyphonic choral style” in contrast to Handel’s large choirs, he argues that Bach enjoyed the delicate differences in the balance of sound that could be achieved in the smaller instrumental ensembles—­“a balance so sensitive that often the mere doubling of a line through several additional instruments ruins its subtle texture as much as would a doubling of the soprano line in Pamina’s aria by a women’s chorus.”11 For this reason, he maintains, Bach’s music should be performed on period instruments—­a belief that no doubt inspired his own turn in 1922 to the Baroque viola d’amore with its seven strings (and resonance strings) and its use in his compositions.12

The shift in his approach is exemplified perfectly by his setting (1922–­23) of the fifteen poems of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Das Marienleben, which the poet had written ten years earlier while composing the first of his Duino Elegies. Nothing could be further from the expressionistic exuberance of the three operas than the sublime solemnity of these poems,13 in mostly (but not wholly) alternately rhyming four-­line strophes, tracing the life of the Virgin from birth (“Geburt Mariae”) to death (“Vom Tode Mariae I–­III”) and including such scenes as her presentation in the temple, the annunciation, Joseph’s suspicions and the annunciation to the shepherds, the birth of Jesus and the flight into Egypt, the wedding at Cana, and the Pietà. Years later, when he published a new version of the Marienleben in significantly

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revised form, Hindemith wrote that with this composition, which he labeled “an experiment,” “I began to glimpse the ideal of a noble music, as nearly perfect as possible, that I should some day be able to realize.”14 The new tone is instantly apparent in the opening measures of the first song (“Geburt Mariae”),15 where the piano paraphrases the opening notes of the late medieval hymn Surrexit Christus hodie, which provide the basis for the accompaniment and the clear soprano line throughout16 and which show up as a motif in several of the subsequent songs. Unlike the parody of  Wagner in Das Nusch-­Nuschi, which was purely satirical, this recourse to the ancient melody is completely serious, used to set the mood but applied with a modern sense of detached awareness and respectful manipulation—­“ironic” in the sense established in connection with the “classical” works of Stravinsky and Picasso and in the sense of play implicit in the title of Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis (ludus means “play” in Latin). The classical references show up most conspicuously in the earlier songs. Another nod to the past occurs in the second (“Die Darstellung Mariae im Tempel”), where the accompaniment employs the rhythms and structure of an eighteenth-­century passacaglia with a stately eight-­measure basso ostinato in the left hand. Unlike in the opening song, the soprano line here floats freely above the piano, only occasionally echoing the theme of the ostinato. Similar reversions to classical forms may be seen in many of the following songs. The third (“Mariae Verkündigung”), for instance, is based on a quotation from Martin Luther’s familiar Christmas hymn “Vom Himmel hoch,”17 which is repeated throughout by the piano and then echoed in the following fourth song (“Mariä Heimsuchung”). In the fourteenth (“Vom Tode Mariae II”) the piano’s long introduction establishes a basso ostinato, whose pattern is then repeated throughout in a series of variations. In almost every song, in sum, the listener hears echoes of classical forms and motifs.18 Generally speaking, the classical reminiscences occur in the piano part and less so in the more free-­floating soprano lines.

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Hindemith’s dissatisfaction with the first version stemmed in part from his sense that the vocal line, with its difficult progressions and awkward intervals, was too challenging to perform and that it often “moved in such self-­willed fashion that in combination with the piano disturbing harshnesses and unwieldy turns of phrase were produced that were in no way justified by the text or by the general style of the work.”19 Another reason was the fact that it was “essentially a series of songs held together by the text and the story unfolded in it, but otherwise not following any compositional plan of the whole.”20 In other words, the shape of each song was determined by the shape of the poem and not by any overarching plan for the whole. He sought to remedy these perceived deficiencies by ordering the fifteen songs into four distinct groups and removing some of what he regarded as excessive technical difficulties for the voice. While some listeners prefer the later revisions,21 many still agree with the pianist Glenn Gould, who maintained that the 1922–­23 version, which enjoyed considerable success at the time, was “the greatest song cycle ever written.”22 Other works often cited as exemplary for Hindemith’s neoclassicism are the six pieces for chamber orchestra that he wrote from 1924 through 1927 and that, like Das Marienleben, display Hindemith’s tendency to compose series of related works rather than individual pieces.23 Kammermusik Nr. 1, conventionally grouped along with the other six, was composed two years earlier and is a transitional work. Scored for twelve solo instruments including an accordion—­essentially the instrumentation of salon orchestras of the period—­its four movements include a brilliantly frantic prelude, which has been called “the finest Petruschka-­ derivative of the twentieth century”;24 an almost parodistically playful march; a lovely slow fugue for three woodwinds and glockenspiel (which plays only one note at the end but, for that reason, humorously justifies the heading “quartet”); and a wild “Finale 1921” that quotes a familiar fox-­trot by the popular cabaret composer Wilm Wilm (Wilhelm Wieninger)—­quite remote

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from the quotations of classical hymns in Das Marienleben—­and concludes with the wail of a siren. In stark contrast, the six later solo concertos (for piano, cello, violin, viola, viola d’amore, and organ) of Kammermusiken 2–­7 are frequently compared to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.25 For sheer technical virtuosity in their playful and ironic manipulation of classical forms and quotations and their often hectic energy, they rank among Hindemith’s finest compositions and as exemplary works of the classicism of the twenties. Their classicism is evident, first, in the shift away from the big orchestras of late romanticism to instrumentation resembling chamber orchestras of the Baroque, which Hindemith preferred, as noted above, because the smaller concertante ensembles allowed for greater purity of line and enabled him to focus on individual tones rather than harmonies. Secondly, most display the four-­ movement form, often with a balanced alternation of fast and slow, familiar from the so-­called ripieno concertos (or sonata da chiesa) of the Baroque. The piano concerto (no. 2) opens with a brilliant toccata that gives way to a slow movement—­as long as the other three movements combined—­in which the pronounced basso ostinato is accompanied by imaginative piano variations; this is succeeded by a scherzo-­like “Potpourri” and a rapid finale. The splendid cello concerto (no. 3), written for Hindemith’s brother, Rudolf, and probably the best-­known of the chamber works, begins with an unmistakable echo of Bach’s Suite for Cello no. 5 in C Minor and follows the traditional slow-­fast-­slow-­fast sequence of the ripieno concerto, ending with a “cheerful” (“munter”) movement that faintly echoes the farandole from Bizet’s L’ Arlésienne Suite. (It is worth noting that one contemporary critic called the Kammermusik Nr. 1 “a dissonant German Bizet.”)26 A further resonance of the same Bizet may be heard in the fourth movement of the violin concerto (no. 4), which is introduced by a majestic “Signal,” which is followed by four movements: first, a lively opportunity for the soloist to display his virtuoso abilities, which is succeeded by a melancholy “Nachtstück”; the mood is then re-

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lieved by a lively march which quotes Paganini’s B-­flat Caprice,27 before closing with a brief stretto. The concerto for viola (no. 5), which Hindemith himself performed more than ninety times,28 offers a strong melodic line over the fast-­slow-­fast counterpoint of the accompaniment before closing with a jaunty march. With no. 6 Hindemith enters new territory: a concerto for the traditional Baroque instrument, the viola d’amore—­rarely used in music since Telemann, Scarlatti, and Bach—­which appropriately displays perhaps the most conventional form of all the Kammermusiken, with a third movement of variations on the introductory theme. No. 7, finally, the concerto for organ—­only three movements, but just as long as most of the preceding works (roughly sixteen to twenty minutes)—­begins with playful variations on military marches and ends with a fine fugue in which the organ provides the counterpoint to the eleven wind instruments.

The culminating work of this neoclassical period is Cardillac (1926), Hindemith’s first full-­length (three-­act) opera and the work regarded by many as “his major achievement of the period” and “one of the landmarks of twentieth-­century opera.”29 The expressionistically colored libretto by the Swiss writer Ferdinand Lion was based on one of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s most famous stories, Das Fräulein von Scuderi (1819), which tells the tale of a gifted goldsmith in the Paris of Louis XIV who became so passionately attached to his creations that after each sale, he murdered the purchaser in order to recover his work. For Hoffmann and his German Romantic contemporaries the tale exemplified the artist who prizes his art above all else: in the words of the libretto, he is “the victim of a sacred madness” (“das Opfer eines heil’gen Wahns”). Lion and Hindemith intensify the theme by eliminating the central figure of Hoffmann’s tale, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, and placing the goldsmith, who appears only once in the story, squarely in the middle of the action.30 In fact, Cardillac is the only figure named in the cast; the others all have generic names (the lady, the courtier, the daughter, the officer, and so

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forth). We are faced, then, with the seemingly paradoxical case in which a composer accommodates classical forms and techniques to a romantic theme and text as revised by an expressionist librettist—­a contrapuntal paradox resolved by some critics as Hindemith’s “musical critique of expressionism.”31 Beyond that, we may regard it as Hindemith’s own confirmation of the priority of art over society—­a view consistent with his own move into the Kuhhirtenturm. Hindemith’s classicism is evident, first, in the small orchestra (some forty instruments) and the strikingly architectonic form of the opera, which accounts for the many parallels in structure. Most conspicuously, the first and third acts take place in public venues (a public square and a tavern), while the second is set in the privacy of Cardillac’s studio. Act 1 opens with a lively prelude against which the chorus expresses the general fear produced by the mysterious murders that have taken place in the city, followed by the voice of an official (the provost marshal), who assures them that law and order will prevail. In an inversion of that sequence, act 3 closes with the voice of an official (now the officer who marries Cardillac’s daughter) explaining Cardillac’s motivation to the enraged mob, followed by the chorus, now understanding and sobered by Cardillac’s death, and ending with the orchestral postlude. (The important role of the chorus at beginning and end is noteworthy because the chorus does not appear at all in the second (middle) act. This conspicuous external order is paralleled by the internal order of the acts. Act 2 opens (in the late afternoon) and closes (in the evening) with ariosos by Cardillac, followed and preceded, respectively, by duets (Cardillac and the gold merchant; Cardillac and the officer). The center of the seven scenes, and accordingly the center of the opera, is a fugato duet of Cardillac and his daughter. The inner order applies, further, to several of the scenes. Scenes 3 through 6 of act 1 taken together, for instance, constitute a single “galant episode”32 comprising four genre pieces from the Baroque: a minuet, an operatic aria for tenor, a song for the

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lady with delicate woodwind accompaniment, and an instrumental ritornello. The opening scene of act 2 displays the pattern: ri­ tornello (an agitated orchestral passage)—­arioso (Cardillac)—­ ritornello—­duet (Cardillac and gold merchant)—­ritornello (the ritornellos being virtually identical).33 Within this highly articulated and utterly un-­ Wagnerian structure, which in itself offers a kind of emotional counterpoint to the romantic-­expressionistic action, Hindemith uses a variety of easily recognizable classical devices, which are played concertante by various instruments and notably flutes and oboes. The prelude begins with a rapid fugato by the orchestra, which continues as the accompaniment for the opening chorus, and the act closes with another concertante fugue that accompanies the concluding pantomime of the lady and the courtier, who make love before the masked figure of Cardillac appears and murders the cavalier: beginning with two flutes (in the score it is called “Duet for 2 flutes”), adding an oboe, and gradually expanding to include the entire ensemble. In act 2 the daughter’s “aria with concertante instruments” as she waits for her lover is a traditional Baroque da capo aria in ABA form with vocal passages introduced, divided, and concluded by orchestral ritornellos. The appearance of the king and his courtiers in Cardillac’s shop is presented as pure pantomime as Cardillac successfully prevents the monarch from purchasing a piece—­lest he be tempted to murder him as well! Cardillac’s closing aria in the same act is accompanied by an elaborately varied orchestral passacaglia. The third act begins with a military march to introduce the officer, but the march gradually transitions, with an ironic anachronism, to jazzy music appropriate for the tavern scene and its brief “ariettas.” This gives way to a quartet of four voices (gold merchant, officer, Cardillac, and daughter) and a trio (daughter, officer, Cardillac) with the chorus. Cardillac’s appearance with the mob (3.3) is an antiphonal song with variations. His closing song is accompanied by a passacaglia with a powerful basso osti­ nato until, with an orchestral cacophony, the mob attacks and

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kills him. In the final scene the voices of the daughter, the officer, and the chorus are followed by a lovely flute-­and-­oboe fugue. So the opera, which opens with a loud fugato, closes with a gentle fugue culminating in a reassuring tonic chord in B-­flat major. The listener is conscious at every stage of the classical form, even when the music is modified by modern harmonies and rhythms. Cardillac is a masterpiece of classicism of the twenties, in which the music (apart from the jazz in the tavern scene) reflects the period of the action (France of the Baroque) and, at the same time, its own era. As Dieter Rexroth puts it: “For Hindemith the early Cardillac, following Das Marienleben, signifies the first start toward the recovery of a conception of art from which the artist can derive and determine his binding moral obligation vis-­à-­vis the society in which he lives.”34

During the midtwenties, then, Hindemith fully earned the label of (neo)classicism—­a label confirmed by the contempt of Theodor W. Adorno with his notorious hostility to neoclassicism.35 (Following his move to Berlin in 1927 to teach at the Hochschule für Musik, Hindemith’s work progressed beyond his earlier straightforward classicism.) To be sure, he does not use themes from classical antiquity, as did Stravinsky, Picasso, and Eliot. But his work alludes directly in many passages to composers of the Baroque, notably Bach, and the clarity of line that he achieves—­consciously and wittingly, as we noted—­through the reduced concertante orchestra is fully as pure, say, as the graphic lines of Picasso’s drawings. In addition, the varied polyphonic effects realized by the voices of his concertante works, whether chamber music or opera, are analogous to the polyphony of Eliot’s voices in The Waste Land or the heteroglossia of Joyce’s in Ulysses. At the same time, his turn to the Baroque for forms and techniques was not intended parodistically, as in the case of his earlier Wagner parodies, but as a respectfully ironic look to the past as a bulwark against the romantic and expressionistic excesses of the present. For, as he repeatedly stated in his letters

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and later in his theoretical works, his was no mere adaptation of the past for other purposes but, rather, a serious attempt to bring order and harmony into his life and works—­to move from the disharmonies of the present into the tonic of art.

Alfredo Casella Hindemith’s strongest advocate in Italy was the piano virtuoso, composer, and conductor Alfredo Casella (1883–­1947). Under the auspices of the Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche (New Music Corporation), which he founded in 1923 together with his friend the composer Gian Francesco Malipiero—­with the enthusiastic encouragement of Gabriele d’Annunzio and generous funding by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge—­Casella brought Hindemith with his quartet to Italy for the first time and sponsored a number of other notable musical occasions such as the Italian premiere of Stravinsky’s Octet and a tour with Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire.36 Yet despite his appreciation and championship of virtually every form of modern music, Casella’s own compositions during the twenties display a wholly original tone. As he explained in his preface to the volume of autobiographical essays on musical theory and personal acquaintances that he published under the strange title 21+26—­the sum of the two numbers, which refer to the “official age of reason plus his long years of experience,” equals his age at the time of pub­ lication37—­the years 1920–­23 constituted for him a period of “intense meditation” during which two circumstances produced a radical reorientation of his views. First, in the course of a sojourn in Tuscany in 1922 he experienced what might be called an epiphany of nature that convinced him of the incompatibility of the Italian spirit with “certain expressions of exotic modernism.”38 Second, his assiduous study of contemporary Italian art and his intimate friendship with many young artists, including specifically Giorgio de Chirico, taught him a great deal. “I can even say that I learned more in the last eight years from certain of our artists—­in the sense of a wholesome and fertile ‘ritorno

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all’antico’ [‘return to antiquity’]—­than from any contemporary modern music.”39 How did this come about? Casella’s biography displays certain conspicuous parallels to that of his friend De Chirico. Born in Turin, he enjoyed an unusual musical education at home. His father, a professional cellist, was joined there every two weeks by three colleagues, with whom he played the string quartets of Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn. His mother, a trained pianist, started him at age four on the piano, where he progressed so rapidly that within four years he had mastered the two books of Bach’s Well-­Tempered Clavier. Since he never attended the theater, his musical experience for many years was “classical and severe” and provided the basis for what he regarded as his finest qualities: “a constructive steadfastness and classicism of mind.”40 In 1896, at age thirteen, he lost his father, and because of the poor state of musical instruction available in Italy, his mother decided despite their straitened circumstances to move to Paris so that her son, whose talent was already evident, could receive a more adequate training at the Conservatory of Paris. He began in piano with Louis Diémer, who introduced him to Claude Debussy and took him to an early performance of Prélude à l’après-­midi d’un faun. Later, in 1900–­1901, he studied composition with Gabriel Fauré among such fellow students as Maurice Ravel, who became a close friend and introduced him to Russian music: notably Mussorgsky and The Five. He also met the young Georges Enescu, who brought Schubert and especially Brahms to his attention. Casella made such rapid progress that, in 1899 and despite his youth, he won first prize—­a medium-­sized grand piano—­in the conservatory’s piano competition; the following year, he took the second prize in harmony. By 1902, sufficiently advanced at age nineteen to leave the conservatory, he was receiving engagements as a piano soloist, and his compositions began to be published. Casella’s earliest compositions for piano betray the influence of Fauré, Ravel, and Debussy. Even the composer later called his First Symphony (1905–­6) “a very juvenile work which oscillates

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between a strong Russian influence and those of Brahms and Enesco.”41 Long a fan of Mahler, whom he met in 1909, he arranged in 1910 for Mahler to conduct his Second Symphony in Paris, the first performance of his music with a French orchestra. He had also carefully studied the orchestration of Richard Strauss, digesting it “perhaps too completely,” he admitted.42 Ac­ cordingly, any listener to the second Symphony in C Minor (1908) recognizes within a few measures the sounds of Mahler and Strauss. In 1915, after nineteen years as a foreigner abroad, Casella returned to Italy and, exempted from military service first as the son of a widowed mother and then for reasons of health, took a position teaching piano at the Liceo Musicale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Toward the end of his stay in Paris he had become acquainted with the music of Schoenberg and had attended the premieres of Stravinsky’s ballets. Because of his Latin nature, he confides, though “much more attracted to the powerful personality of Stravinsky . . . the phenomenon of Schoenberg caused in me serious waverings for several years.”43 The compositions of those years still show his indecision and “the tonal doubt that Schoenberg had stimulated” in him: namely, “a hint of the twelve-­tone system” in his finest composition at the time, the Elegia eroica (Heroic Elegy, 1916).44 “It is evident that my Italian nature defended me against a tendency which could not be mine, much as I admired it.” Nonetheless, that avant-­garde and foreign element—­echoes of Mahler and Stravinskyan dissonances—­in a work dedicated “to the memory of the sons of Italy fallen for her greatness” is still audible to listeners today and produced at its premiere in January 1917 “a wave of indignation” in an Italian audience accustomed, as Casella often complained, only to the “passional-­melodramatic” music of the nineteenth century.45 That episode, coupled with the violent reaction in the press, he reports, brought him to tears and produced a greater sense of loneliness and isolation than he had felt even in France—­a sense of alienation within his own country similar to that of Hindemith.

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As a result, and despite his growing international success in trips abroad as a piano soloist, Casella composed almost nothing during the next eight years apart from a few pieces for piano. It was his encounter with young Italian artists and his epiphany in Tuscany, cited above, that finally elicited the music for which he is justly renowned today. His works prior to 1923, he felt, were merely stages on the way to the goal that he had now attained.46 In an article of 1923, in which he discusses the contributions to music of polytonality and atonality in Stravinsky and Schoenberg, he concludes “with profound joy” that, in the face of the acute technical torment troubling contemporary European music, the Italian school has achieved “a serene and totally independent attitude.”47 Indeed, he felt that the European public, sated with experimentation, now wanted something more concrete: something that the new Italian music could provide. Two years later he stated that Italian music of the present had emerged in recent years from “a long and dolorous musical crisis: the agony of romanticism.”48 Young Italian composers had undergone the “singularly arduous task” of observing “all the often radically differing new tendencies,” of experimenting with them, of assimilating whatever was necessary, and finally of forgetting them in order to “turn to the past” (“tornare all’antico”)—­that is, to Italy’s ancient instrumental tradition that had been forgotten for more than a century during its infatuation with opera. Our music is not atonal. It does not ignore polytonality. But it concerns itself, not with these problems that have already been resolved, but with discovering more distant horizons. It does not try to be “modern,” and perhaps for that reason attains novelty more easily than so much other music uneasy at being “in ritardo.”

The “reaction” in the title of his essay, therefore, does not signify a regression toward barbarism but, rather, the “re-­establishment of equilibrium” after a cataclysm. Casella, for essentially the same reasons as T. S. Eliot, disliked the term “neoclassicism,” which resulted from the aspiration toward a new order generated by the antiromantic character of the

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best European art after the war.49 That tendency coincided with the widespread return to old preromantic forms, such as the partita, toccata, passacaglia, ricercare, and concerto grosso, which often did not go beyond mere stylistic exercises or imitation. That tendency was, however, “only the first aspect of a great movement which is in full development today and which tends to restore effectively to music and the other arts the sense of the classic.” This orientation of the new Italian spirit, he proclaimed in 1929, more classical than romantic, has remote and profound origins and is not a mere caprice of fashion (“un semplice capriccio di moda”).50 It goes back by way of Verdi’s Falstaff, which Casella admires, to “an ancestral chain” comprising, among others, Rossini, Scarlatti, Vivaldi, and Monteverdi. The new Italian music is informed by a renewed study of that past and by a revitalized contact with the music of the people. Today, he summarized in his autobiography of 1941, the old contest between classic and romantic is a thing of the past. “The conviction has been renewed . . . that a true classicism can be achieved only by the restoration of a superior equilibrium in creation, a restoration which is at the same time classic, in its fullness and serenity of form, and romantic, in its subjective idea of a present that has been nourished by tradition.”51 A few pages later he defined this new attitude as “Europeanism,” in contrast to “provincialism” in art: an aspiration leading to “a new order, new disciplines, a new moral and social consciousness, and which begins to be manifested as a probable renaissance of classicism.”52 In these theoretical remarks, in which we recognize the familiar voices of Eliot, Lhote, Stravinsky, and other classicists of the twenties, we also hear the compositions that Casella wrote in the years from 1923 until 1930—­in contrast to his later years, when his scope became less Italian-­classical and more broadly international, as in the Third Symphony (1939), where again echoes of Mahler and even Prokofiev resound. Following such minor experiments as his Tre canzoni trecentesche for voice (1923), based on fourteenth-­century melodies, Casella enjoyed his greatest success with the ballet La giara (1924;

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The jar)—­most familiar today from its arrangement that same year as an orchestral suite. It was commissioned for the Parisian Ballets Suédois by the impresario Rolf de Maré, who wanted a typically Italian ballet to compete with Manuel de Falla’s The Three-­Cornered Hat (1919), which had produced a huge success for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Casella immediately thought of looking for a plot among the stories of Luigi Pirandello, and a friend suggested Pirandello’s well-­known comic tale “La giara” (1909), depicting an irascible Sicilian landowner who orders a majestic jar to hold the overflow of the year’s bountiful olive harvest.53 When the jar is broken, he hires a tinker to repair it; the tinker does so but, in the process, seals himself into the jar, which must then be broken again so that he can get out. Pirandello readily agreed and, for the scenario, modified the story by adding a romantic element: the landlord’s daughter, Nela, and her suitor. The ballet begins with a lovely prelude: a dreamy siciliano, or pastorale, with strings and woodwinds followed by a boisterous chiovu, or Sicilian folk dance, as the peasants, both men and women, excitedly bring the jar to the estate and try to place it in such a manner that a hole in its side will be concealed. When Don Lollò comes down from the balcony and discovers the damage, he falls into a rage that his daughter attempts to assuage. At that point Zi’ Dima (Uncle Dima), a hunchbacked tinker, appears, inspects the jar, and states that he can repair it. He climbs into the vessel and indeed mends it but is unable with his disfigurement to get back out. He decides to remain in the jar, pulls out his pipe, and smokes contentedly as night falls. That evening Nela’s admirer (a lyric tenor) sings a hauntingly lovely serenade (the Sicilian folktale of a girl kidnapped by pirates), which moves her and then the assembled neighbors to song—­a traditional brindisi, or drinking song—­and to a noisy dance. Aroused from his sleep, the angered Don Lollò storms out and, in his wrath, accidentally kicks the jar, which falls into pieces, liberating Zi’ Dima. As the ballet ends, Don Lollò is left alone with his frustrated rage because Nela has gone off with her lover while the neighboring peasants dance happily.

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Like Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, which Casella knew and admired—­in 1926 he conducted the first performance of the ballet in Rome54—­La giara is also based on folklore. The analogy to Stravinsky’s ballet, designed by his friend Picasso, is heightened by the fact that the scenery and costumes for La giara—­including conspicuously the jar itself—­were designed by Casella’s friend Giorgio de Chirico. The set design, which features on the left a house with a protruding balcony and stairs and with classically perspectival lines pointing off into a mysterious distance, is strikingly similar to the house in his painting Roman Villa (1922), but the costumes are more realistically regional than Picasso’s.55 The ballet also occupies in Casella’s career a position similar to that of Pulcinella in Stravinsky’s: both arose “in a phase of reorientation combined with an intense encounter with tradition.”56 While neither ballet fully exemplified the composers’ new classicism, both marked turning points. Just as Stravinsky went on to his Octet, Casella produced his first wholly classical work: his Partita for piano and orchestra (1924–­25), which was first performed in 1925 at the New York Philharmonic with the composer at the piano. The huge success of the Partita was particularly significant, Casella confessed, “as it showed that I had finally achieved the result of so many years of seeking, of uncertainty, and of hard struggle.”57 Now it was his task to consolidate “that stylistic and technical basis.” The work, with the elaborate notations for tempo and dynamics of which Casella was fond, is scored for an orchestra of strings, brass, and timpani against which a smaller concertino—­piano, oboe, and three clarinets—­is often set off as solo instruments. The three movements begin with a Sinfonia in sonata form with two themes that are developed in passages with contrasting moods of “animato” and “calmando” and alternating solo instruments and full orchestra. The second movement, Passacaglia, announces its short theme in a minor key with a basso ostinato and then develops it in twelve contrasting variations, both solo (notably variation 6 for piano) and orchestral. Variation 11, for instance, is a siciliano reminiscent of the prelude to La giara,

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and the last one, in sharp contrast to the preceding ones, is a stately chorale—­“ lento molto e misterioso”—­leading back to a reprise of the initial theme with strings in the low registers. The suite closes, in a typical partita contrast of movements, with a lively Burlesca that ranges playfully between its initial “allegro” and concluding “prestissimo” through a variety of tempi and contrasting orchestral combinations. With this work Casella suc­ ceeded for the first time in skillfully employing recognizably classical forms for modern purposes. The Partita was soon followed by two further works that represented steps forward: the infrequently performed Concerto romano (1926) for organ, brass, tympani, and strings, a work that in its Baroque monumentality recalls Bach and Vivaldi; and the universally successful Scarlattiana (1926), a divertimento for piano and small orchestra based on some eighty themes and motifs taken from the 545 sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, which Casella called “the combination of the personalities of Scarlatti and a musician of two centuries later.”58 Casella resolved the problem of merging different centuries and personalities by his “profound knowledge of the style and the harmonic technique of Scarlatti, which includes many elements of modernity.” The device of basing a modern work on themes and styles taken from classic composers was by no means unique with Casella. For Pulcinella, as we know, Stravinsky borrowed his themes from Pergolesi and his contemporaries. Casella later composed his Paganiniana (1942), a divertimento for orchestra. And untold composers in the twentieth century used Bach as the basis for their transcriptions (Busoni), for their preludes and fugues (Hindemith, Shostakovich), and other variations. Casella himself composed Due ricercaris sul nome B-­A-­C-­H (1932). Nor was he the first composer to base a modern work on Scarlatti: Vincenzo Tommasini’s ballet Le donne di buon umore (1917) also takes themes from his sonatas. But Scarlatti played a particular role in Casella’s life and career. By age eleven, he reports, he had memorized several sonatas of Scarlatti, and a year later, before leaving for Paris, he performed

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three of them at a concert in Turin.59 Yet despite occasional echoes in earlier works, such as the Sicilienne et burlesque for flute and piano (1914), he had not devoted an entire work to the admired predecessor. In particular, he “eliminated with the greatest care any residue of nineteenth-­century chromaticism, which would have compromised beyond remedy the purity of style which is Scarlattiana’s greatest merit.”60 The five movements, which at almost half an hour are as long as the ballet, do not constitute a piano concerto but, rather, a symphonie concertante with the piano sometimes as solo but often as accompaniment. It begins with a Sinfonia, which, following a quiet grave opening resembling with its basso ostinato a passacaglia, becomes a basically lively allegro. The stately Minuetto, the longest movement, is based on a simple lovely melody in conventional binary form, though with delicate dissonances in the middle section. The following brief and vivacious Capriccio punctuated by castanets is succeeded by a serene Pastorale reminiscent of the prelude to La giara; the Finale, which parallels the development of the introductory Sinfonia in its movement from a grave lento to passages of increasingly liveliness and volume, brings the work to a brilliant conclusion. Perhaps the culmination of Casella’s classical phase was his Serenata (1927) for five instruments (clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, violin, and piano; expanded in 1930 into the more frequently performed version for small orchestra). With alternating movements of fast-­slow-­fast-­slow-­fast, the work begins with a lively Marcia (march) that leads into a grave Notturno, again reminiscent of the lento passages in La giara. The spirited Gavotta gives way to a slow Cavatina, which—­as the score indicates—­should be “sentimental but without parody.” For his finale Casella uses a vivacious villanelle alla napoletana with a sustained ostinato. For this work with its traditional designations, composed for a competition sponsored by the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia (with 645 submissions), Casella shared the prize with Béla Bartók; the citation pronounced the work “an authentic model of purely Italian style in form, in spirit, and in its characteristically continuous melodic flow.”

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Casella, who was principal conductor of the Boston Pops from 1927 to 1929, managed despite his popularity to alienate his American audiences through his emphasis on contemporary music. Yet he enjoyed greater acclaim and popularity in the United States than at home in Italy, where his work was strongly opposed by the conservatives with their nineteenth-­ century melodramatic and romantic tastes. In 1929, in the Austrian journal for modern music, Anbruch, he published a short article to explain his intentions with such works as his Scarlattiana.61 He begins with the flat statement that “the current musical situation is characterized by a violent reaction against the tendencies of romanticism and a total restoration of the law of construction and order, which the past century apparently had abolished for ever”—­a restoration exemplified by a number of concerti grossi, partitas, passacaglias, divertimenti, and symphonies in harmony with the strictest academic rules. He suggests that it would be worthwhile to compare this rebirth of older musical form-­principles with modern political developments which, for the benefit of the abstract state authority, limit many individual liberties that the previous century seemed to have secured eternally for humanity.

Order, he insists, “is necessary in every art . . . and is the product of a liberty achieved by overcoming the resistance of the particular material, whether it be stone, color, word, or musical sound.” The present renaissance of antiquated forms is the result of “the definitive liquidation of the atonal intermezzo,” and Casella sees no need to polemicize against a style that has been as wholly overthrown as cubism in painting. We are now, he says, in an epoch of “back to . . . ,” which manifests itself in Italy as “a lively movement back to its great instrumental past”—­a past older than the operatic music that held sway during the past century. “Of all the great men of our past Scarlatti stands closest to us. He is the ‘most modern.’ ” Casella’s Scarlattiana are “no imitation, no arrangement, no ‘rifacimento’ of Scarlatti’s music but simply a work of today with the musical material of the 20th century and

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built on themes drawn from the works of the great Domenico.” The times are past when art was regarded as a riddle or even as a punishment. “People today aspire to clarity and a joyous optimism.” His own work strives for an accessible simplicity by fusing so-­called higher forms with genres considered inferior. “In this general tendency directed toward a music freed of all ponderous and superfluous pathos, Italy has an important role to play.” Casella’s declaration, which triggered a lively controversy in succeeding issues of Anbruch between adherents of classicism and romanticism—­the very same issue included responses by Schoenberg, Křenek, and Malipiero—­infuriated many contemporaries in Italy and elsewhere. The opposition came to a head three years later, when a manifesto was published in the Corriere della sera and La Stampa (December 17, 1932), signed by ten Italian composers, with Respighi’s name heading the list.62 They have come together, it is asserted, “men of good will and good faith not indifferent to the artistic destiny of their country” and convinced that inaction would attest a lack of concern for their country and manly feelings (“sentimento virile”). Without mentioning Casella or his fellow-­in-­arms Malipieri by name, they claim that Italy has been contaminated by the most reckless futuristic ideas. “The word ‘order’ aspires truly, infuriatingly, to the destruction of every old and venerated artistic ideality.” What has remained, they ask, of “the atonal and pluritonal trumpeting, of objectivism and expressionism”? In music, more than the other arts, there is “a biblical confusion of Babel,” and the public, “intimidated by so many profound and learned programs of aesthetic reform,” no longer knows which voice to listen to. Young musicians are infected by “a sense of easy rebellion against the secular and fundamental canons of the art.” At most—­and even here they ape the fashion of a foreign music that lacks any tradition to be followed—­they aspire to the imitation of remote musical centuries. “Above all, the romanticism of the past century is opposed and combatted.” It is now urgently necessary for the public to free itself from “the state of intellectual subjection that paralyzes its free emotional impulses.” Their manifesto, they assure readers, is not motivated by

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any mean reactionism or “misoneistic” aversions. (“Misoneism” is an Italian coinage that means hatred of change.) Since an ideal chain links the past to the future, there is no need to deny any part of the Italian past. They oppose “so-­called objective music,” which proposes to represent pure sound without expressing the vitality of its creator. And they resist any art that has no human content and aspires to be nothing but a “mechanical game.” “The romanticism of yesterday . . . which is life in action, in joy, and in grief, will still be the romanticism of tomorrow.” The ancient controversy between classicism and romanticism, which here attained new heights and even involved Mussolini, continued for the remainder of the decade. Casella succumbed to the admiration of Mussolini shared by many musicians, artists, and writers in Italy and elsewhere because of Il Duce’s own professed commitment to the arts63—­a turn to Fascism that tainted his reputation until his death. During the Fascist years he continued to compose—­notably his Third Symphony (1939–­40) and several operas—­and to explain and defend his theories in eminently readable essays and autobiographical writings, yet his most popular works remain those composed during the classicism of the twenties: works, as we have seen, that looked consciously and conspicuously to the Italian past for themes and forms modified by the techniques of contemporary classicism, but also to what Casella regarded as the Italian spirit. While, like Hindemith, he borrowed no themes from classical antiquity, both in his compositions and in his writings Casella advocated and practiced in exemplary form what we have identified as the classicism of the twenties. In their classical period both composers stressed in their writings their desire for order and harmony, following the chaos of the immediate postwar years: a desire that manifested itself in their respectful reverence for such predecessors as Bach and Scarlatti, in their preference for a reduced orchestra for the sake of clarity of line, and in their adaptation of musical forms from the classical past.

7 Classicism of the Twenties? Has our survey of theories and practices justified any conclusions about a possible classicism of the twenties? Is that term at all useful, or is it as confusing as some scholars and critics of the individual arts suggest? Is it possible to deduce from the works themselves any criteria that can be applied across the disciplines from music to art to literature? Did the actual practice of the arts reflect the widespread theorizing about classicism in the years immediately following World War I? Can we determine the reasons for the appearance of apparently “classicizing” works in that decade? The survey has made no attempt at encyclopedic completeness, which would be as useless as it would be futile. After a consideration of the theories of classicism and a statement of reasons for discarding the term “neoclassicism,” we looked first at the three masters whose names are inevitably associated as the leaders of classicism in music, art, and literature. Then we considered other artists, composers, and writers who are often cited as further examples of (neo)classicism. If we have succeeded in defining classicism of the twenties and setting forth specific criteria, then the term may be usefully applied to include or exclude other composers, artists, and writers who, in the various studies of twentieth-­century music, art, and literature, are sometimes

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called (neo)classical: for instance, Gottfried Benn, Rudolf Borchardt, Ferrucio Busoni, Salvador Dalí, Manuel de Falla, André Gide, Juan Gris, Aristide Maillol, Henri Matisse, and Erik Satie, among others.

The two basic criteria of the theories common in France, Germany, Italy, and England were 1) a desire for reason and order in life, art, and society 2) as exemplified by Greek and Roman antiquity and by past “classics” of Western music, art, and literature. These criteria emerged repeatedly, whether we were studying contributions to the postwar Nouvelle Revue Française or Eliot’s Criterion, the essays of Paul Valéry or of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, or the scholarly recapitulations of Ernst Robert Curtius or Benedetto Croce. For many thoughtful people in a Europe striving to overcome the social, political, and cultural disruptions of World War I, the dreaminess of a neoromanticism looking back to the Middle Ages, the vague associations of impressionism, and the extravagances of expressionism no longer seemed adequate or appropriate for the times. Considering works by Stravinsky, Picasso, and Eliot, we were easily able to establish that all three turned for inspiration and patterns both to antiquity and to other “classic” periods in their respective arts. Picasso invoked Ingres as well as Hellenistic sculpture. Stravinsky reworked Pergolesi and commedia dell’arte but also chose themes for his operas and ballets from classical mythology. Eliot’s poetry teems with references to Greek and Latin but also to Shakespeare and Dante. In each case, moreover, we saw that the artists were motivated by powerful impulses to order and clarity. Picasso spoke of the purity of line that characterized the art of  Ingres and the Greeks. Stravinsky rejected what he regarded as the romanticism of nineteenth-­century chromaticism in favor of a return to tonality and the linear counterpoint of his venerated Bach. Eliot’s poetry exemplifies the “hard, dry lines” foreseen by T. E. Hulme. To this extent, the practicing artists fulfilled wholly the principles of the theorists.

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However, one element stands out in practice that was not specified in the theory: namely, the detachment and irony stemming from the conviction that modernity can never simply repeat antiquity—­a conviction that is perhaps more easily evident to practicing artists than to theorists. As Eliot observed in his essay on Joyce’s Ulysses, “it is much easier to be a classicist in literary criticism than in creative art—­because in criticism you are responsible only for what you want, and in creation you are responsible for what you can do with material which you must simply accept.”1 We noted this ironic detachment in the exaggerated limbs of Picasso’s figures, in the disharmonies and rhythmic irregularities that punctuate Stravinsky’s scores, and in the jarring stylistic contrasts that mark Eliot’s poetry. Precisely this element, which is lacking in earlier classicisms in France, Germany, and England, typifies the classicism of the twenties and, in my opinion, renders the term “neoclassicism” ineffective and imprecise. Each age stamps its own mark on its efforts to recapture the order and purity of classical antiquity. The classicism of Virgil’s Aeneid is utterly different from that of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which it superficially imitates. The classicism of Louis XIV’s fashionable Paris differs from that of the late-­eighteenth-­century duchy of Saxe-­Weimar as distinctly as does Racine’s Iphigénie from Goethe’s treatment of the same mythological theme or, by analogy, the single-­minded power of Beethoven’s symphonies from the inexhaustible variety of Bach’s Well-­Tempered Clavier. In turn, and at a similar distance, the paintings of Picasso differ from those of his revered Ingres, the adaptations of Stravinsky from the compositions of Pergolesi, and the poems of Eliot from those of his sometime models Shakespeare, Dante, and Euripides. The term “neoclassicism” becomes meaningless unless it is specified by period. It is far more precise to speak of “classicism of the twenties,” just as we speak of Weimar Classicism and not Weimar Neoclassicism, or French Classicism, not French Neoclassicism—­not to mention Virgil’s classicism and not Roman Neoclassicism.

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The element that chiefly distinguishes the classicism of the twenties, apart from the pronounced stylistic differences—­for instance, harmonic and stylistic dissonances in music and poetry—­is the ironic albeit respectful detachment with which it regards antiquity: the awareness that it can never precisely repeat, in its general culture or in its individual works of art, the culture and art of antiquity. (Racine and Goethe were of course also aware of this inability to repeat, but they responded to it in other ways and not with the same explicitly ironic detachment.) This same awareness, in turn, enables us to distinguish genuine works of classicism of the twenties from others that sometimes attract the same label. For, as we saw, it is not the adaptation of antiquity alone that is the determining factor. The twenties teemed with plays, musical compositions, and artworks based on classical themes. But despite its mythological theme a play like Jahnn’s Medea, as we saw, is essentially expressionistic in its focus, just as Léger’s “classical” figures assert their technological modernity through their machine-­like features. Nor, as we saw especially in music, is even the element of antiquity essential to classicism. While Stravinsky and others did indeed exploit classical themes, Hindemith and Casella, otherwise wholly classical in their approach, did not, turning instead for their libretti to such literary sources as the contemporary Pirandello or the German Romantic E. T. A. Hoffmann. At the same time, in their scores they consciously exploited themes and techniques borrowed from such older “classic” sources as Bach and Sicilian folk songs, thus producing an ironic contrast between past and present that is as striking as Picasso’s exaggerations or Stravinsky’s disharmonies. Finally, isolated examples within an entire oeuvre, no matter how successful they may be, hardly suffice to justify the label of classicism. Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, while brilliant in its imitation of Haydn, stands alone among his other works, and the composer himself called it “only incidental” and aspired to few, if any, of the theoretical goals of classicism. Braque’s Canephorae, a notable exception in his oeuvre, constitute little more than a ges-

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ture of respect to his friend Picasso. Similarly, the “neoclassical” works of Cocteau and Picabia represent what I have called the bandwagon phenomenon that acknowledges no commitment to the inner meaning of classicism (despite Cocteau’s self-­serving appropriation of the “rappel à l’ordre” at the very moment when the movement was already waning). In any true classicism the works must reflect a serious and sustained effort on the part of the artist to achieve the classical goals of reason and order. In the cases of Picasso, Stravinsky, and Eliot that effort extended well beyond the period of their most intense classicism, which can most productively be limited to the decade of the twenties—­a period that would also include the classical works of Casella, De Chirico, Hindemith, Joyce, and Valéry. Such limitations are essential if we hope to differentiate classicism from other tendencies of the twenties and thirties that may indeed more accurately be called “neoclassical”: notably the efforts by Italian Fascists and Nazis alike to claim antiquity as their model. Hence the many busts of Mussolini, Il Duce, in imitation of Roman sculptures2; or Hitler’s grandiose architectural plans with his chief architect, Albert Speer, for the renewal of Berlin as the glorious capital of his Third Reich, the pompous posters for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia (1936–­38). The limitations can also assist us in differentiating such American examples as Robinson Jeffers’s Oresteian drama The Tower beyond Tragedy (1923) or Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), which postfigure the same material, inasmuch as the personal and social circumstances surrounding writers in the United States differed from those in postwar Europe.3

In every case, as we saw in the individual biographies, the turn to antiquity or to the national classical past in music, art, and litera­ ture was triggered by the calamity of  World War I, which shattered the convictions and beliefs that had previously sustained Europeans. This sense of loss was exacerbated in most cases by

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a feeling of alienation and isolation among the many expatriates living abroad, but also in individuals (Casella, Hindemith) who felt estranged in their own lands and who, in their search for sustaining values, turned to the past. In most cases the turn to the past was accompanied by corresponding sociopolitical attitudes: either a pronounced conservatism (Eliot, Casella, and others) that rejected contemporary modernism or an apolitical stance (Picasso, Stravinsky, and others) vis-­à-­vis the current communism or fascism. The classicists tended to speak openly of their models (whether Bach or Ingres or works of classical antiquity) and of their desire to achieve order, regularity, and proportion in their works. But this longing was qualified by the ironic recognition that the past can never be reproduced; it can only be emulated in the aspiration to achieve classical perfection with the various restrictions and advantages at their disposal in the modern world. Here the most conspicuous examples would be Severini and Léger, who went so far in the direction of modernity that they failed to achieve the balance representative of classicism, or the utterly humorless effort of  Cocteau to modernize Sophocles. Given the differences among the arts, how is it possible to determine common denominators that define their various efforts to emulate the past? In his brilliant theoretical synthesis, Music, the Arts, and Ideas, Leonard B. Meyer argues that the twentieth century has entered “a period of stylistic stasis . . . characterized not by the linear, cumulative development of a single fundamental style, but the coexistence of a multiplicity of quite different styles in a fluctuating and dynamic steady-­state.”4 Meyer’s generalization is certainly reflected in the careers of Stravinsky, Picasso, De Chirico, and others who managed for decades and long after their initial classicism to maintain and practice different styles concurrently in their own work: Stravinsky was experimenting with serial compositions around 1950 when he wrote his still thoroughly classical The Rake’s Progress; Picasso never forsook the clarity of line that he achieved in his classical period; De Chirico was copying his own early metaphysical paintings

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for years after his classical phase had ended; and Eliot never gave up his “hard, dry lines” even when he turned in his later poetry after his conversion to religious rather than classical themes. Meyer identifies four ways, in an aesthetics of stability, in which the art of past epochs has been used in the present: paraphrase, borrowing, simulation, and modeling.5 He cites Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite as an example of “paraphrase” in music, which employs “melodic-­rhythmic emphasis, harmonic idiom, instrumentation” to transform the past into the present. By analogy, we might recall Léger’s paraphrase of the Crouching Venus in his Kneeling Woman, in which the classical pose is transformed by his aesthetics of the machine into a modern paraphrase. “Borrowings,” which merely quote or reproduce excerpts of an earlier work, are exemplified conspicuously in Eliot’s The Waste Land with its quotations in many languages, but we encountered musical examples in Hindemith’s Marienleben (the quotation from the medieval hymn) or Das Nusch-­Nuschi (the quotation from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde), and elsewhere. Examples from painting may be recognized in the bust of Apollo in De Chirico’s Song of Love, and ornamental quotation is common in much twentieth-­ century architecture. By “simulation” Meyer means works that neither paraphrase nor borrow from specific works but, rather, employ recognizable elements of an older style in order to create a modern work that resembles classic works. Meyer cites Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, but we also encountered such examples as Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, in which the composer sought consciously to create the illusion of a symphony written in the twentieth century by Haydn; or Hindemith’s Kammermusiken, which amount, without specific borrowings from Bach, to Brandenburg Concertos for our time. In Joyce’s Ulysses, the “Oxen of the Sun” episode echoes various works from the history of En­ glish literature, while Picasso’s engravings of Minotaurs simulate drawings by Dürer or Holbein. Under “modeling,” finally, Meyer has in mind what, in literature, is usually called postfiguration: that is, the use of a particular work as the general pattern for a modern re-­creation, as in the organization of Ulysses or, to take

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another example, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. In music, for various reasons, modeling is not feasible—­except, say, in the case of a work that might use the basso ostinato of Bach’s Goldberg Variations as the basis for a totally new and modern composition; but in painting the technique is readily available, as in Picabia’s The Three Graces, which is clearly modeled after the pattern of Rubens’s masterpiece. Meyer states the cautious reservation that in an age of stasis with an entire spectrum of styles at its fingertips, “ideology may no longer provide the basis for choosing among possible pasts” and “a particular past will be favored and explored because of the specifically artistic problems it poses rather than because of the ideological position it represents.”6 While this is true for works of Cocteau and Léger, as we have seen, our classicists of the twenties were drawn to antiquity and to the “classics” of their own arts precisely because of the “ideology” of reason and order that they exemplified—­even if that attraction had to be qualified by the ironic realization that the past could not be repeated in their present. What, finally, do the artists, and we as their admirers, achieve through their classicism—­through their efforts to emulate the past in theory/ideology and in practice/style? When we listen to Stravinsky’s Octet or Symphony of  Psalms, or contemplate Picasso’s Two Women Running on the Beach or Woman in White, or peruse Eliot’s The Waste Land or “The Hollow Men,” we benefit in at least two ways, for no thoughtful listener or viewer perceives merely an imitation. Rather, we understand our present culture better because precisely the disharmonies and distortions alert us to the essentially modern quality of the works we apprehend and to the aesthetic progress necessary to make them possible. At the same time, we understand the past better because those same disharmonies and distortions make us more keenly aware of the unique character of that past, whether Greek or Baroque or other. As Meyer puts it, “comprehension and appreciation of the art of other epochs will continually be brought into focus through its reworking in the present.”7

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Our study of the classicism of the twenties, both in its theory and its practice, may not have exhausted all the possibilities of interdisciplinary comparison among the arts, just as it has not encyclopedically encompassed all the possible “classicists” in the various arts. But I hope that it has suggested methods that others may pursue, whether they care to look at other potential classicists or whether they choose to explore other styles altogether. (For the same period such styles as expressionism and surrealism spring to mind, as do New Objectivity and serialism, each of which is governed by its own criteria.)

In sum, classicism of the twenties—­a term more precise, I have argued, than “modernist classicism” or “klassische Moderne” and other labels that have been proposed—­may be defined as a movement encompassing works of that decade that consciously and systematically aspire, through the use of various techniques facilitating echoes of the past, including specifically Greek and Roman antiquity, to an art, music, and literature of the present that express the qualities of reason, restraint, clarity, and order as an antidote to the disruptions of war and the sense of alienation in the modern world. This definition excludes mere camp followers like Cocteau, expressionists like Jahnn who used classical themes for their own nonclassical purposes, and gifted simulators like Prokofiev, who turned to the past in incidental works in order to demonstrate their virtuosity but do not otherwise ascribe to the theoretical goals of classicism, as well as the exploitation of ancient models for modern political goals. At the same time this interdisciplinary definition, based on works of that period by such acknowledged “classicists” as Stravinsky, Picasso, and Eliot, enables us to include such composers as Hindemith and Casella, such artists as De Chirico (with reservations), and such writers as Joyce and Valéry, distinguishing them from more superficial imitators. The decade of the twenties, to conclude, is as fully entitled to its own classicism (without the prefix “neo-­”) as were the Duchy of Weimar, the France of Louis XIV, and Augustan Rome.

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Is the current interest in the classicism of the twenties—­in concert halls, museum exhibitions, and scholarly and critical pub­ lications—­and our instinctive identification with the feelings and aspirations of those artists, in part at least, a response to the turmoil of our own times: the wars, revolutions, and general cultural chaos of the early twenty-­first century? Does our return to that past indicate a longing for yet another classicism in the arts and a renaissance of reason and order in our society?

Notes chapter 1

1. Wolfgang Rihm, “Moderne als Klassizismus,” in Die klassizistische Moderne in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hermann Danuser (Winterthur: Amadeus, 1997), 315–­18. 2. Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, “Les quatre significations du mot ‘classique,’ ” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 12 (1958): 5–­22, here 8. 3. René Wellek, “The Term and Concept of Classicism in Literary History,” in his Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 55–­89. 4. For an overview see Wolfgang Bernard Fleischmann, “Classicism,” in Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 136–­41. For an exhaustive survey of the use of the terms “classicism” and “neoclassicism” in musicology see Scott Messing, “Neo-­Classicism: The Origins of the Term and Its Use in the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic in the 1920s” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1986). 5. Paolo Quazzolo, “Classicism,” in Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, ed. Gaetana Marrone, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1:478–­81. 6. Henri Peyre, Le classicisme français (New York: Éditions de la Mai­ son Française, 1942). 7. E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935).

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8. Sherard Vines, The Course of English Classicism from the Tudor to the Victorian Age (London: Hogarth, 1930). 9. Salvatore Settis, The Future of the “Classical,” trans. Allan Cameron (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 16, 109. 10. Volker Scherliess, “ ‘Torniamo all’antico e sarà un progresso’—­ Creative Longing in Music,” in Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music, 1914–­1935, ed. Gottfried Böhm, Ulrich Mosch, and Katharina Schmidt, Catalog for the 1996 exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel (London: Merrell Holberton, 1996), 39–­62, here 43. 11. Aaron Copland, The New Music, 1900–­1960, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1968), 72. 12. See also “neoclassicism” in Google’s Ngram Viewer, http://books .google.com/ngrams/graph?content=neoclassicism. 13. T. S. Eliot, “A Commentary,” Monthly Criterion 5, no. 3 ( June 1927): 283–­86, here 284. 14. Hermann Danuser, “Primordial and Present: The Appropriation of Myth in Music,” in Canto d’Amore, 298–­314, here 298. 15. Editors’ Foreword, in Canto d’Amore, [unnumbered page 11]. 16. Edoardo Costadura, D’un classicisme à l’autre: France-­Italie, 1919–­ 1939 (Saint-­Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1999), 65–­70. 17. Klassische Moderne: Ein Paradigma des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Mauro Ponzi (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010). 18. “On Socialist Realism,” in Abram Tertz, The Trial Begins, trans. Max Hayward, and On Socialist Realism, trans. George Dennis, with an introduction by Czeslaw Milosz (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), 200–­201. 19. Robert A. M. Stern and Raymond W. Gastil, Modern Classicism (New York: Rizzoli, 1988). 20. Settis, Future of the “Classical,” 19–­21. 21. Judith Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 219–­27. 22. Yves Bonnefoy, “Art between the Wars and the Problem of Clas­ sicism,” in Canto d’Amore, 85–­93, here 86. 23. Art Berman, Preface to Modernism (Urbana: University of Illi­nois Press, 1994), 22. 24. These are some of the “isms” considered by Christopher Butler in his Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe,

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1900–­1916 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). Butler mentions classicism only in passing in connection with T. E. Hulme (225–­27). 25. Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (1970), in his Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf  Tiedemann, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 7:442–­44. 26. Jeroen Vanheste, Guardians of the Humanist Legacy: The Classicism of  T. S. Eliot’s Criterion Network and Its Relevance to our Post­ modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 1–­3, who discusses classicism as “an Interbellum manifestation of humanism.” In his informative volume, essentially “a study in intellectual history and the philosophy of culture” (9), Vanheste wishes to challenge “the views that emphasize [classicism’s] perceived political conservatism and cultural elitism” (7) and does not consider its aesthetic practice. 27. Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influ­ ences on Western Literature (New York: Oxford University Press/Galaxy, 1957), 261–­88. 28. Friedrich Schlegel, Literary Notebooks, 1797–­1801, ed. Hans Eichner (Toronto: University of  Toronto Press, 1957), 59 (#444). 29. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, ed. H. H. Houben (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1909), 263. 30. Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Ernst Elster, rev. ed., 7 vols. (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1890), 5:354. 31. Ralf Klausnitzer, Die Blaue Blume unterm Hakenkreuz: Die Rezep­ tion der deutschen literarischen Romantik im Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Schöningk, 1999). 32. Mme de Staël, De l’Allemagne, ed. André Monchoux (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1956), 133–­36 (“De la poésie classique et de la poésie romantique”), here 133. 33. See the reviews cited in Adèle Hugo, Victor Hugo raconté par Adèle Hugo: Texte intégral, ed. Evelyne Blewer (Paris: Plon, 1985), 456–­ 77, here 470. 34. See Theodore Ziolkowski, Scandal on Stage: European Theater as Moral Trial (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 27–­36 (“The Battle of Hernani ”). 35. “Réponse à une enquête de La Renaissance sur le classicisme,” in André Gide, Oeuvres complètes, ed. L. Martin-­Chauffier (Paris: NRF, 1932–­39), 10:25–­26, here 26.

202

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36. “Aesthetics,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed. (London, 1929–­39), 1:268–­69. 37. William Curt Buthman, The Rise of Integral Nationalism in France: With Special Reference to the Ideas and Activities of Charles Maurras (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 102–­3. 38. Henri Ghéon, “Chroniques du mois: Les lectures,” L’Ermitage 15 (December 1904): 296–­303, here 302–­3. 39. Charles Maurras, La musique intérieure (Paris: Grasset, 1925), 14–46, here 31–­32. 40. Charles Maurras, Anthinea: D’Athènes à Florence (Paris: Honoré et Champion, 1913), 14, 19. 41. Anthinea, 24–­27. Maurras uses a variety of superlatives to characterize his feelings on that occasion: “transport,” “universelles ivresses,” “folie lyrique,” and others. The title refers, as Maurras explains in a note, to a local name for Athens: “village of flowers” or, by extension, “flower of the world.” 42. Anthinea, 84. The entire section is headed “La naissance de la raison.” 43. Anthinea, 29. 44. “Barbares et Romans,” in Charles Maurras, L’étang de Berre (Paris: Flammarion, 1928), 318–­28, here 328. 45. Anthinea, 61. “Semitic” or “Jewish” leprosy was a catchword among the members of  l’Action française. 46. “Barbares et Romans,” 319, 47. Charles Maurras, Quand les Français ne s’aiment pas: Chronique d’une renaissance, 1895–­1905, 2nd ed. (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1916), 35–­36. 48. Quand les Français, xix–­xx. For Maurras’s negative attitude to­ ward Germany generally see the sections entitled “Amitiés germaniques” (1–­25) and “Le service de l’Allemagne” (27–­104). 49. “Barbares et Romanes,” 322. 50. Charles Maurras, Barbarie et poésie (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1925), v–­vi. 51. Anthinea, 87. 52. Pierre Lasserre, Le romantisme français: Essai sur la révolution dans les sentiments et dans les idées au XIXe siécle, 3rd ed. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1907), 14, 62.

Notes to Chapter 1 203

53. Robert Kopp, “André Gide and the Question of Classicism,” in Canto d’Amore, 452–­57, here 453. 54. It is a central thesis of Vanheste, Guardians of the Humanist Legacy (7), to challenge the conventional view limiting classicism to political conservatism. 55. See Hulme’s articles on Bergson, in The Collected Writings of  T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 85–­204. 56. “Balfour, Bergson, and Politics,” in Collected Writings, 161–­65, here 164. 57. “The Art of Political Conversion” (1911), in Collected Writings, 207–­18, here 217. 58. “The Two Temperaments,” in Collected Writings, 232–­38. 59. ”Romanticism and Classicism” (1911–­12), in Collected Writings, 59–­73. 60. Hulme, Collected Writings, 3. 61. On Hulme’s advocacy of abstraction in art as a response to romanticism see Butler, Early Modernism, 225–­27. 62. “German Chronicle” (1914), in Collected Writings, 74–­81, here 76. 63. Samuel Lublinski, Der Ausgang der Moderne: Ein Buch der Oppo­ sition, ed. Gotthart Wunberg (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976), 4–­11 (“Was ist Romantik?”). 64. On Mann’s attraction to the neoclassical movement see André von Gronicka, Thomas Mann: Profile and Perspectives (New York: Ran­ dom House, 1970), 59–­63. 65. “Lebensabriss,” in Mann’s Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1960), 12:98–­144, here 114. 66. Letter of August 31, 1910, to Julius Bab, in Briefe, 1889–­1936, ed. Erika Mann (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1961), 87. 67. “Der Doktor Lessing,” originally in Literarisches Echo 12 (1910), in Gesammelte Werke 12:719–­25, here 723. 68. “Über die Kunst Richard Wagners,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 78 (1911), in Gesammelte Werke 10:840–­42. 69. I cite Tod in Venedig in my own translation from Gesammelte Werke, 8:444–­525. 70. T. J. Reed, Death in Venice: Making and Unmaking a Master (New York: Twayne, 1994), 15–­21.

204

Notes to Chapter 1

71. “On Architecture,” in Adolf Loos, On Architecture, ed. Adolf Opel and Daniel Opel, trans. Michael Mitchell (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1995), 73–­85, here 83–­84. 72. Irving Babbitt, “Rational Study of the Classics,” in his Literature and the American College: Essay in Defense of the Humanities (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 228, 179. 73. Griechischer Frühling, in Gerhart Hauptmann, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hans-­Egon Hass (Berlin: Propyläen, 1996), 7:9–­119, here 49. 74. “Augenblicke in Griechenland,” in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, 6 vols. (Berlin: Fischer, 1924), 3:179–­204, here 198. 75. Glenn W. Most, “Die Entdeckung der Archaik: Von Ägina nach Naumburg,” in Urgeschichten der Moderne: Die Antike im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Bernd Seidensticker and Martin Vöhler (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 20–­39, here 35. 76. See Caroline Pross, Dekadenz: Studien zu einer großen Erzählung der frühen Moderne (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2013), 372–­410, who analyzes Mann’s novel as a departing recapitulation of the period of European décadence from the late 1880s to World War I. 77. Letter of November 25, 1916, to Paul Amann, in Mann’s Briefe an Paul Amann, ed. Herbert Wegener (Lübeck: Max Schmidt-­Römheld, 1959), 49. 78. “Vom kommenden Sieg der Demokratie,” in Gesammelte Werke, 12:910–­41. 79. On Mann’s gradual revision of  his views see especially T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 275–­316. 80. Letter of July 24, 1913, in Briefe an Ernst Bertram aus den Jahren 1910–­1935, ed. Inge Jens (Pfullingen: Neske, 1960), 18. 81. On humanism in the novel see Vanheste, Guardians of the Hu­ manist Legacy, 313–­22. 82. On Pieperkorn as a parodied postfiguration of  Jesus see The­ odore Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 3–­6. 83. Here my emphasis differs from that of Reed, Thomas Mann, 227, who considers the ideas from the standpoint of Mann’s own intellectual development. I have called them “intellectual pawns, to be pushed about for the sake of the composition”—­see my Dimensions of the Modern Novel: German Texts and European Contexts (Princeton,

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NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 68–­98, here 73—­because I regard them from a purely compositional point of view. 84. Letter of February 25, 1916, in Briefe an Paul Amann, 40. 85. I cite the novel in my own translation from vol. 3 of Gesammelte Werke. 86. The essay first appeared in the journal Der Neue Merkur 5 (1922); Gesammelte Werke, 12:604–­24, here 621. chapter 2

1. Edith Wharton, Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (New York: Scribner’s, 1915), 25. 2. Letter of December 9, 1917, in Kurt Wilhelm, Richard Strauss: An Intimate Portrait, trans. Mary Whittall (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), 149. 3. On the scandal see Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-­Garde and the First World War, 1914–­1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 115–­26. 4. Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 160. 5. Quoted by Wilhelm, Richard Strauss, 120–­21. 6. Reproduced by Wilhelm, Richard Strauss, 121. 7. Hermann Danuser, “Primordial and Present: The Appropriation of Myth in Music,” in Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Mu­ sic, 1914–­1935. ed. Gottfried Boehm, UIrich Mosch, Katharina Schmidt (London: Merrell Holberton, 1996), 298–­314, here 302. 8. Hofmannsthal used the myth as a vehicle for his theory of spiritual renewal through what he called “allomatic” transformation—­that is, the reciprocal transformation of Ariadne and Bacchus from their self-­centered loneliness and alienation to a new sense of social self-­ sacrifice. Theodore Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 9–­15. 9. Hans-­ Joachim Hinrichsen, “  ‘ Vernichtendes’ und ‘vernichtetes’ Gefühl: Antike Heroinen im Musiktheater der Moderne,” in Urgeschichten der Moderne: Die Antike im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Bernd Seidensticker and Martin Vöhler (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 197–­216, here 208. 10. Darius Milhaud, My Happy Life, trans. Donald Evans, George Hall, and Christopher Palmer (London: Marion Boyars, 1995), 50.

206

Notes to Chapter 2

11. “Note pour servir de préface à cette traduction,” in Paul Claudel, Théâtre, ed. Jacques Madaule, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 1:1158–­65, here 1160. The text of the translation is printed on pp. 913–­45. 12. “Note,” 1158. 13. Letter of 1913 to Milhaud, cited by Christian Wolff, “Crossings of Experimental Music and Greek Tragedy,” in Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage, ed. Peter Brown and Suzana Ograjenšek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 285–­304, esp. 286–­89, here 286. 14. Wolff, “Experimental Music,” 288 n.5. 15. Hinrichsen, “Antike Heroinen,” 208. Milhaud also wrote a “minute opera,” L’abandon d’Ariane, which compresses the entire action of the Ariadne myth into seven minutes. On his half-­hour-­long operatic trilogy—­ L’enlèvement de l’Europe, L’abandon d’Ariane, and La délivrance de Thesée (1927)—­see Hinrichsen, “Antike Heroinen,” 209–­12. 16. I base my acquaintance with the music on the recording by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic (Columbia Re­ cords, 1962). 17. While in Brazil Milhaud began composing the third part of the trilogy: this time a full-­length opera, Les Euménides, which he completed in 1922. 18. David Nice, Prokofiev: From Russia to the West, 1891–­1935 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 84. 19. I cite the autobiography (written mainly from 1937–­41) as translated in Sergej Prokofjew, Dokumente, Briefe, Erinnerungen, trans. Felix Loesch (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1961), 18–­181, here 131. 20. Quoted by Malcolm Hamrick Brown, “The Symphonies of Sergei Prokofiev” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 1967), 35 n.2. 21. Brown, “Symphonies of Prokofiev,” 13–­64, here 25–­26, provides a thorough analysis of the work, exposing both its use of classical devices and its neglect of basic classical principles. 22. Sergey Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–­1923: Behind the Mask, trans. Anthony Phillips (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 196. To be fair, he goes on to say that “my true friends will see that the style of my symphony is precisely Mozartian classicism.” 23. See Eric Salzmann, Twentieth-­Century Music: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1974), 75.

Notes to Chapter 2 207

24. Leonard B. Meyer, Music, the Art, and Ideas: Patterns and Pre­ dictions in Twentieth-­Century Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 191 n.27. 25. Der Zauberberg, in Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1960), 3:469. 26. André Lhote, “Exposition Braque,” Nouvelle Revue Française 69 ( June 1919): 153–­57, here 153. See Nathalie Reymond, “Le Rappel à l’ordre d’André Lhote,” in Le retour à l’ordre dans les arts plastiques et l’architecture, 1919–­1925 (Paris: Université de Sainte-­Etienne, 1975), 209–­24. 27. In the outline for the second lecture, “The Reaction against Romanticism,” as quoted in Kenneth Asher, T. S. Eliot and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 38. 28. Jacques Vernay, “La Triennale, exposition d’art français,” Les Arts 154 (April 1916), 25–­26, cited by Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-­Garde and the First World War, 1914–­1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 72. 29. Paul Dermée, “Quand le Symbolisme fut mort . . . ,” Nord-­Sud (March 1917): 2–­4, here 3. 30. Paul Dermée, “Un prochain âge classique,” Nord-­Sud ( January 1918): 3–­4. 31. Rudolf Pannwitz, Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur (Nuremberg: H. Carl, 1947), 180. 32. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich: Beck, 1963), x. 33. “A Disillusioned Romantic” (by “S.”), Athenaeum, October 17, 1919, 1034. 34. Ch. E. Jeanneret Gris and A. Ozenfant, Après le cubisme, ed. Carlo Olmo (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1975), 11. 35. Valéry’s essay was first published in English, in two installments in the London journal Athenaeum (April 11, 1919, 182–­84, and May 2, 1919, 279–­80), from which I quote (here 183). 36. Nouvelle Revue Française: Revue mensuelle de littérature et de critique 13/1 (1919): 1–­12, here 2. 37. André Lhote, “Première visite au Louvre,” Nouvelle Revue Française 6 (September 1, 1919): 523–­32. 38. “Prologo in tre parti,” in La Ronda, 1919–­1923: Antologia, ed. Giuseppe Cassieri (Naples: Liguori, 2001), 17–­19.

208

Notes to Chapter 2

39. Gino Severini, Du cubisme au classicisme: Esthétique du compas et du nombre (Paris: Povolozky, 1921), 13. 40. “Noi Metafisici,” Cronache d’attualità, February 15, 1919, in Gior­ gio de Chirico, Scritti, ed. Andrea Cortilessa (Milan: Classici Bompiani, 2008), 269–­76. 41. “Il ritorno al mestiere,” Valori Plastici 1 (November–­December 1919): 18–­19, rpt. Scritti, 277–­85, here 285. 42. “Classicismo pittorico,” in Scritti, 308–­13, here 308. 43. “Open Letter to Hans Pfitzner” ( June 1917), in Ferruccio Busoni, The Essence of  Music and Other Papers, trans. Rosamund Ley (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), 17–­19, here 18. 44. “Young Classicism” (February 1920), in Busoni, Essence, 19–­23, here 20–­21. 45. “Réponse à une enquête de La Renaissance sur le classicisme,” rpt. in Gide, Incidences (Paris: NRF, 1924), 219. 46. Gide, Incidences, 39–­45. 47. See Edoardo Costadura, D’un classicisme à l’autre: France-­Italie, 1919–­1939 (Saint-­Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1999), 12, 31–­35. 48. Cocteau, “D’un ordre considéré comme une anarchie,” in Le rappel à l’ordre (Paris: Stock, 1948), 234–­60. 49. Costadura, D’un classicisme à l’autre, 275–­76, who perhaps states the case too extremely, in contrast to Benedetto Croce (see below). 50. On Eliot’s classicism and his sources see Jeroen Vanheste, Guardians of the Humanist Legacy: The Classicism of  T. S. Eliot’s Criterion Networks and Its Relevance to our Postmodern World (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 43–­46 and passim. 51. New Criterion 4 ( January 1926): 1–­6, here 2. 52. “A Commentary,” Monthly Criterion 5 ( June 1927): 283–­85. 53. “Modern Education and the Classics,” in T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 507–­16, here 513. 54. Barbara Stiewe, Der “Dritte Humanismus”: Aspekte deutscher Griechenrezeption vom George-­Kreis bis zum Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 4. 55. Stiewe, Der “Dritte Humanismus,” 307. 56. “Vermächtnis der Antike,” in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Prosa, ed. Herbert Steiner, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1950–­55), 4:313–­18, here 313.

Notes to Chapter 2 209

57. Prosa, 4:390–­413, here 412. 58. “Restoration of the Reason,” trans. William Stewart, in Monthly Criterion 6 (November 1927): 389–­97, here 389–­90. 59. “Aesthetics,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed. (London 1929–­ 39). The relevant passage, “Classical and Romantic,” occurs in 1:268– 69. I cite the English translation. In the Italian edition, Aesthetica in nuce (1946; Bari: Laterza, 1985), the passage appears with no changes on pp. 47–­51. 60. Theodore Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 12–­17. 61. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 14th ed. (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1932), 469–­70. 62. See Luciano Canfora, Ideologie del classicismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), esp. 133–­59 (“Cultura classica e nazismo”). 63. Ugo Piacentini, “Über die Rolle des Lateinunterrichtes und der römischen Geschichte im faschistischen Italien,” Das Altertum 10 (1964): 117–­26. See also Canfora, Ideologie del classicismo, 76–­103 (“Cul­ tura classica e fascismo in Italia”). 64. The following paragraphs essentially recapitulate the more exhaustive treatment in Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns, 30–­56. 65. Walter Wili, Vergil (Munich: Beck, 1930), 134–­35. 66. Robert Brasillach, Présence de Virgile (1931; rpt. Paris: Plon, 1960), 242. 67. Theodor Haecker, Vergil: Vater des Abendlands (Leipzig: Hegner, 1931), 20. 68. Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns, 67–­74, 80–­82, 110–­19. 69. W. H. Jackson Knight, Roman Virgil, 2nd ed. (London: Faber, 1944), viii. 70. Theodore Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns (Ithaca, NY: Cor­ nell University Press, 2005). 71. Letter of July 16, 1922 to Harriet Monrose, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–­1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 179. 72. Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns, 55–­66. 73. For these and other examples see Hinrichsen, “Antike Heroinen im Musiktheater der Moderne” (as in note 9), 197–­216. 74. Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman In­ fluences on Western Literature (1949; New York: Oxford University Press/ Galaxy, 1957), 503, 518.

210

Notes to Chapters 2–3

75. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 175–­ 78, here 177. 76. Peter Bürger, The Decline of Modernism, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 36. 77. Hermann Danuser, “Einleitung,” in Die klassizistische Moderne in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hermann Danuser (Winterthur: Amadeus, 1997), 11–­26, here 18. 78. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1948; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 117.

chapter 3

1. Leonard B. Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Pre­ dictions in Twentieth-­Century Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 207. 2. Harry Levin, “What Was Modernism?” in his Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 276. 3. Gregory Wolfe, “Beauty Will Save the World,” Intercollegiate Review 27, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 27–­31, here 30. 4. Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi (New York: BasicBooks, 1993), 137–­264. 5. Louis Menand, “A Critic at Large: Practical Cat—­How Eliot Became Eliot,” New Yorker, September 19, 2011, 76–­83, here 78 and 80. I believe that Wolfe (“Beauty Will Save the World,” 29) is mistaken in comparing The Waste Land, a postwar work, to the prewar masterpieces of Picasso and Stravinsky as “a Cubist poem” (29). Fragmentation in Eliot, as we shall see, has a wholly different function: in the prewar works fragmentation was opposed to the order and stability of the existing society, while in Eliot’s poem it reflects the disintegrated reality of the postwar world. 6. Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). 7. Reprinted in Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 578–­79.

Notes to Chapter 3 211

8. Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 112. 9. New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Michael Randel (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986), 535. 10. Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-­ Garde and the First World War, 1914–­1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 271. 11. T. S. Eliot, in his preface to For Lancelot Andrews: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928), ix–­x, here ix. 12. “A Conversation with Béla Bartók,” by M. Ö., in Kassai Napló (April 23, 1926), trans. David E. Schneider and Klára Mórecz, in Bartók and His World, ed. Peter Laki (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 235–­39, here 237. 13. Theodore Ziolkowski, Scandal on Stage: European Theater as Moral Trial (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 73–­84. 14. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), xiv. 15. Thomas Forrest Kelly, First Nights: Five Musical Premieres (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 258. 16. Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (1903–­1934), [trans. not identified] (London: Marion Boyars, 1975), 174–­75. 17. For knowledgeable discussions of all important aspects of the ballet see the various contributions to Petrushka: Sources and Contexts, ed. Andrew Wachtel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). 18. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 81. Stravinsky is eager to defend himself against the “accusations of sacrilege” leveled against him by jealous musicologists guarding the “intangibility of relics.” 19. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 128. 20. The same has reasonably been claimed for Petrushka, although it is perhaps going too far to assert (along with several of the contributors to Petrushka: Sources and Contexts) that a ballet without singing constitutes a Russian Gesamtkunstwerk (e.g., Wachtel’s introductory “Petrushka in the Context of Russian Modernist Culture,” 1–­10, here 8–­10). 21. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 85.

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22. Hermann Danuser, Die Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts (= Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, 7) (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1984), 154. See also Ulrich Mosch, “Kontinuität und Bruch. Zur ‘Modernität’ von Strawinskys und Casellas Werken der zwanziger Jahre,” in Die klassizistische Moderne in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hermann Danuser (Winterthur: Amadeus, 1997), 93–­101. 23. Stravinsky, Expositions, 128–­29. 24. Cited in Eric Walter White’s introduction to Autobiography, vii. 25. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 70. 26. See Zara Martirosova Torlone, Russia and the Classics: Poetry’s Foreign Muse (London: Duckworth, 2009). 27. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues (London: Faber Music, 1982), 27 n2. 28. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 53–­54. 29. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 99. 30. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 100. 31. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 174. 32. Stravinsky, Dialogues, 107. 33. Arnold Schönberg, Drei Satiren, für gemischten Chor (Vienna: Universal-­Edition, [1926]), 5. 34. Eric Salzmann, Twentieth-­Century Music: An Introduction (En­ glewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1974), 115; Danuser, Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, 152–­53; Bernstein, Unanswered Question, 378. 35. Leonid Gakkel, “The Hypnotic Quality of Les Noces,” program notes to the recording of Les Noces/Oedipus Rex by the orchestra and chorus of the Mariinsky Theater, 2010 (Classic Sound). 36. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 103. 37. Stravinsky, “Pushkin: Poetry and Music” (1940), in White, Stravinsky, 588–­91, here 589. 38. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 97. 39. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 98. 40. White, Stravinsky, 300–­307, here 302. 41. Aaron Copland, The New Music, 1900–­1960, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1968), 68. 42. Stravinsky, “Some Ideas about My Octuor,” Arts, January 1924, rpt. in Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 574–­ 77, here 74.

Notes to Chapter 3 213

43. Joseph Straus, “Sonata Form in Stravinsky,” in Stravinsky Retro­ spectives, ed. Ethan Haimo and Paul Johnson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987, 141–­61, here 161. Both Straus (155–­60) and, in the same volume (36–­54) Ethan Haimo, “Problems of Hierarchy in Stravinsky’s Octet,” provide elaborate musicological analyses of the first-­movement sinfonia. 44. Copland, The New Music, 72. 45. Straus, “Sonata Form in Stravinsky,” 161. 46. Stravinsky, Dialogues, 21–­32, here 21. 47. White, Stravinsky, 327, has identified this work as Saint François d’Assise: Sa vie et son œuvre (Paris, 1912), the French translation of Den hellige Frans af Assisi (1907) by Johannes Joergensen (1866–­1956), a onetime anarchist and atheist who, following a trip to Italy and an epiphany at Assisi, converted to Catholicism and undertook his biography, which was based on all available sources. 48. The idea was by not original with Joergensen, having been advanced earlier by the German Romantic myth-­scholar Joseph von Görres in Der Heilige Franziskus von Assisi: Ein Troubadour (1826). 49. Stravinsky, Expositions, 55. 50. Paul Griffiths, Stravinsky (London: Dent, 1992), 88. 51. For an exhaustive discussion of their collaboration see Stephen Walsh, “The Action Drama and the Still Life: Enescu, Stravinsky, and Oedipus,” in Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage, ed. Peter Brown and Suzana Ograjensek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 305–­19. 52. Stravinsky, Expositions, 18. 53. Danuser, Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, 158. 54. Stravinsky, Dialogues, 23. In the following I follow Stravinsky’s own description. 55. On the broad Handel-­reception of the 1920s see Volker Scherliess, “ ‘ Torniamo all’antico e sarà un progresso’—­Creative Longing in Mu­ sic,” in Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music, 1914–­1935, ed. Gottfried Boehm, Ulrich Mosch, and Katharina Schmidt, exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel, April 27–­August 11, 1996 (London: Merrell Holberton, 1996), 39–­62, here 49–­54. 56. Arnold Schoenberg, “Stravinsky’s Oedipus” (1928), in Style and Idea: Selected Writings, trans. Leo Black, ed. Leonard Stein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 482.

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57. Theodor W. Adorno, Musikalische Schriften VI (= Gesammelte Schriften 19) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 264–­66, here 265. On Adorno’s criticism of Stravinsky and his rejection of neoclassicism see Peter Bürger, The Decline of Modernism, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 34–­37. 58. Stravinsky, Dialogues, 30. 59. Bernstein, Unanswered Question, 391–­418. 60. “Avertissement,” Dominant, December 1927, in White, Stravin­ sky, 577–­78. 61. Stravinsky, Dialogues, 32–­36, here 32. 62. Stravinsky, Dialogues, 142. 63. Stravinsky, Dialogues, 34. 64. Stravinsky, Dialogues, 143. 65. Arnold Whittall, Music since the First World War (London: Dent, 1977), 53. 66. Stravinsky, “Perséphone” (1934), in White, Stravinsky, 579–­80. 67. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 161–­64, here 161. 68. Stravinsky, Dialogues, 45. 69. Stravinsky, Dialogues, 163. 70. The original titles of the sections were dropped after the premiere performance; I cite them according to White, Stravinsky, 359–­66, here 362. 71. Stravinsky, Dialogues, 45. 72. Stravinsky, Dialogues, 45. 73. Stravinsky, Dialogues, 46. 74. See in this connection White, Stravinsky, esp. 365. 75. Bernstein, Unanswered Question, 387. 76. Griffiths, Stravinsky, 96. 77. Bernstein, Unanswered Question, 385. 78. Bernstein, Unanswered Question, 55. 79. Stravinsky, Dialogues, 44. 80. Peter Plagens, “Which Is the Most Influential Work of Art of the Last 100 Years?” Newsweek, July 2, 2007, 68. 81. Wilfried Wiegand, Pablo Picasso (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973), 63. 82. For biographical information I have relied principally on John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–­1932 (New York: Knopf, 2007), here 104.

Notes to Chapter 3 215

83. Quoted by Richardson, Life of Picasso, 66. 84. Francis Picabia, “Le Salon des Indépendants,” La Vie Moderne, February 11, 1923, 1, rpt. in Francis Picabia, Écrits critiques, ed. Carole Boulbès (Paris: Mémoire du livre, 2005), 162–­64, here 163. 85. John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 129–­31, 96–­97. 86. Richardson, Life of Picasso, 13. 87. Daniel-­Henry Kahnweiler, My Galleries and My Painters, trans. Helen Weaver (1961; Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2003), 54. Kahn­ weiler assumes that Picasso was contrasting these drawings not with his cubistic works but with earlier naturalistic ones. Michel, Peintres et sculpteurs que j’ai connus 88. Michel Georges-­ (New York: Brentano’s, 1942), 13. Richardson, Life of Picasso, 168, reports that, years later, Picasso complained: “As if Ingres were the only artist I ever looked at in the Louvre.” See in this connection especially Susan Grace Galassi, Picasso’s Variations on the Masters: Confrontations with the Past (New York: Abrams, 1996), which deals with Picasso’s variations on such painters as Grünewald, Velázquez, and Delacroix; it does not consider his variations on ancient models. 89. Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-­ Garde and the First World War, 1914–­1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 271. Silver discusses (245–­79) the widespread influence of Ingres during this period, signaled by the 1921 exhibition of his works. Silver recapitulates his discussion of Picasso in “A More Durable Self,” in Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–­1936, catalog for the exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, October 1, 2010–­January 9, 2011 (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2010), 15–­51. 90. Ulrich Weisner, “Picassos klassizistische Periode,” in Picassos Klas­ sizismus: Werke von 1914–­1934, ed. Ulrich Weisner (Bielefeld: Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 1988), 165–­92. See also Phoebe Pool, “Picasso’s Neo-­Classicism: Second Period, 1917–­25,” Apollo 85, no. 61 (March 1967): 198–­207. 91. Georges-­Michel, Peintres et sculpteurs, 26. 92. Pablo Picasso, “Picasso Speaks,” in Alfred H. Barr Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of  His Art (New York: Museum of  Modern Art, 1946), 270–­71. 93. Elizabeth Cowling, “Introduction,” in On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910–­1930 (London: Tate Gallery, 1990), 11–­30, here 11.

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94. Silver, Esprit de Corps, 315–­19. 95. On Picasso’s proliferation of styles see Gottfried Boehm, “An Alternative Modern,” in Canto d’Amore, 15–­38, here 17–­19. 96. Richardson, Life of Picasso, 28–­29. 97. Pool, “Picasso’s Neo-­Classicism,” 199, 202–­3. 98. Richardson, Life of Picasso, 23. 99. Jean Cocteau, “Picasso,” in Le rappel à l’ordre (1926; Paris: Stock, 1948), 271–­96, here 293. 100. Cowling, “Introduction,” 14. See also in this connection Martin Green and John Swan, The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell’Arte and the Modern Imagination (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 190–­91 and 212–­15. 101. Richardson, Life of Picasso, 381. 102. See Elizabeth Cowling, “Picassos Klassizismus,” in Picassos Klas­ sizismus, 33–­42. 103. The illustrations have been frequently reproduced. I refer here to those in the edition: Ovid, Metamorphosen, trans. Johann Heinrich Voß (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1990). 104. Lisa Carol Florman, Myth and Metamorphosis: Picasso’s Classical Prints of the 1930s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 15–­69. 105. Florman, Myth and Metamorphosis, 43. 106. See Gottfried Boehm, “Die Neuerfindung der Mythen: Verfahren des bildnerischen Klassizismus in den zwanziger Jahren,” in Die klassizistische Moderne in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hermann Danuser (Winterthur: Amadeus, 1997), 261–­73. 107. Theodore Ziolkowski, Minos and the Moderns: Cretan Myth in Twentieth-­Century Literature and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 108. Here I recapitulate essentially the presentation in Minos and the Moderns, 74–­80. 109. Many of these drawings are reproduced in Florman, Myth and Metamorphosis, 140–­95. 110. Silver, Esprit de Corps, 252–­53. 111. Richardson, Life of Picasso, 262. 112. Cowling, “Introduction,” 12. 113. Berger, Success and Failure, 96–­87; Richardson, Life of  Picasso, 227. 114. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927; Boston: Beacon, 1957), 64.

Notes to Chapter 3 217

115. Gertrude Stein, Picasso (New York: Scribner, 1939), 38. 116. Cowling, On Classic Ground, 216. 117. Richardson, Life of Picasso, 157. 118. Richardson, Life of Picasso, 193. 119. Silver, Esprit de Corps, 297–­98. 120. See Danièle Giraudy, “Pablo Picasso: The Pipes of Pan,” in Canto d’Amore, 268–­7 8, where many of the preliminary designs are reproduced. 121. Richardson, Life of Picasso, 198. 122. Nancy D. Hargrave, “T. S. Eliot and the Dance,” Journal of Modern Literature 21 (Summer 1997): 61–­88, here 75. I have been unable to identify the source for this statement. 123. Richardson, Life of Picasso, 131, mentions a party that Diaghilev arranged for the stars of the 1919 London premiere of the ballet Tricorne, at which both Picasso and Eliot were present, but he does not indicate that they actually met. 124. T. S. Eliot, “London Letter,” Dial, October 1921, 452–­55. 125. T. S. Eliot, preface in For Lancelot Andrews: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928), ix–­x, here ix. 126. The remark was made in support of the preservation of Nayland Rock shelter overlooking the sands of Margate in Kent, where Eliot wrote much of his poem. Vanessa Thorpe, “Margate’s Shrine to Eliot’s Muse,” Observer, July 11, 2009 (www.guardian.co.uk, accessed 11 July 2009). 127. Edmund Wilson, “The Poetry of Drouth,” Dial, December 1922, 611–­16, rpt. in The Waste Land, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael North (New York: Norton, 2001), 140–­45. 128. A great deal has been written on Eliot and Virgil. See Gareth Reeves, T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet (London: Macmillan, 1989); and Theodore Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 119–­29. 129. Reeves, Virgilian Poet, 11–­18. 130. Green and Swan, The Triumph of Pierrot, 245–­48. 131. Eliot, “What Is a Classic?” in On Poetry and Poetics (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1957), 52–­74, here 63. 132. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Harvest, 1971), 47.

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Notes to Chapter 3

133. Reeves, Virgilian Poet, 28–­58. 134. Several critics have pointed to Eliot’s tendency to measure the present by the standards of the past: R. P. Blackmur, Form and Value in Modern Poetry (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), 143; and Dennis Donaghue, “The Word within a Word,” in The Waste Land, Norton Critical Edition, 216–­30, here 221. 135. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975), 175–­78, here 177. 136. “What Is a Classic?” 68. 137. “Virgil and the Christian World,” in On Poetry and Poets, 121–­31, here 127. 138. I take this to be consistent with Cleanth Brooks’ central thesis, that Eliot works “in terms of surface parallelisms which in reality make ironical contrasts.” Cleanth Brooks, “The Waste Land: An Analysis,” Southern Review 3 (1937): 106–­36, rpt. in The Waste Land, Norton Critical Edition, 185–­210, here 207. 139. “T. S. Eliot” (1927), in Ernst Robert Curtius, Essays on European Literature, trans. Michael Kowal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 355–­7 1, here 359–­60. 140. Reeves, Virgilian Poet, 60–­65. The image is often attributed to Dante, but in Dante it is also derivative from Virgil. 141. See, as representative, George Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-­by-­Poem Analysis, 2nd ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Noonday, 1966), 154–­62. 142. Edmund Wilson, in a review symptomatically entitled “Stra­ vinsky and Others,” New Republic 46 (March 10, 1926): 73–­74, rpt. in T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ed. Michael Grant, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 1:239–­40. 143. “Virgil and the Christian World,” 125. See Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns, 124–­29. 144. R. G. Tanner, “The Dramas of T. S. Eliot and Their Greek Models,” Greece and Rome 17 (1970): 123–­34. 145. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 175–­7 8. 146. Salzmann, Twentieth-­Century Music, 47. 147. W. Bronzwaer, “Igor Stravinsky and T. S. Eliot: A Comparison of their Modernist Poetics,” Comparative Criticism 4 (1982): 169–­91, here 178. 148. Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas, 104–­33.

Notes to Chapter 4 219 chapter 4

1. See Hellmuth Flashar, Inszenierung der Antike: Das griechische Drama auf der Bühne von der frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart, 2nd ed. (Munich: Beck, 2009), esp. 80–­107; and Hermann Danuser, “Primordial and Present: The Appropriation of Myth in Music,” in Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music, 1914–­1935, ed. Gottfried Boehm, Ulrich Mosch, Katharina Schmidt (London: Merrell Holberton, 1996), 298–­314. 2. Theodore Ziolkowski, Clio, the Romantic Muse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 1–­11. 3. Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (1941), rev. ed. (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1960), 208; see also 243. 4. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975), 175–­78, here 176. 5. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer (London: Jonathan Cape, 1944), 65–­66. 6. Levin, James Joyce, 19. 7. Valéry Larbaud, “James Joyce,” Nouvelle Revue Française 18 (April 1922): 385–­405, rpt. (in translation) in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robert H. Deming, 2 vols. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 1:252–­62. 8. Ezra Pound, “James Joyce et Pécuchet,” Mercure de France 156 ( June 1922) : 307–­20, rpt. Critical Heritage, 1:263–­67. 9. Selected Prose, 177. 10. Mary Colum, “The Confessions of  James Joyce,” Freeman 5, no. 123 ( July 19, 1922): 450–­52, rpt. Critical Heritage, 1:231–­34, here 233–­34. 11. Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (New York: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1972), 186. In this appendix (twelve unnumbered pages following 186–­87) Ellmann reproduces that early schema. 12. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study (1930; New York: Vintage, 1955). 13. Arno Esch, “James Joyce und Homer: Zur Frage der Odyssee-­ Korrespondenzen im Ulysses,” in Lebende Antike: Symposion für Rudolf Sühnel, ed. Horst Meller and Hans-­Joachim Zimmermann (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1967), 423–­32. 14. Theodore Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 33–­36. While Ovid is more prominent in Joyce’s

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earlier work, Aniela Freedman, “The Metamorphoses of Ulysses,” Joyce Studies Annual 2009, 67–­88, has made a persuasive case for echoes of his Metamorphoses in Ulysses. 15. Reported by Edmund Wilson in his review, New Republic 31 ( July 5, 1922): 164–­66, rpt. Critical Heritage, 227–­31. 16. Ivan Goll, “Der Homer unserer Zeit,” Die literarische Welt ( June 17, 1927), 396–­400, rpt. Critical Heritage, 368–­69. 17. Mary Colum, “The Confession of James Joyce,” Critical Heritage, 234. 18. Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses, 189. 19. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). 20. A. Walton Litz, The Art of  James Joyce: Method and Design in “Ulys­ sses” and “Finnegans Wake” (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 39. 21. Levin, James Joyce, 129. 22. See the example reproduced by Litz, Art of James Joyce, 25. 23. Ellmann, James Joyce, 627. 24. Max Halpern, “Neither Fish nor Fowl: Joyce as Picasso,” in New Alliances in Joyce Studies, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Newark University of Delaware Press, 1988), 93–­101, sees only the influence of Picasso’s cubism on Ulysses and not the artist’s search for order during his classical phase. 25. See John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–­1932 (New York: Knopf, 2007), 414 and passim. 26. Quoted in Frederick Brown, An Impersonation of Angels: A Biography of Jean Cocteau (New York: Viking, 1968), 257. 27. Prefatory comments to Antigone: Tragédie d’aprés Sophocle, in Jean Cocteau, Théâtre complet, ed. Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 303. 28. “Antigone Place de la Concorde,” in Théâtre complet, 325. 29. Cocteau’s note “En marge d’Antigone,’ in Théâtre complet, 327. 30. Brown, Impersonation of Angels, 258. 31. Jean Cocteau, Le rappel à l’ordre (Paris: Stock, 1948), 289. 32. Cited by Richardson, Life of Picasso, 220. 33. “En marge d’Antigone,” 328. 34. Theodore Ziolkowski, The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 144–­62, esp. 152–­56.

Notes to Chapter 4 221

35. André Gide, journal entry for January 16, 1923, in Jean Cocteau lettres à André Gide, ed. Jean-­Jacques Kihm (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1970), 134 n.53. 36. “The Young Cocteau” (1927), in Ernst Robert Curtius, Essays on European Literature, trans. Michael Kowal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 446–­55, here 448–­49. 37. For the following see Theodore Ziolkowski, Mythologisierte Gegenwart: Deutsches Erleben seit 1933 in antikem Gewand (Munich: Fink, 2008), 192–­237. 38. I translate from the text in Hans Henny Jahnn, Dramen I, ed. Ulrich Bitz (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1988), 763–­850. 39. In the magazine Die Szene, October/November 1929, in Dramen I, 956. 40. In the radio talk “Die Sagen um Medea und ihr Leben” (1927), in Dramen I, 939. 41. For the above see Fiona Macintosh, “The Performer in Perfor­ mance,” in Medea in Performance, 1500–­2000, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, and Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), 1–­31. 42. In a letter of March 3, 1949, Dramen I, 1158. 43. From the title (“Barbarisierung und Archaisierung”) of the Jahnn chapter in Konrad Kenkel, Medea-­Dramen: Entmythisierung und Remythisierung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1979), 83–­105. 44. Jahnn, “Sagen um Medea und ihr Leben,” Dramen I, 939. 45. In the program notes for the premiere, Dramen I, 901. 46. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Lit­ erature of 1870 to 1930 (1931; New York: Scribner’s, 1959), 1. 47. E. R. Curtius, Essays on European Literature, trans. Michael Kowal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 358. 48. Ellmann, James Joyce, 598–­99, 715. 49. Curtius, Essays on European Literature, 207 (in the essay on “Balzac”). 50. See Theodore Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 68–­74. 51. Theodore Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns Ithaca, NY: Cornell Unviersity Press, 2005, 66–­67. 52. Paul Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1957–­61), 6:569. 53. Paul Valéry, Cahiers, ed. Judith Robinson, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 2:1099, 1102.

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Notes to Chapters 4–5

54. “Recollection,” in Paul Valéry, Poems, trans. David Paul, Bollingen Series XLV.1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), xv–­xvii, here xv. 55. “Au suject du Cimetière Marin,” in Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1957–­60), 1:1497. 56. Theodore Ziolkowski, Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 67–77. 57. Valéry, Oeuvres, 1:1412–­15. 58. Reproduced in Claude Launay, Paul Valéry (Paris: La Manufac­ ture, 1990), following page 160. 59. “A View of Descartes” (1941), in Paul Valéry, Masters and Friends, trans. Martin Turnell, Bollingen Series XLV/9 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 36–­68, here 49. 60. Joseph Frank, “Introduction,” in Masters and Friends, xix. chapter 5

1. In his article “Il ritorno al mestiere,” Valori Plastici, November–­ December 1919, 18–­19, rpt. in Giorgio de Chirico, Scritti, ed. Andrea Cortilessa (Milan: Classici Bompiani, 2008), 277–­85, here 285. 2. Guillaume Apollinaire, Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902–­1918, trans. Susan Suleiman (New York: Viking, 1972), 422. 3. G. Papini, “Giorgio de Chirico,” La Vraie Italie, March 1919. I am indebted for this reference to William Rubin, “De Chirico and Mod­ ernism,” in De Chirico: Essays, ed. William Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 55–­79, here 76 n.9. 4. On the 1919 “break” see Wieland Schmied, “Pictor classicus sum? De Chirico, pittura metafisica and classicism,” in Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music, 1914–­1935, ed. Gottfried Boehm, Ulrich Mosch, and Katharina Schmidt (London: Merrell Holberton, 1996), 100–­117. 5. Rubin, “De Chirico and Modernism,” 72–­73, 79n.45. 6. “Noi Metafisici,” Cronache d’attualità, February 15, 1919, rpt. in Scritti, 269–76. 7. In a review of the 1913 Salon d’Automne, quoted by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, “De Chirico in Paris, 1911–­1915,” in De Chirico: Essays, 11–­34, here 19. 8. Memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico, trans. Margaret Crosland (New York: Da Capo, 1994), 96–­97.

Notes to Chapter 5 223

9. “Ritorno al mestiere,” 284. 10. In La Ronda, July 7, 1920, 506–­11, rpt. in Scritti, 308–­13. 11. Memoirs, 20. 12. I take the biographical information primarily from De Chirico’s Memoirs and from James Thrall Soby, Giorgio de Chirico (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955). 13. Memoirs, 231–­43, here 231. 14. See Giorgio de Chirico: München 1906–­1909, ed. Wieland Schmied and Gerd Roos (Munich: Akademie der Bildenden Künste, 1994). 15. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Salon d’Automne” (1913), in Apollinaire on Art, 333. 16. See in this connection Theodore Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 3–­9. 17. Wieland Schmied, “Die Geburt der Metaphysik aus dem Geiste Münchens,” in Giorgio de Chirico: München 1906–­1909, 29–­52. 18. Wieland Schmied, De Chirico und sein Schatten: Metaphysische und surrealistische Tendenzen in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Prestel, 1989), 22. 19. The distorted perspective has been frequently noted. See, for instance, Joan M. Lukach, “De Chirico and Italian Art Theory, 1915–­ 1920,” in De Chirico: Essays, 35–­54, here 37; and in that same volume, Rubin, “De Chirico and Modernism,” 58–­59. 20. Christopher Green, “ ‘ There Is No Antiquity’: Modern Antiquity in the Work of Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger, and Francis Picabia (1906–­36),” Modern Antiquity: Picasso, De Chirico, Léger Picabia, ed. Christopher Green and Jens M. Daehner (Los Angeles: Getty, 2011), 1–­15, here 11. 21. Schmied, “Pictor classicus sum?” 100. 22. Schmied, “Pictor classicus sum?” 113. 23. Marianne W. Martin, “On de Chirico’s Theater,” in De Chirico: Essays, 81–­100, here 92–­93; and Schmied, “Pictor classicus sum?” 112. 24. Soby, De Chirico, 162; Schmied, “Pictor classicus sum?” 112. 25. Schmied, “Pictor classicus sum?” 100, 111–­12. 26. Green, “ ‘ There Is No Antiquity,’ ” 3. His title is a quotation from Francis Picabia. 27. Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–­1936, ed. Kenneth E. Silver (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2011).

224

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28. Elena Pontiggia, “Classicità e pitagorismo in Gino Severini,” in Gino Severini, Dal cubismo al classicismo, ed. Elena Pontiggia (Milan: Abscondita, 2001), 127. 29. Severini, Du cubisme au classicisme: Esthétique du compas et du nombre (Paris: Povolozky, 1921), 16. 30. Severini, Du cubisme au classicisme, 13. 31. Severini, Du cubisme au classicisme, 27, 122. 32. “Le vrai sens du classicisme” (1923), in Gino Severini, Écrits sur l’art (Paris: Éditions Cercle d’Art, 1987), 139–­42, here 141–­42. 33. “Futurisme et cubisme” (1956), in Écrits, 323–­24, here 324. 34. In two essays of that title, “L’esthétique de la machine,” in Fer­ nand Léger, Fonctions de la peinture, ed. Jean-­Louis Ferrier (Paris: Gon­ thier, 1965), 53–­67. 35. Quoted by Katharina Schmidt, “Fernand Léger: The Monumen­ tal Figures and Mural Paintings of the 1920s,” in Canto d’Amore, 324–­27, here 324. 36. Kenneth E. Silver, “A More Durable Self,” in Chaos and Classi­ cism, 15–­51, here 29. 37. Christopher Green, “Fernand Léger: ‘Mass-­produced’ Classics, 1920–­35,” in Modern Antiquity, 92–­97, here 95. 38. Green, “Fernand Léger,” 95. See, for instance, the letters of Au­ gust 16, 1919, and September 6, 1919, in Correspondances: Fernand Léger, Léonce Rosenberg, ed. Christian Derouet (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996), 52, 56–­60. 39. Schmidt, “Fernand Léger,” 325. 40. See Silver, Esprit de Corps, 291–­90. 41. For detailed discussion of these stages see William A. Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 42. Sara Cochran, “An Alternative Classicism: Picabia with and against Picasso and De Chirico,” in Modern Classicism, 31–­34, here 32. 43. In a response to a lecture (“Francis Picabia—­Trente ans de peinture”) at a 1930 exhibition of his works; cited in Green, “ ‘ There Is No Antiquity,’ ” 13 n.1. 44. For reproductions see Sarah Wilson, Francis Picabia: Accommo­ dations of Desire: Transparencies, 1924–­1932 (New York: Kent Fine Art, 1989).

Notes to Chapters 5–6 225

45. Theodore Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 57–76, here 66. 46. “Presumably” because his titles remain problematic for Picabia scholars; see Camfield, Francis Picabia, 236–­37. 47. Statement for a 1930 exhibition, quoted by Camfield, Francis Picabia, 233–­34. 48. Cochran, “An Alternative Classicism,” 341. 49. Jens M. Daehner, “Francis Picabia: Transparent Stata and Clas­ sical Bodies, 1922–­31,” in Modern Antiquity, 107–­13, here 113. chapter 6

1. Giselher Schubert, “Zur Vorgeschichte des Neoklassizismus in Deutschland,” in Die klassizistische Moderne in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hermann Danuser (Basel: Paul Sacher Stiftung, 1997), 153-­65, here 154. I prefer “neoclassicism” to the term “Neue Sachlichkeit” (New Objectivity), which is sometimes used by musicologists. See Giselher Schubert’s entry “Hindemith, Paul” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Staley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), 11:523–­38; or Siegfried Mauser, “Expressionismus und Neue Sachlichkeit in den zwanziger Jahren,” in Hindemith-­ Interpretationen: Hindemith und die zwanziger Jahre, ed. Dominik Sackmann, Zürcher Musikstudien 6 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 11–­14. That label, more fittingly applicable to Hindemith’s later phase of Gebrauchsmusik (utilitarian music), refers more broadly to artists like Otto Dix and George Grosz or writers like Bertolt Brecht and Hans Fallada, who advocated a socially, and often socialistically, committed art and whose style can under no circumstances be designated as “classical.” In its focus on the collective it had little in common with Hindemith’s concern for art and the artist. 2. I base my biographical information primarily on Geoffrey Skelton, Paul Hindemith: The Man behind the Music (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975). 3. See the “Chronological List of Works” in Skelton, Paul Hindemith, 299–­308. 4. See Camilla Bork, Im Zeichen des Expressionismus: Kompositionen Paul Hindemiths im Kontext des Frankfurter Kulturlebens um 1920 (Mainz: Schott, 2006).

226

Notes to Chapter 6

5. See the piano reduction: Das Nusch-­Nuschi: Ein Spiel für burmanische Marionetten in einem Akt (Mainz: Schott, 1921). It is worth noting that in several of the English-­language studies the plot is wrongly recapitulated—­suggesting either that the actual seducer is punished or that the general was in fact the guilty one—­a misinterpretation that loses sight of the radical satire of the work. 6. Bork, Im Zeichen des Expressionismus, 200. 7. From an autobiographical sketch written for the second Donau­­ eschingen Festival and quoted in Ian Kemp, Hindemith, Oxford Studies of Composers 6 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 7. 8. Letter of April 2, 1925, in Selected Letters of Paul Hindemith, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 38. 9. Dominik Sackmann, “ ‘Dem korrumpierenden Einflusse der Öffentlichkeit’ ausgesetzt: Paul Hindemith und die ältere Musik,” in Hindemith und die zwanziger Jahre, 223–­53, here 227. 10. Paul Hindemith, Johann Sebastian Bach: Heritage and Obligation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952), 43. 11. Hindemith, Bach, 18. 12. Sackmann, “Hindemith und die ältere Musik,” 233. 13. Hans Egon Holthusen, Rainer Maria Rilke in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2000), 108, calls the cycle “one of Rilke’s sublime parodies of the figures of Christian salvation history,” but his understanding of parody is close to what here has been called the irony of detachment. 14. Paul Hindemith, “Introductory Remarks for the New Version (1948) of the Song Cycle” (trans. Arthur Mendel), in Paul Hindemith, Das Marienleben: Gedichte nach Rainer Maria Rilke für Sopran und Klavier (Mainz: Schott, 1948), 3–­14, here 3. 15. I refer to the 1976–­7 7 recording of the first version by Glenn Gould with Roxolana Roslak (reissued by Sony 1995). 16. For a detailed analysis of the song, see David Neumeyer, The Music of  Paul Hindemith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 145–­57. 17. Neumeyer, Music of Paul Hindemith, 157–­67. 18. For an analysis of all fifteen songs see Siglind Bruhn, Hindemiths große Vokalwerke (Waldkirch: Gorz, 2010), 47–­126. 19. Hindemith, “Introductory Remarks,” 4–­5. 20. Hindemith, “Introductory Remarks,” 5.

Notes to Chapter 6 227

21. See Neumeyer, Music of Paul Hindemith, 137–­43, for a discussion of the controversy. 22. Quoted by Michael Stegemann in his program notes to the Sony recording, 9. 23. I base my account on the 1990 recording by Riccardo Chailly with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Decca 1992). 24. Kemp, Hindemith, 11. 25. Schubert, “Hindemith, Paul,” 11:525. 26. César Searchinger, in Musical Courier, 1922, cited in Paul Hinde­ mith: Leben und Werk in Bild und Text, ed. Andres Briner, Dieter Rexroth, Giselher Schubert (Zurich: Atlantis, 1988), 71. 27. Kemp, Hindemith, 16. 28. Susanne Schaal, “Paul Hindemith: Kammermusik No. 5,” in Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music, 1914–­1935, ed. Gott­ fried Boehm, Ulrich Mosch, and Katharina Schmidt (London: Merrell Holberton, 1996), 343–­45. 29. Kemp, Hindemith, 19, 20. 30. In 1952 Hindemith also published a revised version of this opera, but I refer here to the 1926 version, which is generally regarded as superior. See the reduction for piano: Paul Hindemith, Cardillac: Oper in drei Akten (Mainz: Schott, 1926); and the 1968 recording by Joseph Keilberth with the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (Allegro 2005). The libretto is available online at www.karadar .com. 31. Neumeyer, Music of Paul Hindemith, 182. 32. I take the term from Sigrid Bruhn, Hindemiths große Bühnenwerke (Waldkirch: Gorz, 2009), 51–­57. The book goes on (43–79) to provide a musicological analysis of the entire opera. 33. I take this example from Neumeyer’s analysis of two scenes of the opera: Music of Paul Hindemith, 168–­83, here 175–76. 34. Dieter Rexroth, “Zum Stellenwert der Oper Cardillac im Schaffen Hindemiths,” Erprobungen und Erfahrungen: Zu Paul Hinde­ miths Schaffen in den Zwanziger Jahren, ed. D. Rexroth (Mainz: Schott, 1979), 56–­59, here 58. 35. Adorno can barely conceal his contempt under a wordy theoretical and analytical discussion: “Ad vocem Hindemiths: Eine Dokumen­ tation” (1962, 1968), in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 17:210–­46.

228

Notes to Chapter 6

36. Alfredo Casella, Music in My Time: Memoirs (1941), trans. Spencer Norton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), 158–­64. I take most of the biographical information from this volume. 37. Alfredo Casella, 21+26, ed. Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini, Ar­ chivio Alfredo Casella, Studi I (Venice: Olschki, 2001), V. 38. “Proemio,” in 21+26, 6–­7. 39. “Proemio,” 7. 40. “Proemio,” 2. 41. Music in My Time, 74. 42. Music in My Time, 92. 43. Music in My Time, 106. 44. Music in My Time, 137. 45. Music in My Time, 140–­41. 46. “Proemio,” 8. 47. “Problemi sonori odierni” (1923), in 21+26, 27–­39, here 39. 48. “La reazione italiana” (1925), in 21+26, 40–­42, here 41. 49. Music in My Time, 225–­26. 50. “Tendenze e stile della nuova musica italiana” (1929), in 21+26, 43–­47, here 46. 51. Music in My Time, 226. 52. Music in My Time, 232. 53. Music in My Time, 168. 54. In Music in My Time, 197 n.1, Casella lists several of Stravinsky’s works that he introduced in Italy, including later The Symphony of Psalms (in 1932) and Oedipus Rex (in 1933). 55. De Chirico’s preliminary set design and costumes are reproduced by Ulrich Mosch, “On Relations between Music and Art in the Classicist Ballets Pulcinella and La giara,” in Canto d’Amore, 222–­40, here 237–­39. 56. Mosch, “On Relations,” 236. 57. Music in My Time, 170. 58. Music in My Time, 173. 59. Music in My Time, 27, 32. 60. Music in My Time, 173. 61. Casella, “Scarlattiana,” Anbruch 11, no. 1 (1929): 26–­28. 62. Reprinted in Fiamma Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel venennio fascista (Fiesole: Discanto, 1984), 141–­43. 63. Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 235–­7 1.

Notes to Chapter 7 229 chapter 7

1. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 175–78, here 177. 2. For examples see Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–­1936, ed. Kenneth E. Silver (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2011), plates 21–­23. 3. Theodore Ziolkowski, The View from the Tower: Origins of an Antimodernist Image (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) 69–­95. 4. Leonard B. Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Pre­ dictions in Twentieth-­Century Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 98. 5. Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas, 195–­208, here 195. 6. Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas, 193. 7. Meyer, Music, the Art, and Ideas, 192.

Index Action française, 12, 15, 18 Adorno, Theodor W., opposition to neoclassicism, 9, 35, 78–­79, 174 Aeschylus, Oresteia, 38, 49 alienation, sense of among expatriates, 76, 95, 110, 149, 166, 194 “alternative modernism,” 8 Anbruch ( journal), 184 Ansermet, Ernest, 75 antiquity, turn to, 60–­67 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 36, 92, 146, 147 Apollonian and Dionysian (Nietzsche), 10, 78, 91, 97 Arnold, Matthew, 25 Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, 4 Babbitt, Irving, 25 Bach, J. S.: Brandenburg Concertos, 170; Goldberg Variations, 196; influence of, 41, 42, 53, 166–­67, 170, 182, 186, 190; Well-­Tempered Clavier, 167, 191 Baker, Josephine, 3 Balanchine, 86

Ballets Russes, 74, 103 Barnes, Djuna, 129 Bartók, Béla, 73, 183 Battleship Potemkin, 3 Bellessort, André, Virgile, 62 Benoit, Alexandre, 73 Berger, John, 92 Bergson, Henri, 17 Bernstein, Leonard, 72, 84–­85, 90 Bizet, Georges, 170 Blei, Franz, 164 Blue Angel, The, 3 Böcklin, Arnold, 148 Bonnefoy, Yves, 8, 9 “borrowings,” 195 Braque, Georges, 44, 92; Canephorae, 158–­59, 192 Brasillach, Robert, Présence de Virgile, 63–­64 Brecht, Bertolt, 83 Breton, André, 98, 134, 153 Bronzwaer, W., 120 Brooks, Cleanth, 218n138 Brown, Malcolm Hamrick, 41, 206n21

232

Index Bürger, Peter, Decline of Modernism, 67–­68, 214n57 Busoni, Ferruccio, 53 Butler, Christopher, Early Modernism, xii Butler, E. M., Tyranny of Greece over Germany, 60 Butler, Guy, Demea, 136 Cabinet of  Dr. Caligari, 3 “call to order.” See “rappel à l’ordre” Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music, 1914–­1935, xiii Cardarelli, Vincenzo, 50–­51 Casamichela, Joannes de, 61–­62 Casella, Alfredo, 175–­77; analogy to Stravinsky, 181; “Europeanism” of, 179; influence of Schoenberg, 177; turn to Italian past, 178–­79, 184–­ 85, 186; writings on music, 175–­76, 178–­79, 184 Casella, Alfredo, works of: early compositions, 176–­77; Elegia eroica, 177; La giara, 179–­81; Paganiniana, 182; Partita for piano and orchestra, 181–­82; Scarlattiana, 182–­83, 184–­85; Serenata, 183 Chanel, Coco, 133 Chaplin, Charlie, 3 “classic,” as popularly understood, 4–­5 “classical without classicism,” 36–­44, 134, 139, 154, 158, 161 classicism: aspects of, 7; association with right wing, 17, 52, 54–­55; assuming characteristics of each age, 9; as conservatism, 10; derivation of, 4; as designation of periods, 5–­6, 191, 197; effect of, 196; in music, 6–­7; in opposition to romanticism, 10–­12, 185; return

after World War I, 45, 49–­52; as struggle between order and discipline, 10; as synthesis of past and present, 9; themes of, 36–­40 classicism, prewar: defined, 25; in England, 17–­21; in France, 12–­17; in Germany, 21–­27 “classicisme méditerranéen,” 8 classicism of the twenties, 9, 189–­90; characteristics of, 120–­21, 161–­62, 190; effects of, 196; ironic detachment of, 191–­92; terms proposed for, 8, 197; turn to antiquity, 190, 194 classicus, 5 Claudel, Paul, 38–­39; Les Choéphores, 38 Cocteau, Jean, 36, 58, 95, 132, 134–­35, 197; Antigone, 132–­34, 194; Rappel à l’ordre, 45, 54, 83, 139, 193 Colum, Mary, 128, 130 commedia dell’arte, 74, 90, 96, 108, 112, 120, 190 Conrad, Joseph, 117, 118 Coolidge, Elizabeth Sprague, 175 Copeland, Aaron, 7, 80, 82 Cosmic Circle, 66 Cowling, Elizabeth, 94 Criterion ( journal), 55, 58, 78, 110, 112, 117, 119, 190 Croce, Benedetto, 12, 59–­60, 190 cubism, 92 Cullen, Countee, Medea, 136 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 58–­59, 117, 134, 139, 190 Daniélou, Jean, Abbé, 83 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 175 Danuser, Hermann, 84, 121; quoted, 68 Daudet, Léon, 14–­15, 16 Debussy, Claude, 176

Index De Chirico, Giorgio, 36, 52–­53, 148–­49, 155, 175–­76, 181; “classical without classicism,” 154; obsession with Nietzsche, 149; as pictor classicus, 52; pittura metafisica of, 146, 150; polyphony of styles, 153–­54; sense of exile, 149; turn to classicism, 147; veneration of “line,” 147–­48 De Chirico, Giorgio, works of: Ariadne paintings, 43–­44, 149–­50; Departure of the Argonauts, 152; Joys and Enigmas of a Strange Hour, 150–­51; “Noi Metafisici,” 146–­47; Orestes and Electra, 153; Roman Villa, 151–­52, 181; self-­ portraits, 153–­54; Song of Love (Canto d’Amore), 44, 153, 195 Delaunay, Robert, 92 Délibes, Leo, Coppélia, 73 Dermée, Paul, 45 Diaghilev, Sergei, 74, 77, 95 Diémer, Louis, 176 École romane, 12 Eliot, T. S., 17, 25, 29, 35, 45, 55–­56, 62, 67; classical images in, 111–­12; classicism of, 72, 110, 115–­17; compared to Picasso and Stravinsky, 71–­72, 109–­10, 118; “hard, dry lines” of, 20, 115, 195; knowledge of classics, 111; rejected term “neoclassicism,” 8, 55; Virgil in his thought and works, 111–­19 Eliot, T. S., works of: “The Hollow Men,” 117–­19; late plays, 119; “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” 114, 119, 127–­28, 191; The Waste Land, 20, 112–­15, 116, 119, 195; “What Is a Classic?” 115–­17, 131 Enescu, Georges, 176 epic theater, 83

Evans, Sir Arthur, 98 exile, sense of, 71–­72, 75, 76, 115, 149, 166, 194 Fabbri, Paolo, Virgilio, 63 Falla, Manuel de, The Three-­Cornered Hat, 180 Farnese Hercules, gigantism of, 95, 101, 104 Fauré, Gabriel, 176 Fénéon, Félix, 91 Fichte, J. G., 14, 16 Five, The, 76, 80, 90, 176 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 82–­83 Frank, Joseph, 145 French Classicism, 6, 10 Fuseli, Henry, 95 Gardner, Howard, 72 Ghéon, Henri, 13 Gide, André, 12, 53–­54, 87, 134 Gilbert, Stuart, 128, 130 Glinka, Mikhail Ivanovich, 80 Goethe, J. W., 11, 16 Goll, Ivan, 129 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 6 Gould, Glenn, 169 Green, Christopher, 154, 157, 161 Griffiths, Paul, 83 Haecker, Theodor, Virgil: Father of the West, 64 Halpern, Max, 220n24 “Harmonie,” 80 Hasenclever, Walter, 134 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 22–­23, 25–­26 Haydn, Joseph, imitated, 40, 41, 192 Heine, Heinrich, 11 Heredia, José-­Maria, 15 Hesse, Hermann, 66 heteroglossia, 93, 120 Highet, Gilbert, 67

233

234

Index Hindemith, Paul, 146, 163–­64, 165–­66, 192; devotion to Bach, 166–­67, 170; (neo)classicism of, 163, 172, 174; suppression of early works, 166; technical analogies to Picasso and Eliot, 174 Hindemith, Paul, works of: Cardillac, 171–­74; Kammermusiken I–­VII, 169–­7 1, 195; Das Marienleben, 167–­69, 195; Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, 164; Das Nusch-­ Nuschi, 164–­65, 195, 226n5; Sancta Susanna, 165 history: replaces myth in literature, 125–­26; new sense of, 126 Hitler, Adolf, 61, 193 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 74, 192; Das Fräulein von Scuderi, 171 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 22, 26, 36, 190, 205n8; collaboration with Strauss, 37; “Legacy of Antiquity,” 57; “Das Schriftum als geistiger Raum der Nation,” 57–­58 Holthusen, Hans Egon, 226n13 Honegger, Arthur, 67, 134 Hugo, Victor, 15; Hernani, 11–­12 Hulme, T. E., 17–­18, 21, 34, 35, 36, 52, 190; “Above the Dock,” 20; rejection of romanticism, 17–­21, 27; “Romanticism and Classicism,” 19–­20; “Tory Philosophy,” 18–­19 Ingres, Jean Auguste, influence of, 92–­93, 108, 147, 160, 190, 191 “Interbellum classicism,” 9 Interdisciplinarity, xi–­xiii irony, as characteristic of classicism, 120, 153, 168, 191 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 76 Jacob, Max, 92 Jaeger, Werner, 56

Jahnn, Hans Henny, 136, 197; Medea, 135–­39, 192 Jansen, Horst, 161 Jeanneret, Edouard. See Le Corbusier Jeffers, Robinson, 193 Joyce, James, and Eliot, Picasso, and Stravinsky, 127, 130, 131 Joyce, James, works of: Portrait of the Artist, 65–­66, 127, 129; Stephen Hero, 127; Ulysses, 7, 114, 119, 128–­ 31, 195 Jung, Carl Gustav, 66 Kahnweiler, Daniel-­Henry, 92 “klassische Moderne,” 8 Knight, W. F.  Jackson, Roman Vergil, 62 Kokoschka, Oskar, 164 Krˇenek, Ernst, 67, 185 La Fresnaye, Roger de, 159 Larbaud, Valéry, 127, 128 Lasserre, Pierre, 15, 17; Le Romantisme français, 16 Latinité ( journal), 61–­62, 65 latinité (Latinitas), 60, 64, 158 Le Corbusier, 46, 156 Léger, Fernand, 96, 156–­57, 192; “classical without classicism,” 158, 194; Kneeling Woman, 157, 195 Lenormand, Henri-­René, Asie, 136 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 6 Lessing, Theodor, 23 Levin, Harry, 71, 131 Lewis, Wyndam, 104 Lhote, André, 44, 50 Linati, Carlo, 128 Lion, Ferdinand, 171 Loos, Alfred, 24 Lublinski, Samuel, 21, 27, 34, 52; Ausgang der Moderne, 21–­23 Lucretius, 13

Index Mackail, John William, Virgil, 62–­63 MacNeice, Louis, 65 Magic Mountain, The, as ironic retrospective, 27–­34. See also Mann, Thomas Mahler, Gustav, 41, 177 Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 175, 185 Mandelstam, Osip, 76 Mann, Heinrich, 33 Mann, Thomas, 35: Death in Venice, 24, 28; defense of Lublinski, 23; Doktor Faustus, 34, 196; The Magic Mountain as ironic retrospective, 27–­34, 44 “Mannheim rocket,” 41, 86 Maré, Rolf de, 180 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 51 Marxism, rejection of romanti­ cism, 11 Massine, Léonide, 36, 95 Matisse, Henri, 36 Maurras, Charles, 12–­15, 25, 27, 34, 48–­49, 52, 202n41; Barbarie et poésie, 15 Medea, literary treatments of, 136 Menand, Louis, 72 Meyer, Leonard B., Music, the Arts, and Ideas, xii, xiv, 71, 121, 194–­96 Midnight in Paris, 3 Milhaud, Darius, 38–­39, 67, 206n15; Les Choéphores, 38–­39, 42 Minotaure ( journal), 98–­99 “misoneism,” 186 “modeling,” 195 Modernism, movements it comprises, xiii–­xiv, 8–­9, 121 “modernist classicism,” 8 Moréas, Jean, 12, 49 Morges (Switzerland), 74 Motion, Andrew, 110 multiplicity of styles, 121, 153–­54 Mussolini, Benito, 61–­62, 186, 193

Nazism, co-­optation of cultural trends, 11, 56–­57, 193 neoclassicism, 8; ineffective as critical term, 191; rejected by Eliot, 8 “Neue Sachlichkeit,” 225n1 New Criterion. See Criterion Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10, 78, 97. See also Apollonian and Dionysian Nouvelle Revue Française, 48–­50, 190 Offenbach, Jacques, Tales of Hoffmann, 74 O’Neill, Eugene, 193 Ortega y Gasset, José, 57 Ovid, influence of, 65–­67, 96–­97, 113, 140–­42 Owen, Wilfred, 36 Ozenfant, Amédée, 46, 96 Paderewski, Ignaz, 75 Pannwitz, Rudolf, Crisis of European Culture, 45–­46 Papini, Giovanni, 146 Parade (ballet), 36, 54, 95, 133 “paraphrase,” 195 Parnassians, 15 Parthenon: Maurras’s epiphany, 13, 25; Renan’s Prière, 14, 25; as symbol of reason, 13, 15 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 74, 80, 90, 108, 190 Picabia, Francis, 92, 155, 159, 193; The Fig Leaf, 159–­60; The Three Graces, 160, 196; transparencies, 159, 160–­61 Picasso, Pablo, 7, 29, 36, 44; clarity of line, 93, 102, 106, 194; classicism of, 72, 93; compared to Eliot and Stravinsky, 71–­72, 108–­9, 109–­11; experience of antiquity, 95–­96; gigantism of women, 103–­4, 120, 192; and Ingres, 92–­93; and Ovid,

235

236

Index Picasso, Pablo (cont.) 96–­97; simultaneity of styles, 93–­95 Picasso, Pablo, works of: Demoiselles d’Avignon, 91, 110; Large Bather, 104; Metamorphoses, 67, 97–­98; Minotaur, drawings of, 98–­100, 195; Minotauromachy, 100–­101; Pipes of Pan, 106–­8, 159; Pulcinella, 72, 96; Pygmalion group, 101–­2; Reading, 106; The Source, 105; Studies, 93–­94; Suite Vollard, 98, 100, 101; Three Bathers, 106; Three Women at the Spring, 104–­5; Two Nudes, 104; Two Women Running on the Beach, 102–­3; Woman in White, 106 Pierrot, figure of in classicism of twenties, 29, 156 Pirandello, Luigi, “La giara,” 180, 192 pittura metafisica, 43–­44, 52. See also De Chirico, Giorgio polyphony, literary, 93, 120, 153–­54 postfiguration, 126, 195 Pound, Ezra, 17, 35, 62, 66, 113, 127 Previati, Gaetano, 52 Prokofiev, Sergei, 40–­41, 197; Classical Symphony, 40–­42, 192, 195 Pross, Caroline, 204n76 pseudo-­classicism, 8 puppets, animated, 73–­74 Pushkin, Aleksander, 79–­80, 86, 90 Rainer, Arnulf, 161 Ramuz, Charles-­Ferdinand, 75 Rand, E. K., 111 “rappel à l’ordre,” 44–­45, 91, 131, 144, 146, 161, 166 Ravel, Maurice, 176 Reed, T. J., 204n83

Reeves, Gareth, 114 Reifenstahl, Leni, 193 Respighi, Ottorino, 185 Richardson, John, 96, 97, 217n123 Rihm, Wolfgang, 4–­5 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 21, 26–­27, 36, 66, 167 Rivière, Jacques, 48–­50, 53, 54 Rolland, Romain, 134 romanità (Romanitas), 60, 64, 158 romanticism, as opposed to classicism, 10–­12, 49, 185 Ronda, La ( journal), 50–­51 Rosenberg, Léonce, 157 Rottenberg, Gertrud, 166 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 19 Ruskin, John, 20 Sackville-­West, Vita, 65 Salzmann, Eric, 120 Satie, Eric, 36, 95 Scarlatti, Domenico, 74, 182 Scherliess, Volker, quoted, 7 Schlegel, Friedrich, 11 Schmied, Wieland, 150, 153 Schoenberg, Arnold, 177, 185; Pierre lunaire, 175; Three Satires, 78 Schröder, Rudolf Alexander, 65 Segantino, Giovanni, 52 Servius Tullius, 4 Settis, Salvatore, 6 Severini, Gino, 96, 155, 194; Du cubisme au classicisme, 51–­52, 155–­56; paintings of Pierrots, 156 Silver, Kenneth E., 93, 95, 106, 215n89 “simulation,” 195 Skira, Albert, 97, 98 Soffici, Ardengo, 54 Sorge, Reinhard, 36 Speer, Albert, 193 Spengler, Oswald, 34, 46, 57, 61 Spranger, Eduard, 56

Index Staël, Anne-­Louise-­Germaine, Mme de, De l’Allemagne, 11, 14 Stein, Gertrude, 3, 104, 131 Stramm, August, 165 Straus, Joseph, 82 Strauss, Richard, 36; Alpensymphonie, 41; Ariadne auf Naxos, 37–­38, 39, 42, 43–­44; Elektra, 37 Stravinsky, Igor, 29, 53, 67; “classicism” of, 72, 85, 89–­90, 90–­91, 192; compared to Eliot and Picasso, 71–­72, 108–­9, 109–­11; influenced by Tchaikovsky, 77, 80; love of order, 77–­7 8; reaction to Russian Revolution, 75–­76; simultaneity of styles, 79, 89, 194; turn away from Russian themes, 76 Stravinsky, Igor, works of: Apollo, 85–­86, 109; early works, 73; late works, 89; Mavra, 79–­80, 90; Les Noces, 79; Octet, 80–­82, 90, 175; Oedipus Rex, 82–­85, 88, 109; Perséphone, 86–­87; Pulcinella, 72, 80; Pulcinella and Petrushka compared, 73–­75; Rite of Spring, 73, 81–­82, 87, 198, 110; Suite Vollard, 98, 100; Symphony of Psalms, 81, 87–­89, 90, 106, 109 Suite Vollard. See Picasso, Pablo, works of Symbolism, 16, 45 Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilych, 73, 80, 90; Nutcracker, 73 Tcherepnin, Nikolai, 40, 41 Tertz, Abram (Andrei Sinyavsky), 8 Third Humanism, 56–­57 Tommasini, Vincenzo, Le donne di buon umore, 74, 182 Toynbee, Arnold, 61 transparencies. See Picabia, Francis

Triennale of 1916, 36, 45 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 76 “tubism,” 157 twenties, the: popular image of, 3–­4 Valéry, Paul: admiration of Descartes, 144–­45; allusions to classics in early poems, 139–­40; commitment to classics, 141; influence of Ovid, 141–­42 Valéry, Paul, works of: Les Bucoliques, 140; Charmes, 141; Le Cimetière marin, 142–­44; La Jeune Parque, 140; The Spiritual Crisis, 46–­48, 57, 139, 144, 190 Vanheste, Jeroen, 9, 201n26, 203n54 Vaugeois, Henri, 12 Vernay, Jacques, 45 Virgil, influence of, 62–­65; Aeneid, 112, 113, 114; Eclogues, 103, 160; Georgics, 119 Vollard, Ambroise, 92 Wachtel, Andrew, 211n20 Walter, Marie-­Thérèse, 99 Waste Land, The. See Eliot, T. S., works of Weimar Classicism, 7, 56 Wellek, René, xii, 68 Wharton, Edith, 35 Whittall, Arnold, 86 Wili, Walter, Vergil, 63 Wilson, Edmund, 111, 139 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 6, 97 Wolfe, Gregory, 71, 210n5 World War I, cultural effects of, 44, 48–­49, 60, 95, 111, 126, 190, 193 Yeats, William Butler, 62 Zervos, Christian, 99

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