Many happy returns
How the dawn of 1911 was followed by a year of astonishing creativity
Mark Wigglesworth 11:02am GMT 4th January 2011
Most art tells us something about the time and place in which it was created and judging by the amazing collection of musical masterpieces that composers were working on exactly a century ago, the hundredth anniversary of 1911 is well worth celebrating. But though the quantity and quality of these works is unquestionable, it is above all their variety that I think is so fascinating. What sort of time could simultaneously inspire music as thrilling as Stravinsky's Petrushka, as ambitious as Schönberg's Gurrelieder, as subtle as Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra, as nostalgic as Elgar's Second Symphony, as sensitive as Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe, as decadent as Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier, as disturbing as Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, as sensuous as Debussy's Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, as brooding as Sibelius' Fourth Symphony, or as profound as Mahler's Tenth? And that's not to mention pieces by the likes of Nielsen, Janáček, Vaughan-Williams, Berg, Scriabin, Rachmaninov, and Ives.
1911 was not only a year of musical achievement. There was plenty of ambition and adventure in other fields too. Physicist Ernest Rutherford deduced the existence of a compact atomic nucleus from scattering experiments; Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered the phenomena of superconductivity; an aircraft landed safely on a ship for the first time; and Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first person to reach the South Pole. People saw new paintings by Chagall, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Matisse, and Picasso, and read original novels such as The Secret Garden, and Ethan Frome, along with writings by HG Wells, DH Lawrence, EM Forster, GK Chesterson, Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, and Beatrix Potter.
In Europe, the mounting political pressures of the day caused an intensity that many reacted to creatively. Great artists have always sensed the mood of their time and an increasingly stressful international situation was understood by several composers as a time bomb that would not take long to implode. Of course, how they all responded to it differed dramatically. Sibelius and Mahler took a dark and truthful approach. Elgar and Strauss harked back nostalgically, mourning the loss of a more innocent way of life, whilst Schönberg, Berg, and Webern chose instead to look uncompromisingly forward. Stravinsky and Scriabin glorified in the pure opulence of musical colour, whereas Ravel and Debussy sought refuge in a more intimate musical perfection. Though Janáček and Bartók tapped into the flavours of patriotic folksong, both must have been outraged and appalled by the horrific bloodshed that extreme nationalism was about to cause.
Music mirrors the soul of the period and culture in which it is written. But masterpieces also deal with timeless truths as relevant now as when they were first composed. A hundred years on from 1911, with open-ended military campaigns, uncertain economic futures, changing climates, and profound ideological misunderstandings, one could argue that there is a similar tension around the world today. Let's hope that these less than straightforward times can produce a similar outpouring of wonderful creativity to that which flowered so extraordinarily one hundred years ago.
Comments
Thank you Mr Wigglesworth for underlining the unique richness of the post 1911 period that is part of the extraordinary paradigmatic revolution that began more or less around 1860 and runned as far as the 1970's; a period during which the human imagination was so profundly changed that we can call it, with Ian Macdonald, a genuine «Revolution in the Head»
Louis Caron, Montréal QC
Mark,
Many thanks for this very interesting post. Going through the list of pieces first premiered in any of the years immediately prior to the Great War reveals the riches available, from composers who were well established like Richard Strauss to somke of the younger compolsers yet to make their mark.
There seems to be something in the culture of societies on the verge of radcialk change that spurs new creative forces - the analogy here would be Europe on the verge olf the French Revolution. But we need to remember also that these were times of mounting discord and anxiety. 1911 was a year of a major industrial worker action, with prices rising faster than wages, and yet another of the incidents that were to lead ,not inevitably, but certainly with greater likelihood after each successive crisis, to the conflagration of 1914.