The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century - Opening

1
THE GOLDEN AGE
Strauss, Mahler, and Fin de Siecle

When Richard Strauss conducted his opera Salome on May 16, 1906, in the Austrian city of Graz, several crowned heads of European music gathered to witness the event. The premiere of Salome had taken place in Dresden five months earlier, and world had got out that Strauss had created something beyond the pale -- an ultra-dissonant biblical spectacle, based on a play by an Irish degenerate whose name was not mentioned in polite company, a work so frightful in its depiction of adolescent lust that imperial censors had banned it from the Court Opera in Vienna.

Part 1
1900-1933

I am ready, I feel free
To cleave the ether on a novel flight,
To novel spheres of pure activity.

-- GOETHE, FAUST, PART 1

THE REST IS NOISE Copyright 2007 by Alex Ross. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador, 175th Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Picadoe is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to repring the following material: Excerpt from "Art for Art's Sake" from The Cradle Will Rock. Used by permission of the Estate of Marc Blitzsen. "Battle Cry" by Milton Babbitt. Used by permission of the author. Excerpt from letter of September 1934 to Israel Citkowitz, by Aaron Copland. Used by permission of the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc.

Designed by Michelle McMillan

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

For my parents
and
Jonathan

It seems to me ... that despite the logical, moral rigor music may appear to display, it belongs to a world of spirits, for whose absolute reliabilist in matters of human reason and dignity I would not exactly want to put my hand in the fire. That I am nevertheless devoted to it with all my heart is one of those contradictions which, whether a cause for joy or regret, are inseparable from human nature.
--Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

HAMLET: ... -- the rest is silence.
HORATIO: Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
[March within]
Why does the drum come hither?