Dateline: 06/29/98
Shocking allegations about an
influential 20th century composer swept across the Internet last month,
resulting in curiously little Sturm und Drang
in the classical music world.
According to a widely circulated story attributed to the Associated Press,
Austrian composer Anton Webern was a Nazi spy who
helped steal atom bomb secrets from the
Hardly trivial charges... but where is the public outcry? Why have there
been no harsh condemnations, no demands for the purge of Webern's
works from the classical canon?
Apparently, no one believes a word of it.
Bryan Johanson, a composer and music professor at
Many of his colleagues, Johanson noted, have
received the same story by email. The consensus is that it's a hoax.
Here's the controversial text in question:
|
Composer Webern
was Double Agent for Nazis By Heinrich Kincaid (c) The Associated Press BERLIN, GERMANY (AP) - Recent
admissions by an ex-Nazi official living in Argentina have confirmed what
some musicologists have suspected for years: that early twentieth century
German composer Anton Webern and his colleagues
devised the so-called "serial" technique of music to encrypt
messages to Nazi spies living in the United States and Britain. In what can surely be considered the
most brazen instance of Art Imitating Espionage to date, avant
garde composers of the Hitler years working in
conjunction with designers of the Nazi Enigma code were bamboozling
unsuspecting audiences with their atonal thunderings
while at the same time passing critical scientific data back and forth
between nations. "This calls into question the
entire Gunned down by an American soldier in
occupied It is now known that Webern was using music to shuttle Werner Heisenberg's
discoveries in atomic energy to German spy Klaus Fuchs working on the Hans Scherbius,
a Nazi party official who worked with Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, admitted at age eighty-seven that the Nazis
secretly were behind the twelve-tone technique of composition, which was
officially reviled to give it the outlaw status it needed to remain outside
of the larger public purview. "These pieces were nothing more
than cipher for encoding messages," he chuckled during an interview on
his balcony in Physicist Edward Teller, who kept a
9-foot Steinway piano in his apartment at the Arnold Schonberg, the older musician
who first devised the serial technique at the request of the As an example, Scherbius
showed Associated Press reporters the score of Webern's
Opus 30 "Variations for Orchestra" overlaid with a cardboard
template. The notes formed a mathematical grid that deciphered into German a
comparison between the neutron release cross-sections of uranium isotopes 235
and 238. Schonberg responded with a collection
of songs for soprano and woodwinds that encrypted the chemical makeup of the
polonium-beryllium initiator at the core of the Trinity explosion. And in "The most curious thing about
it," says composer Philip Glass in Unlike the diatonic music, which is
based on scales that have been agreed upon by listeners throughout the world
for all of history, twelve-tone music treats each note of the chromatic scale
with equal importance, and contains a built-in mathematical refusal to form
chords that are pleasing by traditional standards. Known also as serialism, the style has never been accepted outside of
an elite cadre of musicians, who believe it is the only fresh and valid
direction for post-Wagnerian classical music to go. "Even if this is really
true," states conductor Pierre Boulez, a composer who continues to
utilize serial techniques, "the music has been vindicated by music
critics for decades now. I see no reason to suddenly invalidate an art form
just because of some funny business at its inception." |
It may look like a news story and even read vaguely like one, but it's not.
The style is too casual and opinionated, the facts are mostly wrong, and the
scenario described is implausible.
What we have, rather, is a clever bit of satire which harps on an
all-too-familiar point about modern art – that it's too cerebral and
inaccessible, and perhaps isn't even art at all.
Avant-garde composers like Webern and Schoenberg
are easy targets for such criticism. Their more challenging works have long
been considered unlistenable by some, and the
question "Is it really music?" has frequently been posed. It's but a
small comedic leap to the suggestion that their methods were invented for some
nefarious, non-musical purpose – say, transmitting scientific data to Nazi
spies.
In part because it was never really intended to fool anyone – it's not that
kind of hoax – it's not hard to prove the story a fake. What follows is a short
list of factual errors and logical inconsistencies. It's not exhaustive, but
more than sufficient to debunk the central claims. Additions to the list are
welcome...
(Special thanks to JoAnne Schmitz, whose newsgroup
postings in alt.folklore.urban provided valuable
clues and commentary.)
More
on the Webern-Nazi hoax from composer Chris Hertzog