Piano

Learning from Liszt

A German musicians’ directory from 1911 states:

Walden, Herwarth (Composer, Music Writer and Editor, Berlin-Halensee, Katharinen Street 5), Director of the Verein für Kunst and the weekly, Der Sturm. Works: Ten Songs; Opera Guides for the Schlesinger Music Library; Richard Strauss, music guide; Dafnis Songs, op. 11; The Nightwatch, opera; Murder, Hope of Women, opera; Lieder for poetry by Else Lasker-Schüler, Richard Dehmel, Alfred Mombert, Peter Hille, etc.20

Although this brief text mentions Walden’s Sturm journal, just a year old at the time, his specifically musical activities garner most of the attention. By 1919, in another music directory, the emphases have shifted:

Walden, Herwarth. Early champion of expressionism, founder of the “Sturm” (1910); Author, expressionist poet and composer of “aharmonic music”; to date, 23 works, for piano and voice and piano.21

A musical guide, by definition, cites the musical accomplishments of everyone it deems worthy of an entry, but even in that context, Walden’s musical activities have been relegated to the end. More important, now, is his role as “early champion” of expressionism. An entry of just three lines (on page 1282) also reveals that he still warrants mention in a musical guide, but just barely—at least in the way music is usually understood.

A guide from 1926 reflects Walden’s apparently reduced musical reputation still more, but it offers a key to how the piano affected his career. Here we learn that Walden was a “student of H[einrich]. Hofmann (compos[ition].) and C[onrad]. Ansorge (pi[ano].).”22 Andreas Meyer argues convincingly that Hofmann may have offered some instruction to Walden, but it was Ansorge who proved much more influential.23 Although Ansorge was prominent enough in 1903 to have Lovis Corinth paint his portrait (now at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich), he is little known now, at least in the United States, so an excerpt of his entry in the 1919 German directory is in order:

Ansorge, Conrad, Pianist, b. 15 Oct. 1862 in Buchwald (Silesia), following completion of high school he studied at the Leipzig Conservatory (1880–82) and with [Franz] Liszt (1885–86) in Weimar and Rome; following concert tours in America (1887ff.) he settled in Weimar in 1893 and Berlin in 1895. He taught at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory [in Berlin] 1898–1903. In 1918 he was awarded the title of Professor.24

The entry, perfunctory at first, turns more descriptive and glowing: “Through his vivacious, spiritual permeation of the works, Ansorge has earned an outstanding position among contemporary pianists. He is also awe-inspiring as a composer (Lieder . . .).” In this characteristic representation, Ansorge communed deeply with the works he played, and he brought both sensitivity and flair to his compositions, especially to his Lieder, for which he was best known and most highly regarded.

The Romantic Lied, with its intimately related poetry and song, became Walden’s genre as well. It is not known when Walden began to study with Ansorge, who was sixteen years his senior. The earliest correspondence dates to 10 March 1897, when Ansorge wrote, with a formal air, “Dear Sir, If you come Saturday or Monday morning between 11 and 1 o’clock, you can be sure to find me.”25 Walden, at age eighteen, may have requested an audition with the master, who still taught privately at the time. No matter how their relationship began, Ansorge, as a former Liszt student, could have been instrumental in the young Walden’s winning a Franz Liszt Scholarship to study in Florence later that year, according to Walden’s second wife, Nell.26 Whether Walden actually received this fellowship is uncertain—Nell’s testimony is not always verifiable, the Liszt Foundation’s records are incomplete, and no scholar has yet to find a trace of Walden in Florence at that time—but Nell was not alone in linking Walden, through Ansorge, to Liszt.27

Ansorge was an immediate influence, but Liszt was at least as much of a hero to Walden as Nietzsche was. For example, when Oskar Kokoschka arrived in Berlin in 1910 to help Walden launch Der Sturm, he found a large plaster medallion of Liszt prominently displayed in the journal’s office (Figure 1.6).28 In a display of his own youthful bravura (at age twenty-four), Kokoschka painted his own portrait over the face. However, the effort required to render the master’s famous hair invisible by darkening it into the background and to displace the master’s visage with his own only reinforced the primacy of that authority. Indeed, Kokoschka came to associate his own mentor, Walden, with the great virtuoso, Liszt: in his memoir, Kokoschka praised Walden’s managerial skills and perceptiveness of emerging talent, but his most animated admiration was for his piano playing: “When he improvised for his friends at the piano, with his blond mane flying, he reminded me of the descriptions of Liszt.”29

It is possible that Walden not only admired Liszt but also tried to emulate him. Keeping in mind that neither Walden nor Kokoschka was old enough to have seen Liszt perform, we can discern something of Kokoschka’s impression of Liszt by looking at these four caricatures of the virtuoso by A. Göschl in a Hungarian journal in 1873 (Figure 1.7). Walden, too, kept his hair long and cut evenly. Yet that is just part of what binds him to “Liszt” in the popular imagination: performative virtuosity with abandon is what this figure’s wild gestures signify.

The two shared still more. In 1904 Otto Freundlich, who later sculpted and painted but was at that time studying music and philosophy, wrote Walden a positively gushing letter, in which he elaborates on another talent he believed Walden shared with Liszt:

I feel compelled to write you, since I just spent a lonely hour playing the songs of yours that I own and parts of others that I know by heart. Recently I noticed that you reach your hand out to just one of your predecessors, and that is Liszt: His magnificent plasticity, his fiery breath, his monumentality, all of that flows willingly in the chalice out of which you drink. I am quite certain that only an elective affinity joins you together and that the deployment of your expressive means is as original [to you] as Liszt’s is to him.30

Freundlich’s reference to Goethe’s well-known novel Elective Affinities (1809) is not obvious. As a recent study explains, readers have “fiercely debated” whether “elective affinities,” which supposedly draw people to each other like a chemical reaction, are rooted in fate or demonstrate free will.31 So we do not know whether Freundlich felt that Walden’s and Liszt’s temperaments, as evidenced by their compositions, were “naturally” so closely related or whether he believed that Walden had cultivated the likeness. Perhaps it did not matter to Freundlich, because Walden’s music’s “magnificent plasticity,” “fiery breath,” and “monumentality” struck him as absolutely “original,” even if the same characteristics could be ascribed to Liszt.

Freundlich’s counts as one of the most overwhelmingly positive responses to Walden’s compositions. He was not a professional musician, capable of offering an authoritative evaluation, but the keenly felt empathy he ascribes to Walden and Liszt remains worthy of our attention. Yet we must explore how the association of Walden with Liszt extends still farther: beyond their appearance and musical styles (performative and compositional) to their shared organizational prowess. Recall that Kokoschka noted all four (the hair, the performance, the compositions, and the promotion of others); the record suggests that they are intricately related to their piano practice, whether by fate or choice.

Although Liszt’s captivating performances thrilled Europe, leading to a veritable “Lisztomania” in his youth, Alan Walker argues that the “true Liszt” emerged only after his years of performance, that is, when he settled in Weimar as Kapellmeister (music director) in 1848 and became more responsive to others: other people and others’ music.32 He was thirty-five. Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, whom he had met in Kiev in 1847 and who became his longtime partner, encouraged him to devote himself to composition. During the first decade in Weimar, Liszt wrote twelve of his thirteen “symphonic poems”—a new genre meant to condense the traditionally four-part symphony into one extended movement—as well as the Faust Symphony. Nearly all these were inspired by other texts, music, or, in one case, visual art.33 Liszt completed the Faust Symphony as a purely orchestral work in 1854, but in 1857 he decided to add voice at the end. The male chorus sings the Chorus Mysticus from Goethe’s original text, including the line “Everything transitory is only a metaphor [Gleichnis].”34 We recognize this text, of course; it is a well from which Walden draws again and again, following Nietzsche. Liszt, too, drew from and appealed to the transformational power of Gleichnis.

Liszt’s responsiveness to others took many forms. He championed the symphonies and operas of others by conducting them to great acclaim; the Wagner and Berlioz festivals that he staged in Weimar in the 1850s, for example, are legendary.35 Liszt may have brought the most music to the most people, however, by offering us a Gleichnis of other works. He wrote rhapsodic prose about them, when moved to do so. Baudelaire’s essay on Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser has had tremendous staying power in modernist literature thanks in no small part to Liszt’s metaphorical translation of Wagner’s music.

Finally, Liszt himself offered Gleichnis for trained pianists to embody by beginning to make masterful piano transcriptions of all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies. In 1863, when the music publishers Breitkopf and Härtel invited him to finish the series, Liszt agreed on condition that he could rewrite his previously published versions as well.36 He suggested to the publishers:

A pianoforte arrangement of these creations must . . . expect to remain a very poor and distant approximation. How to instill into the futile hammers of the piano the breath and soul, the resonance and power, the fullness and inspiration, the color and accent of such music? However, I will at least endeavor to overcome the worst difficulties and to furnish the piano-playing world with as faithful an illustration as possible of Beethoven’s genius.37

When Liszt completed the new and revised transcriptions in 1865, he included a preface, in which he reflected:

I shall think my time well spent if I have succeeded in transferring to the piano not only the grand outlines of Beethoven’s compositions, but also that multitude of details and finer points that make such a significant contribution to the perfection of the whole. I will be satisfied if I stand on the level of the intelligent engraver, or the conscientious translator, who grasps the spirit of a work and thus contributes to our insight into the great masters and our sense of the beautiful.38

Approximation, illustration, transfer, engraving, translation of the “spirit of the work”: all of these are metaphors for Gleichnis itself. It is never a mere “copy,” but it is also not what we usually understand to be “original.” Liszt achieves a perfect union of passive reception and active creation in the Beethoven transcriptions. Walker summarizes: “First, they remain unsurpassed in the amount of fine orchestral detail incorporated into their texture. Second, the seemingly impossible technical problems posed by such an ideal are solved, in a masterly fashion, in the most pianistic way.”39 By “pianistic,” he means that “Liszt may have forsaken the letter of Beethoven’s notation, but, paradoxically, this brings him closer to its spirit.”40

In the middle of the nineteenth century, most private citizens had no access to live orchestras, while the piano became more common in the homes of a growing bourgeoisie.41 Thus it was only through transcriptions such as Liszt’s that most people came to know operas, symphonies, and other orchestral works. Liszt had an unusual gift for finding the Gleichnis of others’ works; he also felt a strong commitment to doing so. In fact, as Walker points out, of Liszt’s prodigious output of eight hundred piano works, some four hundred are transcriptions.42 In addition to all nine Beethoven symphonies, these include fourteen “matchless” piano transcriptions of Wagner’s scores.43 Liszt, then, actively promoted others’ works and also worked tirelessly to make them accessible to a broad public. He translated the jubilation of public performance to the thrill of private revelation. He let himself be carried by others’ sonorities and then carried them home to others, to those of us with pianos, to the private site of shared intimacy and art. Through his student, Ansorge, he offered Walden a model to emulate.

Teloplasma and a Keyboard for Art

Walden was not the musical genius that Liszt was (Freundlich’s appraisal notwithstanding), but they did share affinities. Walden, like Liszt, sought to translate high art in different media into demanding yet accessible fare for a broad audience. The first record of Walden’s musical activities after his purported return from Florence in 1898 is mention of his playing for a celebration in June 1900 of the Giordano-Bruno-Bund, one of several utopian societies in Berlin at the time.44 By 1901 Walden was loosely affiliated with another such group, the Neue Gemeinschaft (New community), which established a short-lived colony on the outskirts of Berlin.45 It is not clear whether Walden was invited to live there, but Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), nearly ten years his senior, was. Yet as much as she idolized its resident, the poet Peter Hille, Lasker-Schüler was eager to keep her independence after separating from her husband, Dr. Berthold Lasker.46 Soon Walden, Lasker-Schüler, and Hille joined several others (Peter Baum, Samuel Lublinski, Otto Petri, and Curt Neimann) in their own common cause: Teloplasma: Cabaret für Höhenkunst, a “cabaret for high art,” directed by none other than the twenty-three-year-old Walden, who was determined—like his teacher’s teacher—to bring the arts to all. Teloplasma provided his directorial debut and his first instantiation of piano as Gleichnis for art.

Walden and his advisory board had high aspirations for Teloplasma, for which they managed to rent the Great Hall of the recently opened Künstlerhaus (Artists’ house, 1898) on Bellevue Strasse. The humble name “Artists’ House” does not do justice to the sprawling complex, a “Nordic-Germanic” building “with Romanesque proportions,” commissioned by the Verein Berliner Künstler (Society of Berlin artists) to host its own exhibitions and to provide facilities for other artists’ groups.47 The Great Hall measured three hundred square meters and featured a low, thirty-five-square-meter stage on one end.

Before Teloplasma premiered, a more famous venture had already enjoyed this stage: Max Reinhardt’s parodic cabaret Schall und Rauch (Sound and smoke) opened here in January 1901.48 By summer 1901 cabaret was all the rage in Berlin; there were reputedly at least forty-two requests to the censor for permission to open cabarets.49 When Teloplasma opened in September, Schall und Rauch had become so successful that Reinhardt and his partners opened their own small theater, designed by Peter Behrens.50 Thus it was an auspicious site and moment for Teloplasma.

The surviving prospectus—one of many sources maintained by the censor—announces Walden’s Lisztian intentions: “The director in the prologue to [Goethe’s] Faust gave us away: You have to present a piece in pieces if you want to grip the crowd.”51 Walden builds on his loose paraphrase from Faust to argue that Goethe foreshadowed the Überbrettl (cabaret) movement by combining poetry and drama, fables and costumes, “presented simultaneously to one’s seeing and hearing.” Walden declares that the lesson to be learned is “Cabaret and high art are not mutually exclusive.”

Yet Walden’s articulated desire to reach a wide audience with a wide range of acts was followed by something of a blunder, when Walden tried to account for the strange-sounding title. The prospectus explains: “Originally we wanted to be just a germ cell, a protoplasm.” That is, the group hoped to embody an early stage in the organic development of the “art form of the future” (an expression echoing Wagner’s “artwork of the future”).52 Walden and team acknowledged that they had no pretensions of attaining that lofty goal, yet they wanted to present a semblance of something complete, so they substituted the Greek prefix telo (end, purpose) for proto (first). The logic is sound, if strained, yet the very need for explanation may have doomed the project. One reviewer, for example, noted that it had been so long since he had had anything to do with Greek that he was unable to conjure anything meaningful from the name.53

In any case, although no known reviewer drew attention to it, the root plasm(a) is potentially more revealing. In English and German it signifies genetic material—the proto-plasm, its first, amorphous stage, will further develop the essential substance and begin to take shape. However, the Greek derivation is the verb plassein, “to mold”—not an adjective signifying “moldable.” Thus “plaster” and “plastic” are malleable, but they do not mold; rather, in a reversal of agency, they can be molded. There remains an oscillation between molder and molded, carrier and carried, at the core of the word. Walden hoped to make the most of this potential plasticity with Teloplasma. The substance might take shape around or through the piano. Let us try to reconstruct what happened in the Great Hall of the Künstlerhaus.

According to the prospectus, each evening’s performance would seek to set a Gesamtstimmung (total mood).54 Therefore, a “Tragic” evening (29 September) was followed by one devoted to “Erotic Art” (31 October).55 For each performance, Walden orchestrated a small Gesamtkunstwerk, using decorative flourishes to reinforce the theme. For example, one critic reports a suffusion of (potentially “tragic”) purple the first night, while the programs and tickets for the second evening were all printed on deep, “burning” red, presumably “erotic” paper (Figure 1.8).56 This extant ticket shows three nude young women or girls, joyfully clasping their raised hands. The scene, cropped in such a way that their breasts are barely exposed, is not explicitly erotic, but it might have reminded Wagnerians in the audience of that composer’s desire for the “three sisters” of music, dance, and poetry to come together as one, much as the Teloplasma organization also hoped.

In addition, the more “tragic” painted backdrop and curtains of the first evening were replaced by a mise-en-scène of domestic furnishings for the second: suggesting the comfortable, bourgeois interior as a site of potential erotic encounter.57 There was an attempt, then, to transform the public and grandiose Great Hall into something much more private and intimate. There were to be readings of poetry and plays, recitals of music—with a “concert grand piano” provided by a Dr. Moser-Schulz, credited in the program—and finally, reproductions of fine art in the adjacent, smaller hall.58 The first night, according to one review, presented unnamed works by Max Klinger, Arnold Böcklin, Franz Stuck, and Franz Stassen (who later illustrated Wagner’s music dramas): one can imagine some work of the more familiar three and that of the budding Wagnerian as “tragic.” The second evening’s reproductions offered a historical swath of “erotic” imagery, from Titian’s comparably tame Sacred and Profane Love (1515, Galleria Borghese, Rome) to Stuck’s Sin (1893, Neue Pinakothek, Munich), in which a snake coils itself around a seductress covered otherwise only by her long, flowing hair.

Walden, as director, opened each evening at the piano. The program for the first night does not survive, but reviews state that he played Beethoven.59 A program for the second evening does survive.60 It divides the eighteen or so numbers (depending how one counts), in half, presumably with an intermission; Walden introduced each of the two “acts.” He opened the first with Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A minor, opus 42 (D845, 1825) and the second with Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne in F sharp major, opus 15, number 2 (1832).61 Both works require considerable skill. The Chopin begins slowly, melodically, but the doppio movimento (double tempo) of the second part attests to the remarkable dexterity that Walden must have had. Was the increasing intensity meant to suggest another intensification (and diffusion), namely, that of sexual desire? If so, Walden was not successful, at least for the reviewer, “Dr. B.,” who wrote of his playing: “Certainly quite beautiful, but it did not produce any erotic thoughts in me.”62

The Schubert and Chopin pieces were both written for piano, rather than transcriptions such as Liszt’s, but as performer, Walden still had the responsibility of interpretation. The young Liszt had been a passionate performer, and long after he devoted himself to composition, transcription, and the promotion of others, he retained a deep understanding of the bodily and spiritual role of the performer. In 1859 Liszt wrote, “The virtuoso definitively has the right of life and death over the works whose thoughts, feelings, and excitement the composer has momentarily entrusted to him.”63 He continued: “For the virtuoso, because he gives its tangible and perceptible essence, himself creates Music.”64

Playing Beethoven, then Schubert and Chopin, Walden may have “created music,” but he had not yet learned to set and hold the mood, the Gesamtstimmung, for the rest of the “high-art cabaret.” Teloplasma flopped after just two nights (about which more below), but it presented Der Sturm in an amorphous, protoplasmic stage, at the heart of which was the piano. There was the actual piano, on loan for the evening’s festivities, but more important, Walden introduced the piano as metaphor. The prospectus makes this explicit. Walden likens the format of Teloplasma, literally, to a piano keyboard. As the season unfolds, he declares, “It would please us if, little by little, we could play artistic and poetic voices off the entire keyboard [Klaviatur].”65 Walden the pianistic impresario was born.

Walden’s Relations at and with the Piano

Walden would have to wait to build and play other such keyboards, however. The third evening—with the intended theme of “Psychological Art” and special attention to Hille—never came to be.66 The inscrutability of the name Teloplasma was compounded by inconsistent thematic presentation, beginning with Walden’s own piano selections. Other problems arose from potentially good, but impractical, intentions. Likely following the example of Wagner’s Festival Theater (1876) in Bayreuth, for example, Walden kept the theater dark. Wagner had sought thereby to intensify the audience’s concentration.67 Walden’s critics, however, complained that they could not read the programs, especially since they were printed on dark purple and red paper.68 Program length was also a problem. Here, too, Wagner may have been a model; operas at Bayreuth were known to last for hours; the festivals, for days.69 Yet a Berlin audience expecting a “cabaret,” even one for “high art,” was unable to devote such concentration to Teloplasma, because of the continually changing numbers and the adjacent room with art and more music.70

If Walden misjudged his audience and setting in all those ways, his greatest directorial misstep was likely his selection of actors to present the readings, at least in the case of Richard Vallentin, who read two poems by Richard Dehmel and three by Lasker-Schüler on the “erotic” evening.71 Vallentin was actively involved with Schall und Rauch.72 However, he also had a reputation “as a not very convincing actor,” perhaps because the forte of Schall und Rauch was parody.73 A letter from Hille to Lasker-Schüler after the second performance of Teloplasma suggests that Vallentin was unable to escape that mode: “Your pieces[,] through the presentation—parody [Persiflage]!” Hille offers advice for improvement, then adds: “And no Vallentin, whom your greatest enemy might have chosen for you. This parody!”74

Why Walden or his advisory board, including Lasker-Schüler and Hille, had selected Vallentin is a mystery. Lasker-Schüler was later known for her “masterful” delivery and her “dark, melodic, expressive voice.”75 She also loved to dress in costume, as seen in this later photograph of her playing a flute in a shiny suit, gathered at the ankles (Figure 1.9). Surely if she had read her own poems, she might have made an impact. Walden and his advisers, however, appear to have opted for more established performers. One female vocalist, for example, was Rosa Sucher; she had enjoyed major roles at Bayreuth since playing Isolde (in Tristan und Isolde) in 1886. She was fifty-two by the time of her appearance at Teloplasma’s “erotic” evening in 1901. Far be it from me to de-eroticize middle age, but perhaps a younger, more “modern” woman, like Lasker-Schüler, would have fared better. Berlin’s foremost drama critic, Alfred Kerr, appears to have spoken for many, and not only about the actual temperature, when he wrote, “The hall, under the direction of Herwarth Waldl [sic], was poorly heated. I’ve never been so cold on an erotic evening before.”76

Despite failure with Teloplasma, Walden went on to become one of the greatest impresarios of modern art. One reason he turned his reception around so completely was his ability to listen and respond to critique. In addition to adopting more accessible titles for future endeavors, the most pronounced lesson he took from Teloplasma was not to entrust readings to professional actors. He was explicit about this in his proposal to found the Verein für Kunst in 1904: “Each evening will be dedicated to just one personality, and the author will present his works himself, or at the very least, he will choose who reads for him. And the selection of works will be left to the poet or possibly the composer himself.”77 The Verein für Kunst was a great success, ending only when it was folded into the Sturm Evenings in 1916. Walden maintained this principle of artistic control at Der Sturm’s landmark First German Autumn Salon in 1913 as well. Each artist was promised continuous wall space for three or four works, to be arranged at the artist’s discretion.78 Artists’ selection and presentation of their own works undoubtedly contributed to the success of each new Klaviatur, in terms of both quality control and contributors’ satisfaction. Walden passively ceded some control in this way. Yet he also actively provided the metaphorical keyboard that allowed others to play their best.

There was one site where Walden restricted collaborative virtuosity, however: the literal keyboard. Although he secured world-class musicians for the Verein für Kunst—among them, Ansorge, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler—it was usually Walden, himself, at the piano.79 He signals this hedging on the principle of self-presentation already in the proposal quoted above, in which the poet, but only “possibly [unter Umständen]” the composer, would be allowed to choose his works. As generous as Walden was about the work of artists with other métiers, critics have remarked on the oddity that during the Sturm years, Walden kept a tight rein on the music (until he wanted to unleash it himself). With rare exception, Walden’s constitute nearly all the musical compositions published in the pages of Der Sturm.80 Yet Walden at the piano generated a maelstrom of modern art.

Although Vallentin apparently botched its presentation at Teloplasma, one of Lasker-Schüler’s poems suggests the pianistically generative power of Walden. According to police record, the censor rejected Lasker-Schüler’s poems with explicitly sexual titles, to wit, “Orgy” and “Erotic nerve,” but he allowed the poem with the musical title, “Fortissimo” (musical direction to play very loudly), into the program.81 In all likelihood, Lasker-Schüler, who was candid about her lack of musical training, learned the Italian term from her new friend, Walden, whose new name first surfaces in letters to her sister during the summer of 1901.82 Their intimacy is apparent in her frequently autobiographical poetry as well as in his adoption of her pet name for him.

Before we look closely at “Fortissimo,” let us place it in the context of Walden and Lasker-Schüler’s budding romance. One Lasker-Schüler biographer, Sigrid Bauschinger, suggests that the poet borrowed the name “Walden” from Henry David Thoreau’s utopian account of the same name (from 1854), although the rural retreat that the American naturalist established clashes with the urban milieu in which Walden always circulated.83 Still, the source is plausible; a well-received German translation had appeared in print just a few years before (in 1897), and Walden and Lasker-Schüler’s friends in the Neue Gemeinschaft lived in a rural, utopian enclave, even if the new lovers chose not to join them there. Moreover, it is not hard to imagine the poet’s and pianist’s enjoying what sounds at times like nascent, expressionist sound poetry in Walden. It was summer for Walden and Lasker-Schüler, but listen to Thoreau’s evocation of winter:

For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum. . . . I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it; Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented somewhat like how der do; or sometimes hoo hoo only.84

A plectrum, or pick, is used to pluck a stringed instrument, but “Walden” no doubt drew an analogy to his piano’s hammers and strings, and if Lasker-Schüler did not “get” the Gleichnis immediately, he could help her understand.

Lasker-Schüler’s first book of poetry, Styx, was under revision that summer. Although its publication date is 1902, the publisher, Axel Juncker, released the book in October 1901, in time for Teloplasma’s “erotic” evening.85 “Fortissimo” is one of her three poems read that night.86 Its original addressee, in all probability, was Walden:

Given its title, the poem ends, fittingly, with lovers’ screams (in the Teloplasma copy the exclamation point is penciled in, although it disappeared in print in Styx).88 The poem begins, however, with the prospective lover playing some music for the lyrical self. The poem’s “I,” reflecting Lasker-Schüler’s own untrained ear, does not recognize the composer or the piece her lover plays. Yet she recognizes its resonance with her and her lover’s desire: it is the glowing “lava” between them.

The music, that is, his playing the music, brings the lava to boiling. In anticipation of lovemaking, their tears make the rug’s colors appear to run together. The lovers’ shared, watery vision is heightened in the original German by the neologism Regenbogenfarbentönen (rainbow-colored tints). Its compounding connotes binding or swirling together, and its four syllables of “en” in German create a repetitive rhythm for the ear that parallels the imagined carpet’s colors for the eyes. Or perhaps they are a series of waves, as the oscillation of stress/unstress suggests, because desire then sweeps the lovers into the flow of the last two stanzas. The repetition of Und (“And”) at the beginning of four successive lines resonates aurally with the pounding of the “blood-storm swells” (Blutsturmwellen) those lines describe. The lovers sink into the carpet moss and scream in an outpouring of desire.

Reading this poem, we can understand why Lasker-Schüler’s work was included in a volume of “modern women’s love songs,” that is, erotic poetry, in 1902.89 We also understand better how Vallentin massacred delivery of the poem, since critics found next to nothing “erotic” at Teloplasma. Most important, though, we see how the piano playing of Lasker-Schüler’s young lover, Walden, both enriched their mutual attraction and spurred her on to continue creating art. Essig and Noudelmann may be right about the erotics of the piano, after all.

If the genesis of “Fortissimo” must remain speculative, a short essay by Lasker-Schüler a few years later confirms that she associated intimacy with Walden and the piano in their home. In Das Theater (The theater), one of the journals edited by her husband, Walden—they married in 190390—before he launched Der Sturm, Lasker-Schüler playfully responded to Adolf Loos’s lecture at the Verein für Kunst. She considers the Jugendstil architectural principle that one’s home reflect one’s character:

My housing resembles me down to the hair. That’s why I sometimes like to jump out of my skin, especially into the room that’s married to me. Even if its chief occupant is rarely present, his home speaks for him. . . . Songs turn homeward over the grand piano cover and lie down on the keys—they slumber and dream loudly; rustled up, their creator sits on the round stool and plays. I think of my princess days.91

She gently mocks the idea that it would be desirable for one’s home to resemble one completely; hence, she wants to jump out of her “skin.” So why not saunter into her husband’s room, then, or his room as his personification? There in his room, the most visible, audible furniture is the piano, whose songs seem to play of their own accord . . . until they wake him, or conjure him, right into the room so that he, their creator, can play them. Their effect is to set her mind wandering. Even in, or especially in, this fictional account, Walden’s playing leads to her poetic imaginings.

By no means do I suggest that Walden’s piano practice was solely responsible for Lasker-Schüler’s often breathtaking poetry and prose. However, it is significant that her most famous poem, “An Old Tibetan Rug,” first published in Der Sturm in 1910, is something of a condensation of her earlier work, “Fortissimo.”92 The piano is gone, and the abandon of new love has metamorphosed into something more familiar, but it is equally intoxicating, and one senses that music might begin at any moment:

If Regenbogenfarbentönen impressed us with its intertwined syllables and beat, Maschentausendabertausendweit (Thousand-upon-thousand-meshes wide) exceeds it in length and intricacy without simply replicating the earlier invention. It is a variation on a theme, an aural Gleichnis of seemingly endless meshes and the accompaniment of seemingly endless pleasure. So impressed was Karl Kraus, friend of Walden and Lasker-Schüler and esteemed editor of Die Fackel (The torch) in Vienna, that he reprinted the poem just three weeks after its Berlin debut, characterizing it as “one of the most delightful and stirring that I have ever read; there is little poetry after Goethe that unites meaning and sound, word and image, language and soul, as it does in this Tibetan carpet.”94

Lasker-Schüler’s enduring fame rests at least partly on that poem and that endorsement, and Walden’s piano playing arguably contributed to the genesis of her poetic faculties. Before I turn to his pianistic effects on visual art, I must, however, tarry for another moment with his first great love, Lasker-Schüler, because she inspired him as much as he inspired her. This is the first great couple in this story of the genesis of relational modern art. It was she, in fact, who motivated Walden’s first piano composition (Figure O.8), which he wrote for her poem “Dann” (Then), soon after Teloplasma closed forever, in early 1902. It is a two-stanza love poem that also appeared in Styx:

Walden did not publish this opus 1, number 1, until some years later, but it resonated deeply with Lasker-Schüler in the months after he wrote it.96 She wrote to fellow poet and Teloplasma veteran Dehmel, in February 1902: “I don’t know anything about purely technical matters in music, but the compositions”—by now there were several—“have a magnificent effect on me. . . . He takes the poems home.”97 Lasker-Schüler’s own sense of home was precarious at the time—she had left her first husband and had started her romance with Walden, but she and her young son, Paul, were living on the edge of society, moving from house to house. Thus Lasker-Schüler had to leave Paul with her sister from January to March 1902, when the poet was placed in a sanatorium because of declining health. Walden was her regular visitor, likely presenting her the music to “Dann” on one of his visits.98 So Lasker-Schüler’s illness and homelessness make her phrasing—that his compositions take her “poems home”—especially poignant.

Meyer, the musicologist, characterizes Walden’s “Dann” as a Lied in the tradition of Ansorge and Liszt. He writes that Walden’s music “responds to the wonderful poem precisely—one wants to say, intuitively.”99 Lasker-Schüler’s biographer Kerstin Decker, in turn, writes movingly about the effect the music must have had on the (ailing) poet: of the eighth-note pause in the music just before the final line, “A dream time of a thousand years,” Decker writes, “it is left to the left hand to make the counting of those years audible and sensible. To make sure, there is a repetition [of the poem’s last two lines], followed by a final chord. That is clear. One cannot feel oneself more deeply understood. After this, any expression of love would seem trivial.”100

Both Meyer’s and Decker’s assessments are perceptive. The music and the words are tightly bound together. The marking of time in the left hand strikes the beat of the “thousand years” to come. Walden has attempted to unite “meaning and sound, word and image, language and soul,” just as Kraus later says of Lasker-Schüler’s poetry. In April 1904 Walden published a short essay explaining just what he had tried to do with his compositions:

My intention was not to write music about a poem, that is, not to approximate its mood, but rather to merge both together so internally that one would no longer be thinkable without the other. . . . Naturally, the piano is not only meant to accompany or to paint in tones, but to keep a firm hold on the prevailing mood, the tendency of the poetry. One might imagine that this principle is anti-musical, i.e., that it is literary, but it is only the consequential result of the movement that soon will be fifty years old and that initiated revolution in opera.101

Wagner—specifically, his Tristan und Isolde (1859)—is the unnamed, revolutionary forebear. But it is the piano, Liszt’s, Ansorge’s, Nietzsche’s, and Walden’s instrument, that sets and keeps the mood throughout. Music and poem melt together, they become indistinguishable, just as Lasker-Schüler’s lyrical lovers melt into the moss and find themselves entwined in the brightly colored weave of the Tibetan rug (or Ganswind and Hermione, more humorously, revel in their polar bear fur). This ideal of art is bodily, it is material, it is multisensory, it is a Gleichnis of the rhythm of life. When Walden played the piano, it brought his listeners home.

There is a catch, though, that may have been essential for the larger story to unfold: not everyone responded positively to Walden’s compositions. The fact that Walden felt compelled to explain his music in the text above suggests that many—including cognoscenti—found his works incomprehensible. Some awkward letters survive in which Mahler politely distances himself from Walden’s work: in 1906 he confesses that he does not feel “the right connection” to the score for Walden’s opera The Nightwatch (1904), which survives only in manuscript. Although he suggests that hearing Walden play it when he is next in Berlin could help, Mahler returns it two weeks later.102 The following year, the correspondence focuses solely on Mahler’s program for the Verein für Kunst (this musician was allowed to determine his own program).103 Walden implored Kraus to promote his opera in Vienna, but to no avail.104 Lasker-Schüler, convinced of her lover’s promise, cajoled Kraus to convince Walden to give up Der Sturm already during 1910, so that he could dedicate himself completely to his music—but either Kraus did not try or he did not succeed.105 In 1911 Döblin tried in Der Sturm to defend Walden’s compositions, but the terms of the defense are revealing: “Few know Walden as a composer. It is not easy to be attracted to the severity of his taste. In his Lieder, an incomparable artistic discipline dominates; it prohibits every superficiality and concerns itself purely musically with the lyrical core.”106

In short, few enjoyed this “incomparable artistic discipline.”107 Walden, however, learned to compose, to translate, to provide a Gleichnis for art with the piano as model but also by other means, and far more productively so. After Teloplasma failed, the Verein für Kunst succeeded. Increasingly, Walden also picked up the pen. His explanatory text about his own music was preceded in March 1904 by a longer essay, “Word and Tone Poetry,” in the anarchist journal Kampf (Battle). There he speculates—however prematurely!—that “the battle over sub- or co-ordination of the two arts is already over, and it has become an incontrovertible truth that both must supplement each other, without the aesthetic value of either of them suffering in any way.”108 He analyzes the role of the musician who would compose Lieder: “One must bring along a strong and fresh imagination [to the given poem], one that is capable of picking up new images within itself, even if they do not appear ‘understandable.’ One must be able to experience moods that one may never have experienced oneself. . . . One must look within and above all be able to sink oneself deeply into others.”109 This extremely empathetic musician “does not just illustrate a poem; he lets it be experienced again, he lets it arise again, with and in the music.”110 The Lied that best exemplifies such a sensitive response, in Walden’s opinion, is “Auf See” (On the lake), opus 17, number 3, by his own teacher, Ansorge (composed for another Dehmel poem).111

Walden heard Ansorge play the piano; even more, he tried to sink deeply into another in the form of poetry. Lasker-Schüler and Freundlich, at least, believed he did so beautifully. Bringing this give-and-take from his piano experience, he writes about it, that is, he translates (into writing) his experience of translating poetry into song, or, better, melding the two into one. “The form of the song cannot be a musical one; the rhythm of the poem gives it its form,” he observes. “The piano provides only the calming influence to the song in movement.”112 Walden felt the rhythm of poetry; he transcribed it for the keys of the piano, whose hammers had touched the strings and (at least occasionally) set other bodies and souls in resonant vibration. He became a medium for art, and if his own compositions did not move as many as he might have hoped, he wanted others to discover how to be more responsive themselves.

Walden, following Liszt in yet another way, became a teacher. He taught piano lessons and published music guides. In 1908 he edited and contributed a sympathetic essay to an authoritative guide, Richard Strauss: Symphonies and Tone Poems, the sixth in a series of Master Guides by the well-known Schlesinger music press.113 There is irony here, not only because Strauss later became a regular target in Der Sturm but also because Walden followed the example of another idol, Wagner, by writing music guides for Schlesinger—work that Wagner claimed to detest, although it supported him in Paris (1839–42). Yet Walden discovered a new métier in it.114 In fact, although Walden edited just one of Schlesinger’s Master Guides, he wrote all their shorter, more informal Opera Guides (1907–8), as this advertisement (Figure 1.10) in the forty-first volume, for Wagner’s Parsifal, reveals. The 1911 music directory cited above ranked these opera guides ahead of the Strauss volume and just after Walden’s songs to Lasker-Schüler’s poetry and his leadership roles in the Verein für Kunst and Der Sturm, that is, ahead of most of his musical compositions.

The Parsifal guide is revelatory. It divulges Walden’s love for Wagnerian music and his fervent wish to make it more accessible. He writes that Wagner “is without doubt the most significant dramatic composer the world has ever seen.”115 He concedes that “it is not easy to ‘take home’ his melodies.” Yet he cautions: “To laugh at the foreign and the unfamiliar is the way of children and fools.”116 He points out some of the opera’s leitmotifs, providing the requisite measures of musical notation, but he insists that “the leitmotifs are not like mathematical formulas that you should learn by heart in order to understand Wagner’s music!”117 Finally, he encourages the reader: “You can experience the greatest enrichment of your own self when you become absorbed in a great personality. The biggest secret of how to understand the ‘difficult music’ of Wagner is: let yourself be impressionable and have a will for art!”118 Perhaps then you could take it home, or it might take you home.

Kandinsky and Schwitters at the Keyboard

The resonances between Walden’s guide to Parsifal and the presentation of the first Sturm prodigy in visual art, Wassily Kandinsky, in 1912, are remarkable. Walden’s musical background, his intimate experience with the piano, his sensitivity to the artwork of others, his desire to translate that work, to be or provide the medium for artistic experience—all these qualities that we have followed back to the keyboard Walden loved—made him especially appreciative of the painting and ideas of Kandinsky, seemingly overnight in 1912, but with years of preparation already behind them both.119

Kandinsky’s Impression III, Concert (1911, Plate 4) is emblematic of the painter’s feelings for the piano. Painted following Kandinsky’s experience of an Arnold Schoenberg concert in January 1911, the work is dominated by the massive, black grand piano hovering over the center.120 A pianist’s head is suggested at the piano’s bottom left; streaks of blue rise above her and curve to the right, following the piano’s outline. To the left, across a white “column,” other musicians can be envisioned, while the collection of black outlines with orange and yellow shapes on the bottom left suggest an audience, leaning toward the piano and also echoing its direction up and to the right. Most striking of all is the strident yellow shape on the right of the canvas; it seems to flow around the piano and begin to engulf audience and performers alike. Such is the potential of the piano to move the soul.

Although Walden did not exhibit this particular painting, he actively encouraged and promoted Kandinsky, beginning with Der Sturm’s first exhibit, in March 1912, of the Blaue Reiter group from Munich. Notably, Walden had not curated this show, however much organizational experience he already had from the Verein für Kunst and two years of Der Sturm journal. Rather, he somewhat impulsively wrote to Franz Marc on 28 February and asked if the Blaue Reiter show currently in Cologne could be forwarded to Berlin, at Walden’s expense, to open a mere two weeks hence (in a rented villa at Tiergarten Strasse 34A).121 Somehow they pulled it off; it is as if Walden, on short notice, had been able to arrange a performance of someone else’s orchestra. Walden, the conductor, was nevertheless in charge: he asked Kandinsky to send more of his “very valuable” paintings and decided independently not to include Schoenberg’s own paintings, explaining simply that he wanted to show more of Kandinsky’s and Marc’s.122

Despite the lack of planning, Walden responded passionately to Kandinsky’s painting and writing. The following month, in April 1912, he published a long excerpt from “The Language of Forms and Colors,” a chapter from Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which had appeared just a few months before.123 Kandinsky repeatedly invokes the metaphor of the piano to describe the simultaneously spiritual and bodily effect of art. In fact, Walden chose to begin the essay in Der Sturm with the piano—his first Gleichnis for art. He cut three pages of text to begin with the piano metaphor, which, in fact, Kandinsky had introduced in the previous chapter, resulting in the journal’s excerpt in an awkward reference to “a few moments ago” and to text the Sturm reader would not have read:

Form is, therefore, the expression of inner content. This is its internal description. Here, we must think of the example used a few moments ago—that of the piano, and for “color,” substitute “form”: the artist is the hand that purposefully sets the human soul vibrating by pressing this or that key (= form). Thus it is clear that the harmony of forms can only be based upon the intentional touching of the human soul. This is the principle we have called the principle of internal necessity.124

Kandinsky’s appeal to “internal necessity” is well known. But how many have considered that this “internal necessity,” according to Kandinsky, “must” be approached through a metaphor, which many would imagine to be inessential? Instead, the essential supplementarity of this Gleichnis, the piano, becomes even more apparent when Kandinsky returns to the same metaphor, two columns later:

Here let us once again remember the example of the piano. Instead of [the words] color and form, substitute object. Every object . . . is a being with its own life and, inevitably, with its own effect flowing from it. Man is constantly subject to this psychological effect. . . . “Nature,” i.e., the ever-changing external environment of man, continually sets the strings of the piano (soul) in vibration, by means of the keys (objects). These effects, which often seem chaotic to us, consist of three elements: the effect of the color of the object, the effect of its form, and the effect—independent of color and form—of the object itself.125

As clearly as Kandinsky makes his case, he knows that opponents to the increasingly abstract painting abound. He, like Walden, wants to cultivate a receptive audience for this art. He, like Walden, presents an aesthetic theory, but he warns against making too much of it: “Even if one today can speculate ad infinitum along these lines, it is nonetheless premature to theorize about the further details. Theory is never in advance of practice in art, never drags practice in its train, but vice versa. Everything depends on feeling, especially at first. What is right artistically can only be attained through feeling, particularly at the outset.”126

In October 1912 Der Sturm offered its first retrospective exhibit of any artist, the first anywhere for Kandinsky. Marking the occasion, Kandinsky wrote his first essay specifically for Der Sturm, “On Understanding Art,” which Walden featured on the journal’s cover (Figure O.1).127 As Riccardo Marchi contends, the painter recognized that more critics were open to abstract art, but he condemned what he considered their “stupid” (dumm) formal analysis, which he equated with scientific and positivist thinking.128 In short, Kandinsky felt that the only way to appreciate modern art was precisely not to “understand” art. Monica Strauss has argued that “the tone of this piece . . . was a new one for Kandinsky. Relying for effect on paradoxes and epigrams—‘there is no worse evil than understanding art’—it seemed to reflect Walden’s style.”129

What did he hope to convey? Kandinsky writes that explanations can help only “indirectly,” in that they “enrich the soul by awakening ideas, creative forces, and the empathetic experience that flows through them.”130 Empathetic response makes the viewer, hypothetically, increasingly sensitive to art. Kandinsky closes, “And he, for whom the work has been created, should open wide his soul and by doing so, experience. Then he, too, will be happy.”131 We hear echoes of Walden’s advice on how to approach Wagnerian opera: “Let yourself be impressionable and have a will for art!” Be simultaneously active and passive and you, too, can share the Gleichnis!

When the retrospective closed in Berlin, Walden orchestrated other venues for it in Germany, Holland, Belgium, and Central Europe for the next two years.132 Privately, he wrote to Kandinsky:

You are an extraordinary artist. I am very proud of this exhibition. It is the strongest that Europe has to offer today. Something like Composition 2 [1910], for instance, has never been created before. What genius! What life! Force and art. I am overwhelmed!133

Surely this response struck a chord with Kandinsky, who endured biting criticism of the painting in question (among others).134 As for Walden, such an impassioned response leads me to envision him doubling over at the piano, as Essig later described the fictional Ganswind and as Puni’s caricatures of Walden foreshadow his eventual collapse. To follow Kandinsky’s repeated metaphor, though, Walden has not played the piano; rather, he has been played by Kandinsky’s painting. Perhaps in the greatest art it is hard to tell who plays what or whom, since everything vibrates together. Walden’s piano practice gave him a metaphorical keyboard on which to play new aesthetic ideas and combinations of old ones in exciting new ways.

In act 2 I return to Kandinsky and pursue his relationship with the Société Anonyme, which gave the artist his first American solo exhibit in 1923.135 Here, however, let us touch on the pianistic accord between Walden and another significant modernist, Schwitters, arguably the last great artist associated with Der Sturm but also a favorite of the coming Société Anonyme. The curator John Elderfield writes, “the Sturm . . . organization itself became the model from which Schwitters’ own one-man movement, Merz, was developed.”136 We can be more precise: it was Walden’s piano.

Walden’s Einblick in Kunst appeared in 1917. Schwitters inscribed his personal copy, “Schwitters 1918,” the earliest sign of their contact.137 The artist from Hannover introduced himself to Walden in early 1918, and Walden selected him for a group exhibition that June. For a January 1919 show, Walden granted Schwitters top billing, along with Johannes Molzahn and Paul Klee.138 The works Schwitters showed were all abstract or nearly abstract paintings. His famous Merzbilder (Merz pictures), imaginative assemblages and collages, did not yet exist. The artist’s breakthrough, the creation of Merz assemblages in many media, came about, in fact, in preparation for his first solo show at Der Sturm, in July 1919. The following month, Schwitters’s poem “An Anna Blume” (To Anna Blume [lit. flower]) was introduced in the pages of Der Sturm, causing a sensation—for and against—in artistic circles of Berlin.139

Collage was not new as of 1919, but Walden’s tradition of combining found objects, be they poems for which he would compose Lieder or exhibitions of paintings, to produce a whole larger than the sum of its parts, seems intimately connected to the generation of Merz. Schwitters extended this practice to include the refuse of daily life, as in Merzz. 19 (1920, Figure 1.11), which Katherine Dreier saw at Der Sturm in spring 1920 and introduced to the United States at the Société Anonyme shortly thereafter.140 The paper collage harmonizes rhythmic repetitions of abstract patterns (such as the tight, blue and white interlock on the top right and middle left) and postwar rations (Kartoffeln, or potatoes, twice; cigarettes just once) with sonic repetition of the letter s throughout. The handwritten “sse der Strass” on the top left implies further repetition, as the “sse” at the beginning would complete “Strass” to make “Strasse” (street) at the end. While the collage is not explicitly musical, its harmony of visual and aural repetition resonates with Schwitters’s studies of music theory and his own piano playing, which was skilled enough for him to wrestle with Liszt’s advanced piano scores.141 Indeed, an impressionistic survey of Schwitters’s multiple paper sacks of sheet music suggests that Liszt’s works show the most signs of use, including thumbed corners and penciled markings.142

While Dreier developed her taste for Schwitters’s art on the other side of the Atlantic (which I address in detail in act 3), Schwitters’s project expanded under the auspices of Der Sturm.143 In December 1920 Schwitters wrote to Walden about preparations for an upcoming exhibit and publications. He said he wanted to address Merz sculpture, Merz architecture, Merz theater, and Merz poetry. Merz was to become a Gesamtkunstwerk, incorporating any and everything along the way. Schwitters, however, did not leave it entirely to chance; he wanted a provisional plan for the Sturm Evenings that would accompany his exhibit at Sturm gallery in early 1921. He wrote to Walden, “I could read on 26 Jan[uary] and 2 Febr[uary]., if you think that would work. If you’d like, I could do the evening alone, both parts; but I’d prefer that you played something for each part.”144 Schwitters addresses Walden here as a fellow artist, hoping that the two might share the stage together, and he explicitly wants Walden to play the piano. In fact, in a letter to the Dadaist Raoul Hausmann, also in 1921, Schwitters wrote that he held “Walden in exceptionally high regard as an artist.”145 At this date, Schwitters did not mean Walden the composer but, rather, the impassioned player and orchestrator of artistic impulses from across Europe.

Walden, too, felt a connection to Schwitters, possibly one that only lifelong pianists share.146 When Walden sent the Merz artist a copy of his own piano composition, “Entbietung” (Compliment), opus 9, written years earlier to a poem by Dehmel and finally published with an abstract drawing by the Sturm artist Rudolf Bauer in 1917, he inscribed it with his own poetic neologism, signifying their bond: “Kurt Schwitters / im Merzensturm [in the Merz-Sturm] / Herwarth Walden” (Figure 1.12).147 The Merzensturm suggests a relational swirling of generative creativity. Schwitters, who preserved the piece with his sacks of sheet music, likely treasured the emotional and aesthetic resonance in its material manifestation, if not the composition itself.148 Schwitters had a gift for welcoming difficulty and even failure into his world, and the Gleichnis of the piano facilitated that for him as well: a noted component of the Merzbau he constructed in Hannover (1919–37), to which I return, was reputedly a defective organ.149

Dreier and Duchamp at the Piano

Of all the art that the Société Anonyme promoted, Dreier coveted that of Kandinsky and Schwitters, and she forged personal relationships with both artists. Her remarkable friendship with Duchamp, however, produced the Société Anonyme, which shaped the direction of modern art in America.150 Pianos—literal and metaphorical—mediated their relationship as well as the aesthetic Duchamp championed years after her death. To be sure, a famous urinal brought the two together: Dreier’s participation in the jury’s rejection of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) for the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York that year initiated correspondence between the two. Yet Dreier’s little-known diary of 1917–18 provides details of her awkward dance of approach and retreat with her new friend, Duchamp, and it presents the piano in an apparently minor yet crucial role in that negotiation.151

By all accounts, the thirty-year friendship and professional affiliation of Dreier and Duchamp was platonic.152 The diary, however, reveals that the two met increasingly frequently after Dreier “wrote Duchamp a letter!!” on the last day of 1917. He telephoned the following day and “wished me a happy new year was so happy over my letter Will come + see me Thursday evening.” Two days later, on January 3: “Duchamp in evening. Will make panel [Tu m’, 1918, Yale University Art Gallery]. Is delighted about it. Will also give [French] lessons. Happy afternoon + evening.” Soon she saw Duchamp almost daily; by the end of April Dreier began to refer to him with the pet name, “Dee.” In May 1918, when Tu m’ was installed in her New York apartment, a Mrs. Griffin purportedly expressed concern “about D.’s + my friendship. Said it wouldn’t amount to anything.” After a sleepless night, Dreier recorded, “After all it is for me to decide whether D should come into my life or not, not for an outsider.” The following day, Dreier was decisive: she took Duchamp and other friends to her country house in Connecticut: “Dee loves the place.” The next day was a “happy day,” during which Dreier discovered: “Dee musical.”

We sense that her growing attachment will cause frustration, but the unfolding tale in the diary lacks such perspective. On 25 June, Dreier reported having sent Duchamp a letter with quotations from May Sinclair’s novel The Tree of Heaven (1917). The context is unclear, but the book’s significance to Dreier was such that she copied the pertinent passages into her diary, including: “He [Nicky] still couldn’t think why it had happened. But he knew that, even if he had loved Desmond [a female character] with passion, it couldn’t have been the end of him. The part of him that didn’t care . . . was the part that Desmond never would have cared for.”153 Following more anguished text about passion and the lack thereof, Dreier noted to herself, “Something made me send this!”

The implication that Duchamp might play the role of Nicky to Dreier’s Desmond appears to have forced a confrontation between the two. On 28 June Duchamp reputedly told her that he did not understand the letter and that “after reading 3 or 4 times had torn it up.” He may have tried to account for the development of feelings between them, although Dreier does not appear to have accepted his explanation, writing: “Considered he signs himself ‘affecteusement’ + called me ‘Beloved.’ I never said a word then—but someday I will!” But the denouement comes more quickly: the following weekend, Duchamp joined Dreier in Connecticut again. Duchamp must have recognized that he needed to be more direct, but he entered slowly into his exchange with Dreier. He began by not talking at all. In her account, “Dee played on the piano.”

That instrument that mediates great feeling, passion and pain, could not be clear enough in this instance, however. After a walk outside, Duchamp rejected her definitively, if indirectly: “[He] said he hated women, + he hated the letter with the quotation because the woman in me had written it. He liked me, but not the woman in me. Because he was always at war with women.”154 Like all things Duchampian, his purported statement is ambiguous: did he hate what he saw as her conventional femininity, or did he reveal his misogyny? We may never know, although he nearly certainly rejected a more intimate union with Dreier. At the same time, however, his piano playing signaled his desire to continue to relate to Dreier in some other way. It was a real piano that facilitated Duchamp’s decision to define the terms of his relationship with Dreier through art. The rest of their reported conversation that evening set the terms of their bond for years to come. Dreier writes: “Told me he wanted to give me something. The drawing he had made of the Policeman, bell boy etc. for his glass [the Large Glass]; he had made it carefully now it was getting dusty + he wanted it cared for, so he would give it to me. How like a boy.”155 The exchange appears to have accomplished a great deal: Duchamp demonstrated his affection by giving her something he had made and that mattered to him; its subject might have reminded her of the Large Glass (formally titled The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915–23, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and, specifically, its bachelors, who unsuccessfully connect with their targeted bride, just as this pair would not be physically intimate; and Duchamp interpellated Dreier as caretaking mother—which she immediately accepted, identifying him as “boy.”

The piano’s significance in this definitive exchange between Dreier and Duchamp must remain speculative, but two later photographs of her piano with his Small Glass (1918) on top (Figures 1.13 and 1.14) reinforce its premise. Properly titled To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (1918, Museum of Modern Art), the Small Glass consists of oil paint, silver leaf, lead wire, and a magnifying lens on glass (cracked like its cousin, the Large Glass), mounted between two transparent panes of glass in a standing metal frame, which requires that it be placed in space, not on a wall. Perspectivally, it appears as if the two outermost circles were on the ends of bars of equal length that might squeeze shut like scissors; if so, they would meet at the bottom of the central circle, an actual lens that flips what one sees through it from left to right as well as top to bottom. As David Joselit writes, “The scissors’ perpetual opening and closing successively accommodates and annihilates vision through a lens. Its seesaw focus offers a precise allegory of how the gaze may be spatialized—how it is locked in an embrace with the phallic logic of geometral projection.”156 He concludes, “In this work the viewer obedient to the imperative of the title finds himself ridiculously crouched behind the object, looking through it, only to become a spectacle himself, behind the glass.”157

A humbled, emasculated crunch is certainly a possible position to assume, but Dreier, to whom Duchamp gave the work after they both returned from Buenos Aires in 1918, appears to have had much more fun with it. She called it “Disturbed Balance,” under which title it was exhibited in both the Société Anonyme’s International Exhibition of 1926 and Alfred Barr’s famous Cubism and Abstract Art exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936.158 Indicating a playful range of possibilities, the piece appears in two different positions on top of the closed piano in Dreier’s home. In the first, more distant view (Figure 1.13), the Small Glass is positioned on the far end of the piano (from a player’s perspective). As Richard Meyer contends, “In Dreier’s parlor, To Be Looked at . . . furnishes an eccentric but effective counterweight to the Tiffany-style glass floor lamp behind the piano bench, the lamp to which the paisley throw [on the piano] seems to point.”159

The Small Glass is relational in other ways as well. As we can see from the slant of the lower “blade” of the “scissors,” we see it here from behind. Thus, although the piece has likely been turned somewhat so that the photographic lens could capture as much as possible of its surface, we can easily imagine its being swiveled counterclockwise some twenty degrees: in which case, if we stood at the end of the piano, we would be well positioned to follow the title’s instruction. If we were to do so, looking through the glass from the “other side,” with one eye or otherwise for as long as we could, we would look either at a piano player who has sat down to play or at the vacant space ready for him or her to occupy. The Small Glass would work on us as we observed or imagined the pianist, whose playing could, in turn, also affect us.160 The pianist would be upside down and reversed, heightening our attention to the mediation of viewing and playing subjects.161

The second photograph (Figure 1.14), with the Small Glass in the close foreground, shifts the relations again, opening them and us to other possibilities. Its proximity and near identity with the picture plane underscore its purposeful placement. This time the camera has positioned us relative to the work, unlike my mere imagining of such a scenario above. Through the work, in the middle of the photograph, we see the length of the piano recede in (real) space. Above that, the inscribed pyramid in the work appears to hover either in space or in relation to the forms of the unidentified abstract painting on the distant wall. We cannot see through the lens with its radial arcs, though its apparent focus makes me, at least, long to peer “through” it. The glass stands on another intricately patterned throw, the wispy edges of which on the lower right are the softer side of chance, otherwise evident in the shattered shards that nevertheless remain connected. Relative to a piano player, we stand near the end of the piano and off to his or her left side, along the long, straight side of the piano’s lid. Standing here we might see a player through the right side (from our perspective) of the glass. Moving our gaze to the left (within the reach of the “scissors”), we would find the lens, looking through which would turn the world over and sideways. Does our gaze rest or actively engage? Whatever we do, it will be relational, bodily, multisensory—a tenuous balance that could shatter and/or be lovingly repaired.

We must be cautious in attributing too much significance to the placement of Duchamp’s Small Glass on Dreier’s piano in John Schiff’s photographs; its variable location suggests that Schiff may have moved the work. However, Dreier commissioned him to take the photographs. Furthermore, Duchamp admired Schiff’s work enough to ask him to document another installation of sorts, his Sixteen Miles of String at the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in New York in 1942 (Figure 1.15). Peering at this view in the context of the piano Gleichnis, it is impossible not to notice what scholars heretofore have silently passed over: the grand piano at the far end of the room.

The exhibit was not organized under the auspices of the Société Anonyme, but Dreier is listed prominently in the catalog’s record of patrons. Furthermore, the exhibit’s development beyond the purview of Der Sturm or the Société Anonyme points to the broad influence of piano as Gleichnis. Walter Benjamin theorized in 1929 that the piano had become one of those out-of-date bourgeois objects that surrealists revolutionized.162 Yet a close examination of the one pictured here suggests a surprising continuation—with variation—of its mediumistic role within modern art.

In this longitudinal view of the room looking south, Duchamp’s web of string apparently impedes our access to the artworks. Historians are at odds about its meaning. Although T. J. Demos asserts that the string presented “the maximal obstacle between paintings and viewing space,” literalizing the dislocation of participating artists in wartime exile, John Vick argues more convincingly that the twine mediated between spectators and the art in a variety of ways.163 Citing contemporary witnesses, Vick reveals that one experienced the string as a guide “to this and that painting,” another noticed its continual imposition only to declare it “the most paradoxically clarifying barrier imaginable,” and a third felt that the twine “symbolized literally the difficulties to be circumvented by the uninitiate [sic] in order to seem to perceive and understand, the exhibitions [of modern art].” Vick also makes a strong case for the probability that this photo exaggerates the obtrusiveness of the web, which likely included strategically placed “apertures.” Finally, there appear to be two areas with little to no twine at all, the center of the room and the small stage with a grand piano on it, visible in Schiff’s photograph.

Vick introduces the piano as evidence of a string-free vantage point from which Schiff must have shot an opposing, north view of the room, but leaves it there. The piano is not completely clear in the photograph, but the image provides enough information for us to offer some hypotheses. To begin with, the instrument’s prominence on the left of the stage implies potential performance. Yet a distinction between performer and audience is blurred by the easy accessibility of the stage. It is so low, in fact, that one could easily step up on it for a close look, free of string, of the large painting there: Chagall’s To Russia, Donkeys, and Others (ca. 1912, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris), which happens to have been one of his three entries in Der Sturm’s First German Autumn Salon in 1913. Walden granted Chagall his first solo exhibit in 1914 and dedicated the first Sturm Bilderbuch (Picture book) to this fellow Russian Jew.164 The Société Anonyme cultivated a relationship with the artist as well.165 Whether a viewer at the First Papers exhibition was aware of this history of relationships embedded in the material of the painting, the suggestions of activity and passivity, viewer and viewed, become interchangeable when one considers viewing a painting while on stage with it. Finally, the painting itself thematizes connection and disconnection between beings. The floating figure, one breast exposed beside an otherwise flat chest, loses her head as her body is shot through with holes, yet she approaches a cow from whose teats both animal and child suckle. At the First Papers exhibit, physical approach to this painting was easy, but making sense of the work required the viewer’s active engagement with it.

The piano was not as physically accessible or as completely string-free as Vick suggests. A small web of twine fans out from the center of the keyboard up to the ceiling network and down to the bottom of the piano’s two front legs. It covers the space where one would sit to play; indeed, there does not appear to be a stool or bench for our imaginary player to sit on. So, an exhibit visitor would be discouraged from playing but at the same time might notice the unusual orientation of the piano, with keyboard closest to the stage’s “audience.” Traditionally, it was the reverse, with the player far from, and facing, the audience, that is, until Liszt pioneered the solo recital and, just as revolutionary, turned the piano sideways, allowing spectators to see him in profile, his flying fingers and springing body, as they simultaneously heard his music swell and fade. Unsurprisingly, that is how Puni pictures Walden playing as well (Figure 1.2). This piano placement allows the audience even greater potential access to the player’s body; one can imagine oneself empathizing right into him or her—except that no one is there and the keys are hidden away. A book (unidentifiable in the photograph except for the appearance of pictures in it) is open where the musical score should stand, but how one might read and “play” the pictures instead of notes remains mysterious as well. Yet these subject and object reversals, medium translations, desires and their frustrations all dramatize the relationships between creator, work, and spectator. Perhaps Duchamp, rather than defeat viewer participation, as Demos theorizes, literalizes the Gleichnis of art with string, as Vick contends, as well as with the piano.

We come, finally, to Duchamp’s metaphorical piano. Duchamp was explicit about the mediumistic role of the piano in “The Creative Act” (1957). Like Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” a decade later, Duchamp’s essay addresses the triad of creator, work, recipient. Although Barthes calls for the “birth of the reader” and the author’s demise, Duchamp describes the “phenomenon of transmutation” of the “creative act” as “comparable to a transference from the artist to the spectator in the form of an esthetic osmosis taking place through inert matter, such as pigment, piano or marble.”166 Although the artist initiates the phenomenon, “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world . . . and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”167 Thus artist and spectator relate actively and passively through the raw matter that they together transform into art. Duchamp is primarily a visual artist, but his most potent metaphor here is neither pigment nor marble but the piano, because we can literally strike its keys and visualize how they move the souls of (willing) others.