By Michael Moriarty

The instincts of the great German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, ruled insane by many because he died of syphilis, have never been more corroborated than now in the Third Millennium. His earliest whiff of Nazism came 50 years before Hitler even finished grade school. Excoriating the famed German supremacist composer Richard Wagner, Nietzsche labeled his critique Contra Wagner.

I have just finished reading Carl E. Schorske’s Fin de Siècle Vienna. His comprehensive analysis of 19^th-century Austria reveals the seminal roots of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s soul that dictated what would happen to Europe in the 20th century.

Beginning with the intellects that were the bipolar field out of which the architecture and city planning of modern Vienna grew – the aesthetic opposites of Sitte and Wagner – Schorske leads us through the lives of the Pan-German racists Georg von Schonerer and Karl Lueger, the miraculous intellectual evolution of Theodore Herzl (founding father of Zionism and inspiration for modern Israel) and the rootlessness of artists Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoshka. Schorske’s treatise culminates in a portrait of the most revealing revolutionary of that age, the composer Arnold Schoenberg.

I’m an actor. I’ve labored on stage, screen and television for 40 years. Yet my first love and lifelong avocation is music. Between my jazz dates and performances of my chamber music in New York, St. Louis, Toronto and Calgary, the history of music and the inevitable efforts of modern composers to dissolve, erode and discard the laws of diatonic harmony constantly shadowed my musical journey. I see this phenomenon in the musical arts as a disturbing mirror of the singular personality, Karl Marx, who was bent on destroying the structure of Judeo-Christian civilization, as well as its Bible and collective memory.

To keep this as comprehensible as possible, I’ll liken the laws of diatonic harmony to the Law of Gravity or Einstein’s formula for energy: E=MC².

Having said that, I can now hear the admonitions of Schoenberg’s ghost as it readies to pounce. As Schoenberg stated emphatically, all notes are equal, to that Maestro they are, and Twelve Tone (Serial) Music is at least the equal of harmony, so with that egalitarian commitment on their part, they must hear my side of the equation. Each tone has overtones, indisputably. The first new addition to the overtone series is the interval of the fifth or, if counting upward, the fourth.

From this scientific fact alone, the rules of diatonic harmony were built. A fifth in the overtone series is as immutable as Galileo’s famous drop from the Tower of Pisa: the determination of the falling object’s speed and the startling fact that if all objects were tossed into a vacuum, they would all, no matter what their size or weight, reach the ground at the same time. This finding is no different than the inevitability of a chord progression called the circle of fifths.

As the stone falls, so do the proclivities of a seventh chord fall toward the fifth below or the fourth above. For Schoenberg to defy this law is akin to a rocket’s efforts to defy the law of gravity. I’m all for exploration and adventure, but with the Schoenberg School and its followers, the audiences did not play along.

Yes indeed, this presents a major psychic problem as well. Regardless of how far out our "lost weekends" may become, we eventually want to go home!

The American artists involved in the early Communist movement in the Free World and the Group Theater modeling its output on Stalin’s demands for Socialist Realism – plus composer Aaron Copland’s breathtaking Cri de Coeur and Fanfare for the Common Man, and Arthur Miller’s blatant assault on the American Dream, Death of a Salesman – all of these are reminiscent of Schoenberg’s declaration that the future must toss out the rudiments of the past.

Schoenberg obliged his students to create from a tone row a melody in which one note cannot be repeated until all the other 11 notes of the 12-note, chromatic scale have been sounded. It is possible, as in Twelve Tone Tune by the great jazz pianist Bill Evans, to take such a "tone row" and make it sound remotely diatonic. However, it necessitates taking only one step backward to the relatively modern school of Wagner, called chromaticism, the forerunner of Twelve Tone or, in the oxymoronic euphemism, atonal music.

The artists and the Communist Revolutionaries were swimming together in a synchronized ideology. It is not without major significance that even a grotesque, Communist purist like Josef Stalin grew tired of excessive a-diatonic music and branded one of Dimitri Shostakovich’s symphonies of the 1930s "muddle, not music." The homicidal dictator’s real objection, however, was to that great Russian composer’s commitment to classicism and the models of Johann Sebastian Bach, the undisputed master of diatonic harmony. Shostokovich, privately mind you, composed a series of preludes and fugues in the manner of Bach. Keith Jarrett, the greatest contemporary jazz pianist we have, recorded them brilliantly. Obviously, Jarrett is one of the few contemporary geniuses who has not been entirely won over by the revolution. Otherwise, he would have obeyed the artistic peer pressure to avoid the work of a furtively dissident Soviet like Shostakovich.

Copland is the most fascinating of American composers. He was caught in the dilemma that Schoenberg’s revolutionary call placed on all serious modern composers. Following Bela Bartok’s model and (at least ideologically, if not musically) basing his most famous and, I think, greatest work on the grass-roots, folk songs of America – Appalachian Spring, Rodeo and The Lincoln Portrait – his creations literally blossomed into iconic American musical signatures, from the Shaker heavens of Pennsylvania to the wide open spaces of the American West. It is that openness, the sense of limitless horizons to his harmonies, which use the open fifth repeatedly, the overtones of which pile up in diatonic momentum almost soundlessly, confirming for me the empirical mystery – yes, the underlying sacredness of the laws inherent in diatonic harmony.

Copland’s few efforts at Twelve Tone are painfully unsatisfying, particularly to an orchestra, because the sum of their parts is so much less than the amount of effort it takes to play them. Or, as someone once described the Nixon administration, "it confuses long hours with hard work."

Explorations into dissonance and indiscernible harmonies, at least to this listener's ears, would have blossomed gracefully and organically without the ruthless paradigms of the French Revolution and Karl Marx slitting the throat of diatonic harmony and Judeo-Christian culture. Bach had already begun to point the way in his own work but, alas, at the same time he was pouring his Gospel oratorios onto the page, the seminal seeds of the Antichrist's revolution had begun with the Priory of Sion.

In conclusion, no figure of the 19th century, out of which the Marxist formulations were spawned and disseminated virulently, so encompassed the abominable depth of evil toward which the human race was headed than the Twelve Tone School of Arnold Schoenberg. Out of his theories, geniuses like Alban Berg led listeners into the torn and fractured souls of Wozzeck and Lulu. It was hardly the sensual life in those operas that damned them. It was the revolting nausea emitted from that century’s "flowers of evil," which Jean-Paul Sartre almost crowned as the Truth in his play No Exit, that can be heard, felt and almost tasted.