In music, as in all the arts, radical modernism was a primary source of creative energy in the period from before World War I until after World War II. The vision of new “languages” to express the new conditions of modern life was a powerful one, even if the public at large often found those languages hard to understand. The success of some avant-garde works of art — Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck, for one — shows that they met with a deep response from minds and hearts battered by the events of the early twentieth century.

Not everyone was as successful as Berg, however; most avant-garde music played to a small, esoteric audience. A figure like Schoenberg, convinced that music’s progress depended on his leadership, could accept this and hold uncompromisingly to his principles. Many others, too, never blinked — including, after Ives, several modernists in America, chief among them Carl Ruggles (1876–1971), Roger Sessions (1896–1985), and Edgard Varèse (1883–1965; Varèse came to America from France).

Other composers, both here and abroad, took a more ambivalent view of avant-garde innovation. The force of Romantic tradition was still strong. Some famous twentieth-century names never joined the avant-garde at all and kept on mining the reliable quarries of Romanticism for their own private veins of (they hoped) musical gold. One area where this tendency is particularly clear, as we will see, is early film music.

Other composers worked with the ideas of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, selectively adopting no more than they needed to fulfill their own creative visions. Still others started out wholeheartedly in the avant-garde, only to turn back to more traditional styles. American figures who fall somewhere in this spectrum are Charles Griffes (1884–1920), Samuel Barber (1910–1981), and William Schuman (1910–1992), as well as William Grant Still (1895–1978) and Aaron Copland (1900–1990), whom we come to at the end of this chapter. Both Still, the first important African American composer in the concert music tradition, and Copland also recall nineteenth-century nationalism in their use of American musical idioms.

Of the many impressive composers active in the first half of the twentieth century, several have maintained and even increased their hold on audiences up to the present day — including the opera composers Puccini (see page 274) and Richard Strauss (1864–1949). Strauss started out as a composer of sensational symphonic poems, and then in 1905 created a furor with the modernist opera Salome. But soon he retreated to a more Romantic style. It is evident in his opera Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose, 1911), a dizzying mixture of Wagner, Mozart, and Johann Strauss, the Waltz King (no relation).

Two more major composers who had little to do with avant-garde experiment were Russians who (like Stravinsky) fled the Russian Revolution of 1917: Sergei Prokofiev, who is discussed on page 355, and Sergei Rachmaninov (1873–1943). Rachmaninov was one of the greatest pianists of his time, and his Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 3 are among the most popular works in the concert repertory. Listen to a section from Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, a concerto-like work for piano and orchestra, in Listening Exercise 2.