Arnold Schoenberg at 150

Schoenberg is 150 years old and it would be strange if this celebration were not marked for the composer who more than others represented  “Forbidden Music”.  I have written little about Schoenberg on this blog, though my admiration for the man and his  music is  clearly expressed in my two books  published by Yale University Press, Forbidden Music – The Jewish Composers Bannd by the Nazis, (2013) and more recently,  The  Music of Exile, (2023). But being an admirer does not necessarily mean I love everything about Schoenberg and enjoy listening to him while doing my taxes or ironing my shirts. Schoenberg is both too complex and too important for such trivialities. My admiration extends over much that has little to do with his actual compositional output. Having written that, I am an admirer of works that extend from Gurrelieder to Survivor from Warsaw, which I have had the thrill of narrating several times for performances in Barcelona. His Kol Nidre is powerful and moving.

I also happen to think that the unfinished Moses und Aron is one of the 20^th century’s greatest operas – and its significance goes well beyond its musical content. The dilemmas that confronted Schoenberg in developing the two main protagonists in his opera were issues that shaped some of my own views on those things we have not been given to understand. Read about it in my latest book Music of Exile. Moses felt what we carelessly refer to as “God” was in fact something so beyond comprehension that no word could suffice and Aaron’s miracles carried out in his name were nothing more than trivialisations.  It is monotheism based on ethics rather than the confusingly familial parent-child relationship of Christianity. But back to the relationship of this blog with Arnold Schoenberg: I have at least thirty papers on Schoenberg in a separate file written by a variety of academics. I have reviewed two books on Schoenberg for The Times Literary Supplement. I remember reading a quote in Melos from 1927, which pointed out that Schoenberg had more articles written about him than works performed. It would seem the same applies today. Too many have written about Schoenberg for me to have much to add.

But my admiration of Schoenberg also extends to his ability to disrupt. His disruption was necessary and grew out of justified anger, resentment and frustration.  If we look more closely, we find in Schoenberg someone who is so culturally and linguistically heir to an Austro-German cultural legacy that the only way he could prove his innate entitlement while defying antisemitic detractors, was to totally re-invent German music. Such audaciousness is like writing poetry: only if done well, does it achieve the desired effect and impress. If done poorly, it only embarrasses. Schoenberg does not embarrass.

My colleague at the Exilarte Center, Prof. Gerold Gruber has written a superb book called Schönberg Verstehen, – Understanding Schoenberg. It is an impressive collection of essays and structural and analytical studies of Schoenberg’s Op.11 Drei Klavierstücke – Three Piano pieces, which Prof. Gruber sees as a key to understanding Schoenberg’s musical past and future development. But even this title suggests that Schoenberg was somehow a symptom of a far more profound cultural phenomenon. Understanding Schoenberg is not necessarily loving everything Schoenberg composed. In this respect, Schoenberg was not a composer to compare with Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms or even Mahler (Gurrelieder apart). But understanding Schoenberg is learning about the cultural world he rumbled and why he felt it was necessary. Schoenberg, like the most important composers before and after him, was reacting to complacency, and the passivity of audiences. Until Wagner and then Mahler, music was a less challenging and less dynamic art form than the visual arts or literature. Opera as theatre could address prejudices and social injustice, but music on its own could only afford pleasure and ultimately, passivity. Wagner’s operas made music socially and politically relevant.  Mahler confronted listeners with their own insecurities and prejudices in order to neutralise them: triviality, banality and triteness are used as a mirror to hold up to listeners. Schoenberg refused to allow audiences to take music for granted – he  did not  want the “next note” to be one of numerous expectant possibilities.

Perhaps some of Schoenberg’s earliest attempts at disruption are miscalculations.  His das Buch der Hängenden Gärten is for me impressive because of its position within the timeline of twentieth century music. Schoenberg himself said it was the work in which he felt he had found his true voice. Since then, it has been superseded – indeed, superseded by Schoenberg himself. But this period of Schoenberg’s creativity is important because it unleashed the idea of Expressionism in music. He removed constricting outlines and constraining borders and allowed his inner contrasts to explode into a musical kaleidoscope. Compare these paintings by Richard Gerstl of Schoenberg and again of his family – the figurative painting is contained by the clear outlines of the subject – when he comes to paint the Schoenberg family, the outlines have disappeared.

His second quartet Op. 10 truly does transport us to another planet and is a work that along with his Op. 11 piano pieces elides into his jettisoning of the restraining confines of tonality. His subsequent Five Orchestral Pieces (Op.16) are prophetic of what was about to be unleashed on Europe but also what was about to be unleashed on music. The journalism of the day referred to “colours” when describing Schoenberg’s music – colour was expression and not constrained by the limitations of shapes. Shapes only showed what was outward; colour showed what was inward. The title of the third of the Five Pieces is called Farben – the German word for “Colours”.

After the Armageddon of the First World War, a sense of sobriety descended on Germany and Austria.  If Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch decided to extract all extraneous emotional fat from music, reducing it to its barest structures with all expressive distractions removed, then Schoenberg came up with his own solutions. Toch and Hindemith remained true to tonality while removing everything that might speak to the heart rather than the objective, ever critical and evaluating brain. Germany’s manifestation of “New Objectivity” in music could be understood as removing all colour and leaving only the most essential structural outlines.

Schoenberg desperately wanted to keep his expressive palette while at the same time finding a means of organising it. His development of twelve tone as an evolution away from traditional diatonic tonality presented him with the necessary means.  It freed melody from harmony and facilitated the liberation of expressive dissonance. It had its own strict rules while dissolving the rules that had determined musical comprehension hitherto.  He could create expressive lines with wide intervals placed in dissonant relationships.  It offered expression but removed effusive “feeling”, a hated concept that had deluded the sense of German self-worth and led to the collapse of Empires and nations. This period, from the early 20s, starting with his unfinished Jakobsleiter (which stands without an opus number between Op. 22 and Op. 23) until his Op. 31 Variations for Orchestra appears to have been a period of establishing his ideas. These are works that are rarely performed.  Yet throughout this period, he was working, composing and developing his ultimate masterpiece, Moses und Aron.

Frankly, this lack of familiarity with these early twelve-tone works is a pity. They offer a great deal and land within an obvious transitional period.  His Op. 24 Serenade is engaging and full of humour and invention. It is far less abrasive than Erwartung and shares some of the parody heard in Pierrot lunaire. Despite its use of twelve tone, it remains constrained within recognisable structures such as March, Minuet and Theme and Variations. Today, we have been trained to hear and follow non-diatonic music just by its frequent insertion into media. Already in the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood discovered that “modern” music (that is to say, “atonal” or heavily chromatic music) was useful for scoring suspense and horror movies.  It may come across as cynical today, but in reality it educated generations to listen and accept music in new and untraditional ways.  Listening to the Serenade today, its combination of woodwinds and plucked strings gives the impression of parodying the traditional music of Vienna’s Heurigen or wine-houses. His Op. 25 suite for piano also stays within the classical nomenclature of Prelude, Gavotte, Musette, a da capo of the Gavotte, Intermezzo, minuet, and so on.  Schoenberg was moving harmonically in one direction while remaining within the self-imposed constraints of classical concepts. Both Op. 24 and Op. 25 offer the listener a clear linear trajectory and an feeling of cadence. In other words, the listener is aware of being at the beginning, the middle and the end of the work. The same is true of his wind quintet Op. 26 and later his Suite Op. 29, which is followed by his Third String Quartet and Orchestral Variations Op.  31.

By the time we reach his “Zeitoper” Von Heute Auf Morgen (From One Day to the Next) from 1929, we encounter Schoenberg attempting a certain fusion with Germany’s ambient New Objectivity. In the case of this particular opera, parodying contemporary society, Von Heute auf Morgen offers Schoenbergian contradictions in full. As his former pupil Hanns Eisler once said, “He was a revolutionary so that later he could become a reactionary”. In common with Hindemith’s opera Neues vom Tage, written almost at the same time,it demonstrates the frailties of modern marriage. Unlike the Hindemith opera which is more realistic and socially contemporary, Schoenberg has the wife returning to her traditional role despite her short-lived attempt to take on lovers. The libretto was written by Schoenberg’s wife Gertrud (née Kolisch). Music, as with life, will always react to an inner ethical gravitational pull. It was the pull that moved Schoenberg away from the wilds of atonal Expressionism towards the organisation of the dodecaphonic.    

In reality, the old and the new always co-existed within Schoenberg. Few were as knowledgeable and interested in tonality as Schoenberg. His book on harmony tells us more about his fascination with tonality than it does about the dangers of parallel fifths. He hammered in the basics of harmony, counterpoint and theory long before he started demonstrating his twelve-tone ideas. What he accomplished was to remove the innate sense of musical anticipation from the listener. Within music until Schoenberg, there had always existed an inner orthography passively perceived by the listener, so no matter how abrupt a key-change, it never fell outside of the listener’s inner musical anticipation and expectation.  Schoenberg removed this sense of expectation, seeing it as a form of listener complacency. But rather than move towards the totally abstract, he remained structured so that even if notes or harmonies did not follow as anticipated, the linear expectations could still be met using recognisable architecture. As his students in Vienna were friends and disciples as much as they were pupils, he explained twelve-tone ideas only to those whom he had already taught the fundamentals of western music. His best-known pupils, such as Anton Webern and Alban Berg often used the method as a means rather than an end, though many on the outer reaches of his circle began to use the method as a means of calculating, rather than composing music. It was something that Ernst Krenek even accused himself of fallen into – composing as if solving a crossword puzzle, or worse, composing while solving a crossword puzzle.   

Nevertheless, it is important to accept that Schoenberg should not be confused, as he often is, by his musical progeny.  Anton Webern was an infinitely more complex technician who rather than merely suspending the cohesion of tonality, suspended the cohesion of time, writing music that is often called “a-temporal”.  It is music that is condensed, compressed and suspended in such a manner that there is no sense of beginning, middle or end. This total suspension of all linear comprehension is something that fascinated the post-war avant-garde. Perhaps it was the tragic fate of Webern who encapsulated the idea of the German artist as victim that pushed Schoenberg to one side during the years following Germany’s defeat in 1945.  Webern was not a Jew, but was shot at the end of the war by mistake after wandering out after curfew. The immediate post-war generation of Darmstadt composers chose to ignore Schoenberg and other Jewish composers with the possible exception of Boulez’s teacher René Leibowitz and turned their attentions and admiration to non-Jewish avant-gardists. 

Why this should be is something that can be debated and discussed, though with little concrete evidence and a dash of post-war paranoia.  The youngsters who came to the summer courses in Darmstadt were children during the Third Reich and indoctrinated with the degree of antisemitic prejudice that many must have found difficult to shake off. One of the leading spirits in these summer courses was Hermann Heiß, a composer who was heavily compromised but ultimately exonerated after the war. Webern, Krenek and indeed, Heiß were presented as non-Jewish musical victims. Webern was shot by an American soldier of the occupation, Krenek was exiled and Heiß was forced, as he later claimed, into “inner exile”. Together, they projected a post-Schoenbergian avant-garde. I realise this is speculative and I have nothing concrete on which to base this view. It an impression I gathered after corresponding with a pupil of Richard Hoffmann, Schoenberg’s last assistant in Los Angeles. Hoffmann described the wilful suppression of Schoenberg in Darmstadt along with the near deification of Anton Webern. Internalised and official policies of antisemitism from just a few years before would not vanish with the defeat of Germany. Young German composers in the country’s post-war contemporary music festivals were angry at their heritage being sabotaged by Hitler. Their understanding of “heritage”, however, appears instinctively and even sub-consciously to have excluded Schoenberg, or indeed, any Austro-German Jewish composer. Exceptions were Erich Itor Kahn and the Poles, René Leibowitz and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati all of whom were one or two generations younger than Schoenberg. They did not have the agency to flee at the obvious signs of danger and remained living and suffering for various lengths of time under Nazi rule. Schoenberg, being experienced in the murderous nature of German antisemitism left as soon as he could.

Soon, the poisonous myth of the émigré’s good life in America while the rest of his countrymen and women were being bombed began to take hold. Schoenberg’s American works were dismissed as “Hollywood” despite the fact that he never wrote a single film score. His Kol Nidre, Survivor from Warsaw, Ode to Napleon and even his Second Chamber Symphony were all seen as signs of “selling out” to the unsophisticated American Dollar. According to many progressives in Germany, he had lost his edge and this was apparently why he had been unable to complete Moses und Aron.  For a few years, I was the producer of recordings with Christoph von Dohnanyi and recall a certain coolness towards Schoenberg’s American works. I now regret not asking him more closely on these points, but at the time, I was just discovering much of Schoenberg myself.  But there can be no denying that Schoenberg, like many other émigré composers found himself drawn back to a certain idea of classicism, completing his violin concerto in 1936 (Op. 36); and his Fourth String Quartet (Op. 37) in the same year. An impressive Piano Concerto (Op. 42) followed in 1942. These are equally challenging works, but heard today, there is little of the sense of untamed incoherency with which critics used to dismiss Schoenberg. But does that mean he’s now been made “Salonfähig” as they say in German, meaning his music has now been “house-broken”? I cannot admit to warming to Schoenberg’s very last a-cappella choral works. Challenges remain. I turn 70 this year, so I still have time.