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| Charlie Chaplin, Gertrud and Arnold Schoenberg, Los Angeles, 1935 (Photographer: Max Munn Autrey) |
Arnold
Schoenberg was the twentieth century’s most violently controversial composer;
he remains so for us. Was he its greatest? Perhaps, perhaps not: there will
always be several other deserving pretenders to the title; it is scarcely a
title worth bothering about. Is his music the most performed, the most listened
to? Certainly not. Indeed part of his ‘greatness’, certainly of his
controversy, lies in confrontation with a world that often will not listen,
sometimes does not even know. Schoenberg’s is in many ways a tragic story that
yet awaits its true catharsis. Like Beethoven, the degree of Schoenberg’s
influence dwarfs that of any other twentieth-century composer, Stravinsky
included. The latter’s Rite of Spring,
Les Noces, Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and so on undoubtedly changed the
face of twentieth-century music; yet Schoenberg’s break with the tonal universe
within which Western art music had operated for roughly three centuries and his
subsequent adoption of the ‘method of composing with twelve notes related only
to one another’ utterly transformed its course. That transformation extended
far beyond mere ‘influence’. When the soprano in Schoenberg’s Second String
Quartet sings that she feels the ‘air of another planet’, not only do we feel
it too; we know that, having breathed that air, nothing will ever quite be the
same again – even if, perhaps especially if, we elect to return to tonality, be
it that of earlier or later music.
Schoenberg
remains the great modernist composer,
forbidding and heroic, in life and
work a standing, intransigent rebuke to the commercialist imperatives of his
time and ours. He was, however, much more than that too. He was also a Viennese
Jew who converted to Lutheranism and back again. He lived his life largely
between Vienna and Berlin; then, following the Nazi seizure of power, he lost
his job, his bearings, his life, and became an exile, settling far from the
Central European culture in which he had grown up, in Los Angeles. Born in the vanished
world – a world always with us in its art and in its history too – of
Austria-Hungary, an anti-Semite on every street corner, Schoenberg died, not
only having lived through the trauma, which he had long foreseen, of the
Holocaust, but having witnessed the creation of the State of Israel, a Zionist
project to which he felt and voiced the strongest yet most difficult of
connections.
This
is a story I have recently been trying to tell, not least through the music
that lies at its very heart. For if we never listen, how shall we know? If I
have one piece of advice, however, it would be to forget, at least for now, the
disputes surrounding this music, whether ‘for’ or ‘against’. Listen to this
music as part of an œuvre that has more in common, both with itself and with
the great Austro-German tradition with which Schoenberg so proudly identified
himself, than many would ever admit; by all means listen to it too as a
harbinger of the musical world to come, of Boulez and Stockhausen, of Henze and
Nono. Above all, however, listen to Schoenberg’s music as music, and let its hyper-expressivity speak to you as might that
of Wagner and Brahms, of Bach and Mozart, of Beethoven and Mahler.
Verklärte
Nacht
It
would be well-nigh inconceivable not to start with the string sextet, Verklärte Nacht (‘Transfigured Night’),
one of Schoenberg’s earliest essays in the art of reconciling Wagnerian
harmonic development with Brahmsian motivic writing. One can think of it,
listen to it, that way if one likes, or one can listen to it as a response to
Richard Dehmel’s erotic poem, whose narrative structure it follows closely, the
latter’s five stanzas reflected, even transfigured in five contrasted musical
sections; with Schoenberg, it is rarely a matter of either/or. Odd-numbered sections present the forest:
there is sepulchral darkness to the opening, as our (aural) eyes adjust, but
also the sense of a gateway to something unknown, dangerous perhaps, yet also
exciting. The second and fourth sections present Dehmel’s words of woman and
man respectively. The woman confesses that she had married a man she did not
love; she had therefore yielded to another, a stranger, whose child she now
bears. Transfiguration is effected through the man’s nobility of soul,
manifested not in a self-denying act of charity, but in a violin and cello duet
of love. ‘Two people walk through the high, bright night.’ The
1950 Hollywood Quartet recording, for which Schoenberg himself wrote a programme note, may
have been matched, but it has never been surpassed.
Gurrelieder
If Tristan
und Isolde haunts the pages of Verklärte
Nacht, how much more so does it the gargantuan tale of love, betrayal, and
catharsis, Gurrelieder. Götterdämmerung does too, not least in
the parallel vassals’ chorus. One may readily forget, given the accomplishment
of his orchestral writing here, that Schoenberg had never previously written a
completed work calling for full, let alone such gargantuan, orchestra. (He had
to order special manuscript paper for the number of staves required; none such
existed.) Listen to its course, however, and you will hear the change in
Schoenberg’s orchestral writing over the period of its orchestration, long put
to one side for financial reasons. Harmony and melody remain, but the final
part speaks of a world that had known the first fruits of ‘atonality’. Claudio Abbado and
massed Berlin forces, many artists the same as in his commercial Vienna Philharmonic recording, capture
the work’s late Romanticism and modernity to a tee.
String
Quartet no.2
How could one not include this fabled quartet? In
many ways, it is an ‘easier’ listen than Schoenberg’s first numbered essay in
this genre. The journey from tonality to atonality provides a narrative of its
own, Schoenberg’s compositional journey more generally telescoped into a drama
first without and then with words. Ghosts of Vienna past are, typically
for Schoenberg, ever present. Listen to the second violin’s singing of a line
from the Viennese popular song ‘Ach du lieber Augustin’, suggestive of something
afoot: ‘It’s all over, it’s all over.’ Soon: ‘Ich fühle luft von anderem
planeten.’ (‘I feel the air of another planet.’) Gravity, tonal or planetary,
loses its pull: ‘I lose myself in tones, circling, weaving … I feel I am above
the last cloud.’ The final ‘resolution’, such as it is, turning to F-sharp
major, the quartet having opened in F-sharp minor, sounds surprising, even perverse. This,
to quote the title of a lecture Schoenberg would give in exile, is ‘How one
becomes lonely’ – or is it how one becomes free, becomes ultimately reconciled
with a new world? Are they one and the same, as Brahms (frei aber froh) might have counselled him? Here are
the New Vienna Quartet from 1967:
Erwartung
The
Second String Quartet, written in 1908, prepared the way for a ‘miracle year’,
1909, in Schoenberg’s output, comparable to that of Schubert in 1815 or
Schumann in 1840. How to choose but one work from this highpoint of ‘free
atonality’? Answers, perhaps, on one of the many postcards Schoenberg,
sometimes affectionate, sometimes playful, sometimes angry, loved to send. His
one-act opera (a ‘monodrama’, with a single character), Erwartung has at least as great a claim as any. It remains one of
the astounding musical accomplishments of the twentieth century. The libretto
was written by a dermatologist, Marie Pappenheim, later an important figure in
the German sexual liberation movement: she offered a clinical understanding of
hysteria as the context for the extraordinary outpouring we hear – and feel. ‘The
aim,’ Schoenberg would explain in 1929, ‘is to represent in slow motion everything that occurs
during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to
half an hour.’ The single event, the Woman’s stumbling over the corpse of her
lover, essentially expands itself, both forwards and backwards, over time. Verklärte Nacht, then, is sped up,
magnified, subverted, perhaps even reversed. Anja Silja, the Vienna
Philharmonic, and Christoph von Dohnányi judge the work’s competing
demands at least as well as any other artists, in a recording deservedly
considered a classic.
Pierrot
lunaire
If
Erwartung is impossible for humans to
perform to perfection, the very conception of Pierrot lunaire seems designed to preclude the possibility of
reconciling so many competing forces. Is it a work of cabaret? Assuredly, yet
not only that. Is it an instrumental masterpiece, as Stravinsky averred? Ditto.
Again, best to listen, enjoy, and take it for what it is in any particular
performance on any particular occasion. Recommendations do not come higher than
Christine
Schäfter, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and that most legendary yet
ambivalent of Schoenbergians, Pierre Boulez. Herewith a film made with their recording:
Suite, op.25
Let
us move ahead to the Roaring Twenties, to the world of the new twelve-note
method. Always a method, Schoenberg insisted: never a system. The chronology of
Schoenberg’s first works and sections of works written according to the new
method – much of which he had been working towards earlier, even in Pierrot – is complex; we need not bother
with it here. Instead, once again, only listen: here to the first work in its
entirety written as such. The neo-Baroque Suite for Piano, op.25 will ideally performed
with dazzling Bauhaus surface gleam that yet reveals an eminently Bösendorfer sensibility
beneath. No one comes closer to that ideal for me than Maurizio Pollini (first movement), but Florent Boffard's recording offers an estimable alternative:
Moses
und Aron
In
Moses und Aron, the fourth and last of his operas, left incomplete – perhaps
uncompletable – at his death, Schoenberg wrestled with so many of the themes of
his music and life. It is a work about difficulty, about communication, about
the relationship between genius and the public, between God and man.
Ferociously difficult to perform, above all for the chorus, called upon to
perform dodecaphonic Bach whilst performing an ‘erotic orgy’ around the Golden
Calf, it is, however, anything but difficult to listen to: so long as one
grants it due attention. Michael Gielen and Boulez, especially in his second,
Concertgebouw recording of this searing drama, made in the wake of
staged performance, penetrate to its heart as few others do. However, there remains something special indeed about the first performance, conducted by Hans Rosbaud, who told in a 1961 interview of a 'very dramatic moment in my career':
One night, perhaps at one o’clock, … the telephone rang furiously; the radio station of Hamburg … asked me if I could conduct the world premiere of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. The regular conductor [Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt] had [had] an accident and could not conduct the performance, for which the radio station had invited many important people …, among other guests, Mrs Schoenberg and her daughter Nuria … I asked, ‘When will this first performance take place?’ And they answered, ‘Exactly in one week … Mr Rosbaud, do come, you must come, you cannot abandon us in this desperate situation!
Violin Concerto
Schoenberg’s
inability to complete Moses, no
performance imaginable in exile, did not preclude composition and completion of
a host of American works. Alleged unplayability – for the soloist, Jascha
Heifetz having declared it so – long contributed to a mystique that did not
help it be loved, or even listened to. However, the greatest difficulty seems
to have been musical rather than technical. If the concertos of Beethoven and
Brahms had proved notably ‘symphonic’ when compared with ‘easier’ works in the
repertoire; Schoenberg’s, by contrast, seems to have rejoiced in mischievous
play between the apparently contrasting demands of traditional virtuosity
intensified and the twelve-note method. Yet there beats a traditional, even
traditionalist, heart within, its three movements as expected, both in number
and in type: sonata form-Andante grazioso-marching
finale. Ultimately, this is a work of hyper-Romanticism, deserving both to be
played and listened to as such. Zvi Zeitlin
understood that well, here in a beautifully comprehending performance with
Rafael Kubelík and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. As ever, the trick is
to treat music as music: all else will follow.
A
Survivor from Warsaw
Always
inclined or rather destined to bear witness, Schoenberg became, if anything,
still more so, once the Holocaust he had long foreseen came into barbaric
being. ‘It means at first,’ he wrote, insistent both
upon his faith and his status as a creative, not documentary, artist: ‘a
warning to all Jews, never to forget what has been done to us, never to forget
that even people who did not do it themselves, agreed with them and many of
them found it necessary to treat us this way. … The main thing is, that I saw
it in my imagination.’ The words, Schoenberg’s own, were derived from accounts
by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto. The gas chamber awaiting, they spontaneously
erupt into a rendition, triumphant, defiant, indescribably harrowing, of the
ancient Hebrew song, ‘Shema Yisroel’. Abbado and the VPO, alert to the work’s Mahlerian ghosts as well as to its
Adornian challenge, prove superlative guides in this, our final stop for now.
For fuller recording recommendations, not restricted to YouTube, and indeed more on Schoenberg generally, please see my book, Arnold Schoenberg, published by Reaktion Books, distributed in the Americas by Chicago University Press.
