Arnold Schönberg. Weimar Bio

Arnold Schönberg, an early Twentieth Century modernist, fit nicely into the avant garde philosophy of rebellion against the old social and cultural order of Europe. In the tumultuous time of the continent's recovery from the deep wounds of World War I, his act of rebellion overthrew the traditional harmonies of symphonic music. In their place he composed atonal creations of harmonic strangeness and unconventional melody to stand against the status quo and for liberation of the intellect.

Mr. Schönberg participated directly in Weimar culture between 1925, when he moved from Vienna to Berlin at the urging of Franz Schreker to become director of a master class in composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts, and 1933, when he fled Germany to escape Nazi persecution of Jews. He was mentor to many young musical rebels.

Like other movements and genres launched or refined by Weimar intellectuals and artists, the new music created and propagated by Mr. Schönberg and his disciples extended well beyond the short-lived German episode into other cultures and subsequent eras. Atonal dissonance — the blasting away of classical norms, the rejection of harmony, the destruction of chords — became a global standard in the realm of ideas, one that remains influential today.

A P R I M E S Y M B O L
O F I N T E L L E C T U A L R E S I S T A N C E .

Mr. Schönberg's profound and enduring influence on Twentieth Century composers emerged on the concert stage during Weimar, but thrived on the intensity of revulsion against the fascist ideology of Nazism, especially in the stunned quiet of early peace. Post-war analysis and deconstruction of the Third Reich positioned Mr. Schönberg's radical musical dissonance as a prime symbol of intellectual resistance to the virulent fascism of his age.

Classical and Romantic composers favored by the leaders of the Third Reich, including Beethoven and Chopin, fell from favor through the power of association. Who stood to replace them in the canon? The oeuvre of Mr. Schönberg and disciples would provide fertile alternatives.

"Hitler seemingly tainted the art; he made it dubious," Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker ("Ghost Sonata: What happened to German Music," March 24, 2003). "No music was more suspect than the Führer's favorite late-Romantic strains of Wagner, Bruckner, and Strauss, a few bars of which are enough to give Holocaust survivors flashbacks of horror. Conversely, it was thought that no music resisted the Nazi taint more thoroughly than the modernist school that Hitler detested. Thus did Arnold Schönberg, the inventor of atonality and of twelve-tone compositions, became a heroic figure in the post-war years; he had stayed, it seemed, absolutely pure. After 1945, a new morality of music evolved, based on two questionable but potent syllogisms: (1) if Hitler liked it, it must be bad; (2) if Hitler hated it, it must be good."

T H E P H I L O S O P H Y
O F N E W M U S I C .

The lineage of intellectual inquiry and exploration that led to the primacy of anti-classical dissonance began with Mr. Schönberg, extended into the compositions of his brilliant pupil Alban Berg, and became codified through the writings of philosopher-critic Theodor Adorno. Mr. Adorno's 1949 extended essay, "The Philosophy of New Music," attempted with some success to translate into words the thoughts and ideas supposedly embedded in Mr. Schönberg's music.

"The 'Philosophy' argues that music must expunge all familiar sounds and conventional notions of the beautiful," Mr. Ross wrote in The New Yorker. "In a world of triumphant kitsch, composition can justify its survival only by becoming a mirror image of physical and spiritual destruction.... Schönberg stood for the truth, for seeing the terror of the world as it was."

In rebellion, he became the annihilator of tonality. He incited as much as he inspired. In Vienna, fistfights broke out when patrons became angered by his radical style. In Berlin, censors peered into the mysteries of his lines in search of the heretical. Young composers took notice and pursued the atonal possibilities of the style.

To know the names of Mr. Schönberg's compositions — much less to have actually heard one of them performed — is less important, it seems, than to know the nature of his stylistic innovations, and the importance of his stature in the history of music.

C O M P O S I T I O N A L I N N O V A T I O N S
O F T H E H I G H E S T R A N K .

In an appropriately dense style, Hermann Danuser of the Arnold Schönberg Center at Vienna wrote in 1998: "In music history his name is associated with two epic 'inventions': the renunciation of tonal composition in the wake of the 'emancipation of the dissonance' in expressionist atonality around 1910, and, a dozen years later, the development of 'composition with twelve notes related only to each other' (i.e. not based on a common tonic note), 12-tone music or dodecaphony. These compositional innovations are certified by works of the highest rank, their possibilities having been artistically proven beyond all theory and explicit poetics. That 20th-century music historiography has now also recognized the epochal break before the First World War in the works of Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók or Charles Ives, which for some time has gone beyond Adorno's dichotomy expressed in his 'Philosophy of New Music' (whose author believed he could elevate Schönberg's rank by disparaging his colleagues, especially Stravinsky), lends Schönberg's contribution to music history additional historical weight."

Then we have the minions of Tom Pynchon, chiming in....

"Arnold Schönberg devised serialism, a new approach to organizing musical notes that doesn't rely on the diatonic scale (with its whole and half steps giving certain notes prominence over other notes and creating tonal polarization)," Tim Ware, Curator of thomaspynchon.com, wrote in his online deconstruction of Mr. Pynchon's novel, Gravity's Rainbow. "According to strict serialism, all twelve notes of the chromatic scale are used, arranged in rows, and each note in the row must be played in order. Thus, all the notes have equal weight, and by analogy serialism can be seen as entropic in that it moves from the asymmetry of tonal polarization towards symmetry and equality of notes."

E X P R E S S I N G P O E T R Y
T H R O U G H M U S I C .

Mr. Schönberg collaborated with Stefan George to make music of poetry, employing extreme techniques of tonality in an attempt to express the meaning of expressionist poems through string quartet movements in a song-cycle composition entitled Das Buch der hängenden Gärten.

Best known among his Expressionist works — some written before the war, others after (who cares about a linear time line when you're caught in the sway of dada?) — are Five Orchestral Pieces, Three Pieces and Six Little Pieces for piano, Erwartung, and Die Jakobsleiter.

The composer settled in Los Angeles in 1934 and became a citizen of the USA in 1941. He was hired as a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. He taught, conducted, and composed until just before the very moment of his death.

C A S T O F F H A B I T S
O F T H E P A S T .

Leon Botstein, Music Director of the American Symphony Orchestra of New York, addressed the societal and cultural dynamics that led to the rebellious radicalism of Weimar in an short essay, "Sounds of Fantasy: Music and Expressionism," published in the superb Dialogues and Extensions series of concert notes. Focusing on the American Symphony Orchestra's May 10, 1996, performance of Schreker's Chamber Symphony, Hindemith's Murderer, Hope of Women, and Weill's The Protagonist, Mr. Botstein wrote:

"The consequences of the war in terms of art helped to inspire a generation to cast off the habits of the past. Tradition lost its prestige precisely because it became associated with the value system which led millions to their deaths in the trenches....

"Artists, writers, and musicians challenged the conceits of continuity, coherence, and meaning as understood by the bourgeois audience of pre-war Europe. Culture, taste, and refinement in an ordinary sense seemed to have little to do with a sense of justice and ethics.... Expressionism was, after all, a vindication of the subjective as the only valid standard. And if art were to have any legitimacy, it had to assist in the radical transvaluation of beliefs, including aesthetic expectations."

H I D I N G A T O M I C S E C R E T S
I N M U S I C A L N O T E S .

END NOTE: Mr. Schönberg was the object of a clever hoax floated on the internet in May, 1998. A story purported to have been written by Heinrich Kincaid and published by the Associated Press accused the late composer of having served the Third Reich by embedding stolen secrets of atomic weapons research in the cryptic notes of serialism compositions. One version reads:

"BERLIN, GERMANY (AP) — Recent admissions by an ex-Nazi official living in Argentina have confirmed what some musicologists have suspected for years: that early twentieth century German composer Anton Webern and his colleagues devised the so-called 'serial' technique of music to encrypt messages to Nazi spies living in the United States and Britain.

"In what can surely be considered the most brazen instance of Art Imitating Espionage to date," the story continued, "avant garde composers of the Hitler years working in conjunction with designers of the Nazi Enigma code were bamboozling unsuspecting audiences with their atonal thunderings while at the same time passing critical scientific data back and forth between nations."

The story charged that Mr. Schönberg, working in collaboration with Mr. Webern, crafted their "naughty and difficult" compositions as cryptic repositories of A-bomb data, which had been stolen by German spy Klaus Fuchs from the Manhattan Project and secretly delivered to the expatriate German composers. The secrets were then cleverly sent to the Nazis on the seemingly innocent wings of musical notes. "Mr. Webern's Opus 30 Variations for Orchestra supposedly formed "a mathematical grid that deciphered into German a comparison between the neutron release cross-sections of uranium isotopes 235 and 238. Schonberg responded with a collection of songs for soprano and woodwinds that encrypted the chemical makeup of the polonium-beryllium initiator at the core of the Trinity explosion."

The hoax did have a redeeming value beyond satire. It put forth an interesting definition of serialism: "Unlike the diatonic music, which is based on scales that have been agreed upon by listeners throughout the world for all of history, twelve-tone music treats each note of the chromatic scale with equal importance, and contains a built-in mathematical refusal to form chords that are pleasing by traditional standards. Known also as serialism, the style has never been accepted outside of an elite cadre of musicians, who believe it is the only fresh and valid direction for post-Wagnerian classical music to go."

POST SCRIPT: "The most curious thing about it," says composer Philip Glass in New York City, "is that musicians continued to write twelve-tone music after the war, even though they had no idea why it was really invented. Indeed, there are guys who are churning out serialism to this day."

END NOTE 2: On April 28, 2003, at a concert at Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall, New York City, pianist Mitsuko Uchida was headliner at a "Perspectives" concert, the second of Ms. Uchida's "Vienna Revisited" series. From The New York Times of May 6, 2003, by Anthony Tommasini: "The idea is, without a trace of pedantry, to juxtapose works from the Viennese Classical period with works from the early-20th-century Second Viennese School and let the audience make any connections...."

The concert featured several works composed by Mr. Schoenberg: Six Little Piano pieces, Phantasy, and Pierrot Lunaire.

Mr. Tommasini wrote: "The concert concluded grippingly with Schoenberg's 1912 landmark of Expressionism 'Pierrot Lunaire.' The speaker was Barbara Sukowa, best known as a film actress, notably in the title role in Fassbinder's 'Lola' in 1982. The texts, Hartleben's German translations of Albert Giraud's surrealistic poems about a Pierrot character drunk with moonlight, are meant to be performed in the song-speech style called Sprechstimme.

"Ms. Sukowa's delivery was far more speech than song. No matter. Performing from memory, her gaze intent, her golden ringlets flowing, her arms draped in the lacy sleeves of a black dress, she was a mesmerizing presence. Her voice conveyed as many shadings as Ms. Uchida's playing: a paleness for the text about the pale washerwoman toiling by a stream at night; a scratchy tone to suggest the scraping of Pierrot's grotesquely huge bow against the strings of his viola.

"Two members of the Brentano Quartet, the violinist Mark Steinberg and the cellist Nina Maria Lee, as well as the flutist Marina Piccinini and the clarinetist Anthony McGill were the other performers in this memorable 'Pierrot Lunaire.' Ms. Uchida keeps good musical company."

EB

7 May 2003

Return to Biographical Glossary....

M O R E W E I M A R on Planet Deutsch....
Just Click!