Arnold Schoenberg (Critical Lives)

240 Pages·2019·11.846 MB·English

by  Mark Berry

Arnold Schoenberg
Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural figures of the
modern period. Each book explores the life of the artist, writer, philosopher or
architect in question and relates it to their major works.
In the same series
Antonin Artaud David A. Shafer Frida Kahlo Gannit Ankori
Roland Barthes Andy Stafford Søren Kierkegaard Alastair Hannay
Georges Bataille Stuart Kendall Yves Klein Nuit Banai
Charles Baudelaire Rosemary Lloyd Arthur Koestler Edward Saunders
Simone de Beauvoir Ursula Tidd Akira Kurosawa Peter Wild
Samuel Beckett Andrew Gibson Lenin Lars T. Lih
Walter Benjamin Esther Leslie Pierre Loti Richard M. Berrong
John Berger Andy Merrifield Jean-François Lyotard Kiff Bamford
Leonard Bernstein Paul R. Laird Stéphane Mallarmé Roger Pearson
Joseph Beuys Claudia Mesch Thomas Mann Herbert Lehnert and Eva Wessell
Jorge Luis Borges Jason Wilson Gabriel García Márquez Stephen M. Hart
Constantin Brancusi Sanda Miller Karl Marx Paul Thomas
Bertolt Brecht Philip Glahn Herman Melville Kevin J. Hayes
Charles Bukowski David Stephen Calonne Henry Miller David Stephen Calonne
Mikhail Bulgakov J.A.E. Curtis Yukio Mishima Damian Flanagan
William S. Burroughs Phil Baker Eadweard Muybridge Marta Braun
John Cage Rob Haskins Vladimir Nabokov Barbara Wyllie
Albert Camus Edward J. Hughes Pablo Neruda Dominic Moran
Fidel Castro Nick Caistor Georgia O’Keeffe Nancy J. Scott
Paul Cézanne Jon Kear Octavio Paz Nick Caistor
Coco Chanel Linda Simon Pablo Picasso Mary Ann Caws
Noam Chomsky Wolfgang B. Sperlich Edgar Allan Poe Kevin J. Hayes
Jean Cocteau James S. Williams Ezra Pound Alec Marsh
Salvador Dalí Mary Ann Caws Marcel Proust Adam Watt
Guy Debord Andy Merrifield Arthur Rimbaud Seth Whidden
Claude Debussy David J. Code John Ruskin Andrew Ballantyne
Gilles Deleuze Frida Beckman Jean-Paul Sartre Andrew Leak
Fyodor Dostoevsky Robert Bird Erik Satie Mary E. Davis
Marcel Duchamp Caroline Cros Arnold Schoenberg Mark Berry
Sergei Eisenstein Mike O’Mahony Arthur Schopenhauer Peter B. Lewis
William Faulkner Kirk Curnutt Adam Smith Jonathan Conlin
Gustave Flaubert Anne Green Susan Sontag Jerome Boyd Maunsell
Michel Foucault David Macey Gertrude Stein Lucy Daniel
Mahatma Gandhi Douglas Allen Igor Stravinsky Jonathan Cross
Jean Genet Stephen Barber Pyotr Tchaikovsky Philip Ross Bullock
Allen Ginsberg Steve Finbow Leon Trotsky Paul Le Blanc
Günter Grass Julian Preece Mark Twain Kevin J. Hayes
Ernest Hemingway Verna Kale Richard Wagner Raymond Furness
Victor Hugo Bradley Stephens Alfred Russel Wallace Patrick Armstrong
Derek Jarman Michael Charlesworth Simone Weil Palle Yourgrau
Alfred Jarry Jill Fell Tennessee Williams Paul Ibell
James Joyce Andrew Gibson Ludwig Wittgenstein Edward Kanterian
Carl Jung Paul Bishop Virginia Woolf Ira Nadel
Franz Kafka Sander L. Gilman Frank Lloyd Wright Robert McCarter
Arnold Schoenberg
Mark Berry
reaktion books
Published by
reaktion books ltd
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www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2019
Copyright © Mark Berry 2019
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
publishers
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78914 087 3
Contents
Introduction 7
1 Birth and Transfiguration 14
2 Emancipating the Dissonance 35
3 Air of Another Planet 62
4 ‘War Years’ and their Aftermath 91
5 Composing with Twelve Notes Related Only to
One Another 108
6 Goodbye to Berlin 130
7 Exile 153
8 Citizenship: War and Peace 179
References 205
Select Bibliography 217
Select Discography 227
Acknowledgements 236
Photo Acknowledgements 239
Photograph of Arnold Schoenberg taken in a Berlin photo booth, c. 1930.
Introduction
Arnold Schoenberg was the twentieth century’s most violently
controversial composer. He remains so in the twenty-first. Was
he the greatest? Perhaps – although there will always be several
other deserving pretenders to the title. His music is certainly
not the most performed, the most listened to. Indeed part of his
‘greatness’, certainly of his controversy, lies in confrontation with
a world that often will not listen, that sometimes does not even
know. Schoenberg, however, was not only the most controversial
of twentieth-century composers; he was also, by any reasonable
historical measure, the most important. He embodied and
continues to embody the essence, like Beethoven at the beginning
of the previous century, of the heroic – in this case modernist –
composer. Contra mundum. And yet, whereas both the original
‘contra mundum’, Athanasius of Alexandria, and Beethoven would
quickly enough – for us, if not necessarily for them – become
accepted as pillars of the Western tradition, what of Schoenberg?
Schoenberg’s life is in many ways a tragic story that yet awaits
its true catharsis. Again like Beethoven, the degree of Schoenberg’s
influence dwarfs that of any other twentieth-century composer,
Igor Stravinsky included. The latter’s Rite of Spring, Les Noces,
Symphonies of Wind Instruments and other works may have changed
the face of twentieth-century music, but Schoenberg’s break with
the tonal universe within which Western art music had operated
for roughly three centuries, and his subsequent adoption of the
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‘method of composing with twelve notes [or “tones” in u.s. English]
related only to one another’, transformed its course utterly. That
transformation went quite beyond mere ‘influence’. When the
soprano in Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet tells us that she
feels the ‘air of another planet’, not only do we feel it too; we also
know that, once we have breathed that air, nothing will ever be
quite the same again – even if, perhaps especially if, we elect to
return to tonality, be it that of earlier or later music.
Even those resistant to or uninterested in those two defining
steps in the course of musical history have found themselves
compelled, sometimes against their better judgement, to confront
them. Take this imaginary, admittedly caricatured exchange:
A: Is it not as absurd now to write tonal music as it is
to build a Gothic cathedral? Even if you could do it,
why would you answer the questions of the fourteenth or
the seventeenth centuries, rather than your own?
B: Neither is absurd, for are not beauty and truth eternal?
Why mistake your inability to match your predecessors for
‘progress’ or the demands of a nebulous ‘spirit of the age’?
Or as Pierre Boulez, one of the most ferocious and yet ambivalent
of Schoenberg’s successors, put it after the composer’s death: ‘Any
musician who has not experienced – I do not say understood, but
truly experienced – the necessity of dodecaphonic [twelve-note]
language is useless.’1 Such enfant terrible fighting talk inspired
and repelled, much in the line of Schoenberg’s hardly less
fanatical words.
Recent academic musicology and history alike have sought to
chip away at the role and the very idea of ‘great men’. (Women, alas,
have rarely been considered ‘great’ composers.) They have sought
more often to consider, even to dwell on, the plateaux rather than
the summits, and to question our motives and suppositions in
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designating the terrain as such. Nevertheless, if we are honest, we
remain fascinated and even spellbound by those lofty peaks. In the
world of musical performance, that is how concert halls and opera
houses operate. Ironically, it is how they operate even when, as in the
case of Schoenberg, much of that world elects to give vast swathes
of his music a wide berth. For every sigh of relief when Schoenberg’s
music, yet again, fails to appear on the season’s programme, there
will be another angry ‘Disgusted of Donaueschingen’ response to
its near-criminal neglect. Schoenberg, as man and as composer,
has from the outset both inspired slavish devotion and provoked
instinctual – sadly, often downright anti-Semitic – aversion. The
composers Alban Berg and Anton Webern abased themselves
in correspondence in ways that extend considerably beyond the
hierarchical conventions of that time or indeed any other. Even
his American pupils spoke in awe of him, as we shall see. They
admired – even worshipped – him but they also feared him. The
same might be said of us, their successors. Any distinction perhaps
lies in the proportion of admiration to fear rather than in the degree
of obsession. At any rate, neither side – few do not feel compelled to
take sides – seems able or willing to escape Schoenberg’s shadow.
That goes for audiences, too. We might argue, in high
modernist style, about how much a composer needs an audience,
even a performer. The music itself is still there, is it not? In some
ways, yes; in other ways, no. Music is something more than mere
notes on a page, even notes in performance. What of its role in
bringing us together, even dividing us? In that sense, and not
only that, it is abidingly political. What of its role in making us
laugh and cry, in making us think as well as feel? The arguments
are as old as music itself, yet some come to seem more important
at certain times and in certain cases than in others. Maybe we
do not want to be made, or even asked, to think; maybe we do
not want to be made to feel, either. For Schoenberg’s music is
not, whatever some may tell you, dry or merely intellectual. Its
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