Schoenberg's early correspondence: 1891- May 1907 PDF
Preview Schoenberg's early correspondence: 1891- May 1907
i SCHOENBERG’S EARLY CORRESPONDENCE ii Schoenberg in Words General Editors Sabine Feisst and Severine Neff Volume 1: Schoenberg on Form, including Fundamentals of Musical Composition, edited by Áine Heneghan Volume 2: Schoenberg’s Models for Beginners in Composition, edited by Gordon Root Volume 3: Schoenberg on Counterpoint, including Preliminary Exercises in Counterpoint, edited by Severine Neff Volume 4: Schoenberg on Performance, edited by Avior Byron Volume 5: Schoenberg’s Program Notes and Musical Analyses, edited by J. Daniel Jenkins Volume 6: Schoenberg’s Correspondence with Anton Webern, edited and translated by Benjamin Levy Volume 7: Schoenberg’s Correspondence with Alma Mahler, edited and translated by Elizabeth L. Keathley and Marilyn McCoy Volume 8: Schoenberg’s Early Correspondence, edited and translated by Ethan Haimo and Sabine Feisst Volume 9: Schoenberg’s Correspondence with American Composers, edited and translated by Sabine Feisst iii SCHOENBERG’S EARLY CORRESPONDENCE 1891—M ay 1907 EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY ETHAN HAIMO AND SABINE FEISST 1 iv 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2016 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, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Schoenberg, Arnold, 1874–1951, author. | Haimo, Ethan, 1950—editor, translator, writer of added commentary. | Feisst, Sabine, 1962—editor, translator, writer of added commentary. Title: Schoenberg’s early correspondence : 1891–May 1907 / edited, translated, and with commentary by Ethan Haimo & Sabine Feisst. Description: New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. | Series: Schoenberg in words | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015050037 | ISBN 9780195383720 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Schoenberg, Arnold, 1874–1951—Correspondence. | Composers—Austria—Correspondence. Classification: LCC ML410.S283 A413 2016 | DDC 780.92—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050037 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America v Contents Preface and Editorial Notes vii Acknowledgments xvii Frequently Used Abbreviations xix I. Letters before 1900 1 II. Letters, 1900–1 901 17 III. Letters, 1902 61 IV. Letters, 1903 156 V. Letters, 1904 223 VI. Letters, 1905 295 VII. Letters, 1906 320 VIII. Letters, through May 1907 367 v vi vi Contents Appendix 1: Undatable Letters 399 Appendix 2: Items Not Included 405 Select Bibliography 409 Index 413 vii Preface and Editorial Notes Notwithstanding Arnold Schoenberg’s central importance for the music of the twentieth century, relatively little of his early correspondence has been published in German transcription, let alone translated into English. The present book addresses that scholarly gap. By presenting English transla- tions of and commentary on all known (and available) letters to and from Schoenberg beginning with the first surviving letters (1891) and continuing to the end of May 1907, this book sheds new light on Schoenberg’s early biog- raphy and career. The rationale behind the starting date may seem obvious, but our decision to include all available letters and to stop at the end of May 1907 requires some explanation. Since an edition of all the approximately 20,000 surviving letters is well beyond the capacity of any single, or even, as here, pair of editors, prior editions of Schoenberg’s letters have presented some subset of the total. Erwin Stein was the first to prepare a volume of Schoenberg’s letters, Ausgewählte Briefe (1958). For that volume he selected letters and excerpts thereof that he found to be particularly interesting and important. He tended to choose let- ters that Schoenberg wrote to prominent figures (Ferruccio Busoni, Richard vii viii viii Preface and Editorial Notes Dehmel, Vasili Kandinsky, Alban Berg, Thomas Mann, Anton Webern, and so forth) or that addressed compositional or biographical issues he deemed important. Moreover, he included only letters written by Schoenberg, not by his correspondents. Other publications have dealt with Schoenberg’s com- munication with a specific figure such as Berg, Busoni, Heinrich Schenker, Alexander Zemlinsky, and so forth. In the Schoenberg in Words set (of which the present book is a part), other subsets are chosen: Schoenberg’s correspon- dence with Alma Mahler, Webern, and American composers. In this volume we decided to take an alternative approach, one which we found particularly advantageous. We present the complete text of every available letter, both to and from Schoenberg, within the designated time frame, including letters not only to and from famous figures but also let- ters to and from less well- known correspondents. We believe that a full pic- ture of Schoenberg and his milieu is best achieved by seeing not only what Schoenberg wrote but what others conveyed to him. Since the nineteenth century, one of the most popular (and enduring) historiographical models has been Thomas Carlyle’s “Great Man Theory,” the idea that history can largely be explained by the impact and influence of the acts, decisions, and ideas of great figures. Books featuring only Schoenberg’s correspondence with the leading lights of his day fit comfortably into Carlyle’s historiographical model. But a competing model quickly emerged: Herbert Spencer’s argument that great men and women are products of their societies and cultures and that their actions flow out of the prevailing social and cultural context. By presenting all the surviving letters, from both prominent figures and far less well- known correspondents, we anchor our work firmly in Spencer’s model of thought. These documents give us some inkling of what it was like to be a young, aspiring, but controversial com- poser in Vienna and Berlin just after the turn of the twentieth century. We see Schoenberg’s interactions with musicians, publishers, contest commit- tees, writers, family, benefactors, friends, and foes. We discover his reaction to criticism, how he worked with (or against) his publisher, how he tried to promote his works, how he earned his daily bread, and countless other bio- graphical and historical details. ix Preface and Editorial Notes ix Starting with the first extant letters is obvious, but why did we include correspondence only through the end of May 1907? The period of time cov- ered by this book begins with Schoenberg as an unknown, unpublished, and untested composer who had few compositions in his catalogue, no publications to his credit, and almost no public performances of his works. Schoenberg was someone who, at the beginning of our story, was compelled to take a job at a cabaret in order to support himself and his family. But within six years, he had become famous, primarily as a result of the extraordinary reactions to the premieres of his String Quartet, Op. 7, and his Chamber Symphony, Op. 9. By the end of May 1907, the reactions to these premieres had tapered off. Thus the end of May 1907 seemed like a logical point in time to stop, marking as it did the end of one phase of his career and the beginning of the next. Any ending point may seem arbitrary, halting the story in media res, but stopping after the hubbub died down following the controversial concerts in early 1907 gave us as reasonable an endpoint as we were likely to find. There is an added reason that an edition of the early letters is particularly attractive. One of the consequences of Schoenberg’s early anonymity is the frankness with which he and his correspondents could write, not suspect- ing that the letters would ever be read by anyone else. Thus there is a fresh- ness to the dialogue that is not often matched in the correspondence of later years. From 1909 onward, Schoenberg made it a regular practice to create carbon copies of all the letters he wrote. (By contrast, in the period covered here, he made almost no copies, and thus letters of his survived only if the recipients saved them.) When someone is famous and makes copies of his letters, saving them for posterity, it is reasonable to assume that the author is self- consciously aware that his words are no longer private. It follows that letters can take on the feel of public manifestos, not private communications. The same is true for Schoenberg’s correspondents. Before 1907, few of those who wrote to Schoenberg could have imagined that their words would be published (let alone translated) more than a century later. This too permitted his correspondents to write with a directness that is unusual to find in the correspondence of later years when his correspondents knew they were writ- ing to a famous man.
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