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WD_130/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 2 | | Medium: | oil pastel and wax crayon on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0130 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
"With the Chamber Symphony we have reached the absolute limits of tradition chromatic tonality. The period immediately following its appearance was critical in Schönberg’s development—and indeed, largely because of the direction he took, one of the most important in the entire evolution of Western Music. In a two-year period of astonishing creative activity, from 1907 to 1909, Schönberg made his final break with tonality and triadic harmony and moved into the previously uncharted area of free chromaticism, producing a series of works that fundamentally altered the course of music: the Second String Quartet, Opus 10; Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11; Two Songs, Op 14; the song cycle Das Buch der hangenden Garten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens), OPUS 15; Five Orchestral Pieces, Opus 16; and the drama Erwartung (Expectation), Opus 17. In one sense Schönberg’s break with tonality can be understood simply as the next step in a continuous development, for in his music the role of triads and key centers had already been weakened to a point of virtual extinction. But this step was decisive, producing a difference in kind rather than merely of degree. As Schönberg himself proclaimed in the program for the first performance of his Opus 15 songs: "For the first time I have succeeded in coming near an ideal of expression and form which I had in mind for years…..Now that I have finally embarked on the path I am conscious that I have broken all barriers of a past esthetic."
-a quote from Twentieth-Century Music by Robert P. Morgan (published by W.W. Norton & Company in 1991)/ www.dovesong.com/positive_music/schonberg.asp
"Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951) – Portrait of a Century" by von Hermann Danuser.
Arnold Schönberg’s œuvre stands complete before us, fifty years after his death, as an outstanding achievement of 20th-century artistic modernism – indisputible, but at the same time, in many ways still enigmatic. The scholarly complete edition of his works, progressing well but without end in sight, the recently initiated edition of correspondence, plans for a critical edition of his writings, an immense quantity of musicological, theoretical, and critical publications on the man and his works, but particularly performances and recordings of his music – all attest to the thesis of Schönberg as a classical master of New Music. Born in 1874 in Vienna, died in 1951 in Los Angeles: the dates of this life frame worlds, golden ages, catastrophes, and rescues – historic, artistic, and personal. Because of his life experience, also rich in the painfully catastrophic, Schönberg has become a paradigm for epochs – and not just a single one.
Schönberg was both teacher and self-taught, and both elements shaped his artistic physiognomy to equal degrees. He, who enjoyed no regular musical instruction, who attended no music academy, became an outstanding teacher of his time. Both aspects, although apparently contradictory, belong inextricably together. The autodidactic principle made Schönberg independent in judgement and commanding in his convictions. Only knowledge acquired on his own allowed him to follow new paths of musical composition completely unerringly. Knowledge given to him, on the other hand, led him to other, shorter, paths. The dialogue with Alexander von Zemlinsky represented a premonition of that at which Schönberg’s pedagogy would later excel: his own learning through teaching, his own teaching through learning. In the Forward to the “Theory of Harmony” (“Harmonielehre”), a book he described as having learned from his students, he said: “If I had only told them what I know, then they would have known only that and nothing more. They perhaps know even less, but they know what it depends upon: searching! I hope my students will search! Because they will know that one searches only for its own sake, that finding is indeed the goal, but can easily mean the end of striving.”
Schönberg remained a teaching auto-didact his whole life. Especially in phases of aggressive innovation, his circle of students created a support for him against the attacks of traditionally oriented friends of music, in Vienna, in Berlin, in Los Angeles. Thus, the Viennese School – which should not be prefaced by “Second,” since at the time of Viennese Classicism there was no “First” – became the leading example of a compositional school of modernism.
Schönberg became the leading example of a century, however, through the fact that his artistic development, surprisingly logical and generative, marked fundamental paradigms of modernist compositional procedures: progress from tradition, freedom of expression, classical modernism.
“Progress from tradition” determined Schönberg’s early compositional development. He rejected age-old oppositions like the antagonism between Brahms and Wagner or between absolute instrumental music and musical drama. Tired antinomies like those between absolute and programme music he also ignored, in that he placed no constraints on the expressive possibilities of vocal and subject-oriented instrumental music. Stemming from the tradition of German Romanticism, his early songs are simultaneously autonomous and textually based. Also the string sextet “Verklärte Nacht” is completely independent in form, yet bases its musical narrative on Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same name. Similarly, the symphonic poem “Pelleas und Melisande” is instrumental music supported by a programme. Generic musical categories provide a conceptual support, a foundation for possible connections, and an angle for certain negations, but no longer a basis for the conventional composition of a generic work. With Schönberg the singular status of the individual work as telos of musical modernity is confirmed.
The “Gurre-Lieder,” a masterwork lyrically founded in a turn-of-the-century musical world view, integrated the cantabile, Brahmsian, strophic songs with the expanded orchestral language of Wagner, and secured Schönberg’s reputation as a composer striding away from tradition. The triumphal première of this work, under the direction of Franz Schreker on 23 February 1913 in Vienna, brought to a temporary silence all those critics who had for the past few years battled his steps toward an expressionist New Music – accomplished and spectacularly demonstrated with “Pierrot lunaire” – calling it a result of compositional incompetence or even impotence.
With the works composed between 1907 and 1913, Schönberg entered music history. They mark the source documents of that which since then – with varying meanings – has been called “New Music.” With the First and Second String Quartets, the Chamber Symphony, the song cycle on Stefan George’s “Das Buch der hängenden Gärten,” with piano and orchestral works, the melodrama “Pierrot lunaire,” as well as the stage works “Erwartung” and “Die glückliche Hand,” a group of works emerge in quick succession that force a decision: “critical works” at a crossroads. A compositional process that proceeded lightening fast at times, then again stopped for awhile altogether, remained characteristic for Schönberg from then on. These works made him, whom his students honored in 1912 with an celebratory volume, one of the – indeed the – protagonist of musical modernism.
Scandals litter the performance history, scars of a new imagination that perceives the conventions of received tonal language as chains, and which gradually recede as the classicism of the works sinks into public consciousness. For example, the première of the Second String Quartet (on 21 December 1908 in Vienna with the Rosé Quartet and soprano Marie Gutheil-Schoder) led to open fighting; although the work is tonal, unrest was incited by the “Augustin” quote in the Scherzo and the added vocal part of the two last movements, unprecedented in the string quartet genre. In order to avoid such scandals, which Schönberg felt were completely foreign to his art, he and his students founded the legendary but short-lived “Society for Private Musical Performances,” to which Zemlinsky added a branch in Prague. The scandal, a result of New Art in confrontation with a public expecting something less radical, and the retreat to a circumscribed, close-knit circle of “initiated,” are determining factors of New Music in general, verifying Schönberg’s paradigmatic position also in this regard.
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.
“Freedom of expression”: Insofar as Schönberg acknowledged (on the occasion of the première of his George song cycle op. 15 in January 1910), that he was conscious in this work of “having broken through all boundaries of a by-gone aesthetic,” and in his compositional process followed instead of received rules his own inner voice, an instance of what Ernst Bloch has described as “logic of expression,” he set a standard whose historical influence – beyond stylistic criteria – reaches to the present day, namely Wolfgang Rihm. In fact, to the degree that New Music emancipates itself from rules and opens itself to a language of freedom, successful composition becomes more difficult. Even if in its expressionist syntax the gesture still draws upon elements of tonal music – as in the third Piano Piece from op. 11 (composed in August 1909) that lays one concentrated means of expression upon another –, and even if every Schönberg work displays in its musical shape more traces of conventional forms than those ensemble compositions by Edgard Varèse from the ’20s, still Adorno’s emphatic thesis conceived around 1960 – the idea that a truly free, artistic expression, realized in ever-newer forms of New Music, is rooted in Schönberg’s expressionist-atonal works from the “heroic” period before the First World War – has justified Schönberg’s position as a leading intellectual figure of modernism. Creations such as the third of the Five Pieces for Orchestra op. 16 (for a time provided with the title “Colors”), informed by the idea of tone-color melody (“Klangfarbenmelodie”) explained at the end of his “Theory of Harmony,” or the variously individualized ensemble arrangements in “Pierrot lunaire” are strides whose historical significance for music history up to the present day cannot be underestimated. The avant-garde aural art since the 1960s and the concrete aural innovations of the newly assembled ensembles, which have replaced the clumsy standard ensembles, stem from these originating documents within Schönberg’s œuvre.
The expressionist musical style, however, found itself faced with two alternatives: the works either tended to be temporally contracted, very short pieces (Schönberg wondered at the “concentration” of the string quartet Bagatelles op. 9 of his student Anton Webern, who was able “to express a novel through a single gesture, happiness through a single breath”) or needed the guiding support of a poetic text “along which” the music could make its way. This situation drove Schönberg, after years of hesitation and trial, finally to “12-tone music.” In a syntactic sense, the pattern of a polyphonic regulated movement was revived; musical shape was reactivated in formally older levels that expressionism had thrown overboard. Thus in the mid-’1920s Schönberg developed – here also corresponding to tendencies in Stravinsky or Hindemith – a “classical modernism.”
With this third paradigm Schönberg made clear that a conscious return to models of earlier music – whether it be genres, formal types, movement models, or expressive characteristics – offered a viable possibility under the conditions of modernism, one that should not be excluded from an ostensibly important, one-dimensional progress. As forcefully as the 20th century nears its end under the sign of a “postmodern” art of censure, the relevance of this paradigm also becomes all the more clear. Pierre Boulez’ critique of the ill-proportioned modernist position held by the classic Schönbergian 12-tone works – the Piano Suite op. 25 (which returns to dance movements of the early 18th century) or the sonata forms of the Wind Quintet or the Third String Quartet (which carry on the instrumental forms of Beethoven and Brahms) – is motivated out of interest in the same issue. Today, since we have learned to live with extreme disjunctions, with simultaneous discrepancies and crass contradictions within the work itself and to value such findings positively as aesthetic challenges, we no longer need to adhere to such critique. On the contrary, also in this third paradigm we can recognize more clearly than ever before perspectives for the further compositional history of the 20th century: precisely in the postmodern age, in which “music about music” has become the rule, it exudes a unique power of fascination.
Another point: Schönberg also set the standard for the relationship between autonomous and politically engaged music. To be sure, he held fast to the supreme primacy of the autonomous aesthetic throughout his life, and yet he found in works from all periods – conveyed through writings, programmes, etc. – a motivation for the artistic importance of the content. For polemic clothed as work he made just as much a place in his Three Satires op. 28 as he did later for political protest and religious lament and accusation. In exile, where he further expanded his spectrum of instrumental genres – with a violin concerto and a piano concerto – he simultaneously defined his music in a specific sense as “engaged” – for the religious-political goals of Judaism as well as against Nazi Germany. In his “Ode to Napoleon” (after Byron) or “A Survivor from Warsaw” a complex, modern musical language represents something distinctive in an absolute sense and formulates it into an individual shape. Because of this range that sees no contradiction between absolute and politically engaged works, for neither allows any aspirations to art other than the highest, Schönberg became a model during his lifetime and later for many composers, whether Pierre Boulez (whose “Le Marteau sans maître” is linked to “Pierrot lunaire”) or Luigi Nono, whose politically engaged music (such as “Il canto sospeso” or “Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz”) inherited and transformed Schönberg’s engagement.
Finally, Schönberg is a portrait of the 20th century in the pattern of his life as well. The National Socialist catastrophe drove Jews and modern composers, like countless other artists, into American exile, an exile that was soon no longer experienced as such, for new perspectives were opened to Schönberg that once again enriched his creativity. Through this migration, the emphasis of modern musical culture shifted from Europe to America. The European tragedy, resulting from misguided human and political developments, increased the value of American cultural life; in the second half of the century a world-wide institution of “New Music” arose from these roots. All the more reason Europe, Austria, and especially Vienna, Schönberg’s home, may now rejoice that at the end of the 20th century, with the legacy of Arnold Schönberg, the sources of his work and life return to the place of their origin – for the benefit of all friends of this epoch-making composer’s music – in a transfer that simultaneously strengthens the commemoration of the inestimable contribution of Vienna to the culture of modernism around 1900.
© Arnold Schönberg Center und Hermann Danuser, 1998
-www.schoenberg.at/1_as/essay/essay_e.htm
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