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Schoenberg and
his Public
“Called
upon to say something about my
public,”
Arnold Schoenberg wrote
ironically in 1930, “I have to
confess: I do not believe that
I have one.”
Schoenberg was here alluding
to the reproach that was
regularly levelled at his
music, namely that it was
inaccessible to the average
concert-goer and gave
pleasure, at best, to only a
handful of initiates.
Schoenberg spent his whole
life convinced that the
opposite was the case: his
true enemies, he believed,
were the soi-disant
“experts” and especially the
critics whom he despised and
whom he carefully
distinguished from “those who
know what they are doing”.
Audiences, he argued, “come
less to judge than to enjoy,
and can to some extent sense
whether the person appearing
before them is entitled to do
so or not”. As a result, he
doubted whether he was “really
so unacceptable to the public
as the expert judges
invariably assert, and whether
people are really so scared of
my music”.
In fact,
the spectacular scandals that
time and again attended
performances of Schoenberg’s
works in the concert hall tend
to blind us to the fact that
he was by no means unfamiliar
with triumphant applause,
notably for his Gurrelieder.
And, if we may judge by sales
figures alone, his Six
Orchestral Songs op. 8 of 1904
were also well regarded by the
public at large. Of these
songs, four are settings of
poems by Heinrich Hart and
Petrarch, while the remaining
two are taken from Des
Knaben Wunderhorn, a
collection of poems which, as
we know had also played a
central role in Mahler’s work
as a composer. Indeed,
Schoenberg himself was later
to argue that the music, too,
was influenced, in part, by
Mahler. Mahler, he went on,
had not abandoned tonality -
the system of relationships
between pitches with the tonic
as the principal element - but
had expanded it, adopting a
broader approach to harmony
which “could continue to
remain unchanged for some time
longer as it was rarely forced
to explain unusual shifts in
the melodic line and therefore
to adapt to that line”.
Schoenberg attempted much the
same sort of thing in his Six
Orchestral Songs, which to
that extent may be said to
have postponed his later
breach with his audiences
listening habits.
Only two
years later, however,
Schoenberg’s First Chamber
Symphony for fifteen solo
instruments marked an enormous
leap forward in his voyage of
innovatory experimentation. In
writing it, he had “enjoyed so
much pleasure, everything had
gone so easily and seemed to
be so convincing, that I was
sure the audience would react
spontaneously to the melodies
and to the moods and would
find this music to be as
beautiful as I felt it to be
myself”.
But the first performance in
Vienna in 1907 scandalised its
audience, even though every
one of its innovative features
can be seen as a logical
consequence of all that had
gone before it, with the
radical reduction in the size
of the forces involved the
only possible option open to
Schoenberg after the
giganticism of the Gurrelieder.
And the idea of telescoping
together the contrastive types
of movement that make up the
classical symphony in order to
produce a single-movement
sequence of sonata Allegro,
Scherzo, development section,
Adagio, recapitulation and
finale is one that Schoenberg
had already essayed in his
one-movement First String
Quartet of the previous year.
Even the chords of a fourth
that replace the triadic
harmonies on which the
language of music had
traditionally been built
hitherto had been anticipated
in his symphonic poem Pelleas
und Melisande. But the
majority of listeners were
unable to cope with so many
innovations at once.
This was
not the case with the Begleitmusik
zu einer Lichtspeilszene
op. 34 that Schoenberg wrote
in Berlin during the winter of
1929/30. A publishing house
that provided atmospheric
music for silent films had
commissioned the score from
him, and the subtitles “Threatening
Danger”,
“Fear” and “Catastrophe” refer
to the practice of using music
to underscore cinematic
situations.
Whether or not there were ever
any actual plans to perform
this advanced twelve-note
score in the cinema, it was in
fact at the Krolloper in
Berlin that the work received
its first performance in
November 1930. Its huge
success filled Schoenberg with
feelings of consternation:
“People seem to like the piece
- should I draw conclusions as
to its quality?”
But the “experts” could be
relied on to criticise the
work and to complain that it
could not be used in the
cinema. “When I think of
films,”
Schoenberg retorted, “I think
of films of the future, films
that must necessarily be
artistic. My music will suit
this type of film!”
The result was a soundtrack
that uniquely was written
before the film that it
inspired: not until 1973 did
the French film director
Jean-Marie Straub and two
colleagues produce a sequence
of scenes that provided a
visual counterpart to
Schoenberg’s Begleitmusik.
At no
other time in his life was
Schoenberg as widely acclaimed
as a composer as he was in
Berlin. His works were now
performed all over the world,
and in 1925 he was appointed
to a prestigious teaching post
at the Berlin Academy of the
Arts. But when Germany’s
electorate voted the National
Socialist Workers’ Party into
power on 30 January 1933, the
music of a Jewish composer
like Schoenberg was inevitably
branded “degenerate”. He fled
to France, where he
reconverted to Judaism, and
from there went to the United
States. Here he threw his
weight behind the fight
against Fascism, a stance that
also finds expression in some
of the works that he wrote
during his years of exile and
that include his Ode to
Napoleon and his only
piano concerto. Two years
after the end of the war he
wrote a brief but monumental
vocal piece that even today is
still regarded as one of the
most important anti-Fascist
pieces ever composed, A
Survivor from Warsaw op.
46 for narrator, men`s chorus
and orchestra. In essence, it
is an extremely condensed
oratorio, the words of which -
by Schoenberg himself - are
based on authentic accounts.
The text distinguishes between
three different layers, each
of which is in a different
language: English is the
language of the surviving
eyewitness who tells of a
massacre in a Warsaw ghetto,
while the murderers interject
in German and the Jews who are
about to perish strike up the
prayer Shema Yisroel
(Hear, O Israel) in Hebrew.
These three levels are
distinguished musically too,
with the brutality of the Nazi
thugs siunmed up in aggressive
brass fanfares, while the
melodic line of the Shema
Yisrael (which also
represents the basic form of
the twelve-note row)
incorporates snatches of
synagogue tunes. The
excoriating documentary impact
of these compositional devices
overwhelmed listeners at the
work’s première at Albuquerque
in New Mexico in 1948, and the
performance ended in such
tumultuous applause that the
piece had to be repeated. The
audience had understood
Schoenberg.
Friedrich
Geiger
Translation:
Stewart Spencer
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