Overlapping opposites

Musical Times, Autumn 2001 by Whittall, Arnold

Schoenberg since 1951

Fifty years since his passing, ARNOLD WHITTALL explores some recent critical approaches to the twelve-tone master

I

Because of the many attempts to connect the past with the future one might be inclined to call this an Apollonian period. But the fury with which addicts of various schools fight for their theories presents rather a Dionysian aspect.

(from Arnold Schoenberg: Structural functions of harmony [completed 1948], ed. Leonard Stein (London, 1969), p.193)

While inflicting the most deadly blows on authority through his work, he seeks to defend the work as though before a hidden authority, and ultimately to make it itself the authority.

(from Theodore W Adorno: `Arnold Schoenberg 1874-1951', in Prisms, trans. Samuel & Shierry Weber (London, 1967), p.151)

BETWEEN SCHOENBERG'S DEATH, on 13 July 1951, and the centenary of his birth, on 13 September 1974, his music benefited from increasingly authoritative performance and increasingly sophisticated (or, at any rate, elaborate) critical interpretation. In Britain, which had already experienced the effects of the Glock-Boulez initiatives at the BBC, the main centenary event - albeit a year early - was the series of twenty-six concerts, eleven in London, devoted to `The complete instrumental and chamber music of Arnold Schoenberg and Roberto Gerhard', all taking place between 9 October and 16 November 1973. With a 180-page programme book of dimensions inconceivable today, and tied in with a Decca recording contract, this magnificently executed enterprise, master-minded by David Atherton, drew inevitable and appropriate attention to Schoenberg's all-important function as a composer who taught - and through teaching inspired - younger generations.

One sentence in Roberto Gerhard's programme-- book tribute (written in 1961: Gerhard had died in 1970) encapsulated the favoured way of accounting for man and work: `Schoenberg's sense of belonging to a tradition and of working in the main stream of that tradition is alive in every phase of his evolution, even at his most boldly innovating'.' Gerhard did not conceal his awareness of the challenge Schoenberg the man presented even to those close to him. `As a personality there was something truly formidable, almost unapproachable about Schoenberg. [...] Even in repose, the burning eyes in that ascetic face and the faint expression of disdain in the peculiar shape of his mouth had an extraordinary power of intimidation'. Gerhard was, we now know, even more outspoken about Schoenberg, as both man and composer, in other jottings,2 and several of the commentators discussed below connect that `extraordinary power of intimidation' with a more far-reaching authoritarianism. But the point about Schoenberg's relationship to 'tradition', deriving from his own so eminently quotable comment (1931) that 'I venture to credit myself with having written truly new music which, being based on tradition, is destined to become tradition',3 has always been a gift to those commentators eager to balance talk of the music's difficulty with emollient claims about its comprehensibility. My own centenary essay for The Musical Times had the resounding title `Schoenberg and the "true tradition"; theme and form in the String Trio',4 the pair of words in quotes coming from Stravinsky's encomium for those perfect works, the Five Pieces for Orchestra, Herzgewachse, Pierrot, the Serenade, the Variations for orchestra, and, for its orchestra, the Seraphita song from op.22. By these works Schoenberg is among the great composers. Musicians will take their bearings from them for a great while to come. They constitute together with a few works of not so many other composers, the true tradition.5

Thus spake Stravinsky, the convert to twelve-- tone atonality who evidently preferred Schoenberg's 'freely' atonal compositions to his twelve-- tone ones. But by 1973 it was becoming clear that the bearings taken by contemporary composers were altogether more complex and diverse than allowed for in Stravinsky's grand design. Hans Keller, who had declared at the time of Schoenberg's death that `he was born too early. It was really his premature birth which the newspaper obituaries, unintentionally, mourned',6 used the platform of the London Sinfonietta programme book, twenty-two years later, to elaborate this theme, and to proclaim a pessimistic conclusion: Schoenberg couldn't have chosen a worse moment for coming too soon: the break-up of the general musical language would have caused chaos in any case, but since it came too soon, it caused something worse than chaos, i.e. pseudo-- communication: and Keller lambasted a contemporary situation in which music,

from being an act of precise communication [...] descended to the level of mere stimulation. [...] Schoenberg thus emerges as musical history's most tragic figure - its most uncompromising clarifier and its leading confuser at the same time. [...] The current crisis of communication is not merely, not even chiefly, produced by one musical language having split into several. The one language has also, over a considerable part of the contemporary scene, evaporated into none.7