I'm trying to recall if we talked about Schoenberg very much in my years at university. I don't think we did. We talked a lot about Bartók, Shostakovich, DuFay (not much about Messiaen), and a host of others so obscure I don't even recall their names. But Schoenberg? Despite the fact that he was and is a huge boulder in the stream of music history, professors deftly execute manoeuvres to slip by Schoenberg without engaging. Why is this?
Early in the volume of the Oxford History of Music devoted to the early twentieth century, Richard Taruskin handles Schoenberg by setting him alongside contemporaries like Mahler and Richard Strauss, framing him as just another modernist of the day. The main chapter on Schoenberg, subtitled "Schoenberg, Webern, and Expressionism; Atonality," observes:
Schoenberg's whole career was fraught with ironies, contradiction, and ambiguities, beginning with the paradox that one of the outstanding academic music theorists and composition teachers of the twentieth century was himself self-taught.
In a similar irony, the greatest composer of all was just an underpaid church musician in Saxony, also pretty much self-taught.
The claim I want to make, after trying to figure out Schoenberg for much of my musical life is that he is not just an important modernist, or inventor of atonal music, or composition teacher--no, Schoenberg is actually the most important composer of the twentieth century--certainly the first half, and probably of the whole century. Never mind his social alienation, his difficult reconciliation with his Jewish heritage or his struggles with the musical establishment. He just wrote the most important music, next to which the music of so many of his well-known contemporaries is mere lemon meringue.
Let's have some examples. His early rival was Stravinsky, who attended one of the first performances of Pierrot Lunaire and was impressed. He had just written The Rite of Spring, which many (myself included) have considered the greatest work of the twentieth century. But, you know, with a bit more thoughtful consideration, while The Rite is a brilliant ballet based on primitive Russian themes--an astonishing compilation of so many harmonic, melodic and rhythmic inventions that it still feels avant-garde, Pierrot on the other hand is actually a deeper and more profound work, synthesizing much of the devices in Western music into an expressionist tapestry of unique expression: a new kind of ensemble (since imitated many times), a new vocal technique (Sprechstimme), a new kind of music theatre and so on. The measure of just how radical this music is, is that while it took audiences a year or two to appreciate The Rite, most audiences today, over a century later, still don't know what to make of Pierrot.
I could go on, listing other pieces by Schoenberg that easily surpass in their substance more famous pieces: Verklärte Nacht over Berg's Lyric Suite, the Piano Concerto, op 42 over any piano concerto by Stravinsky or Prokofiev (but yes, those by Bartók stand up pretty well), the Violin Concerto, op 36 over any violin concerto by Stravinsky, Bartók, Prokofiev and so on (but, the Violin Concerto no. 1 by Shostakovich is pretty good competition), even the opera Moses und Aron over Wozzeck or a bunch of other 20th century operas (but I haven't such a broad knowledge of them, so I accept correction), and so on. The point is, just about everything Schoenberg wrote was and is hugely important. And I haven't even mentioned all the amazing piano music.
The empirical reason I am saying this is, in this 150th anniversary of Schoenberg's birth, as I come back to listen to some pieces, I realize that I have been listening to them all along, never stopped listening to them and I want to hear music by Schoenberg more than almost any other music. It is pure, solid, musical truth, and there is not a lot of that around.
6 comments:
Schoenberg was one of the first composers I took special notice of when I was a teenaged rocker blindly exploring classical music by just buying piles of random LPs. I knew absolutely nothing but as I got to know my albums Schoenberg held a special status as not just unique and original but touching me in deeper psychological places. There was a tension and difficulty that defied simple emotional labels or immediate circumstances, interior places like those glimpsed in experiencing good abstract paintings. Shadows or projections of ineffable dimensions that cannot be understood or literally reported. I liked visiting those places, they are real but not in ways that that can be mapped or talked about.
Will, your comment brilliantly captures just what I was trying to get at about Schoenberg. Thanks, so much.
Glad to see you enjoy Schoenberg. It’s a shame that classical music fora, which trend elderly, are still quick to depict his atonality as a barrier to acceptance. I think that the problem for him gaining an audience, is the same as classical music in general: his music sounds very conservative. Younger people today might be listening to pop or jazz artists that are just as out there harmonically, and so when they hear Schoenberg what strikes them are the rhythms, the forms that are so of their time and place in early-twentieth-century Vienna.
That was the case for me when I first heard Schoenberg already over two decades ago: it was music that sounded musty and staid compared to the avant-garde that he was accused of spawning, and it wasn’t until I gained a thorough grounding in the Viennese Classical and Romantic eras that Schoenberg really opened up to me.
I've been listening to and enjoying Schoenberg since my early 20s and that atmosphere of fin de siecle Vienna which hangs about the music, is one of the things that I treasure about it. I don't get too much from the new and shiny stuff--even when I was 20.
Christopher, what then is conservatism in music? If it means adhering to convention then I never did hear Schoenberg that way. His chords and tonality instantly struck me as funny, and after decades they still do. For the past decade my listening and instrument learning have been focused on early music, centered around the 17th century, but in its time much of this music was exploratory and new, and I try to play it now as if it were alive in the moment. Perhaps my tastes run conservative but only if judged from our moment. Time never stands still, there never was a Day One so no moment endures as an objective standard. When taking a historic survey of music, I judge the pieces aesthetically rather than how conventional they are in their context. After all, although we don't want to become bored, most experiments don't really work.
I think there is room here for a distinction: there is a musical surface and a musical depth. Schoenberg, for example, especially in some of the free atonal music before the 12-tone system, often has, as Christopher mentions, rhythms and gestures that recall the music of fin de siecle Vienna. But this is just on the surface. Inside the music is using motivic relationships, harmonic structures and novel textures that are something quite new. This is why Schoenberg rewards repeated listening today where many of his contemporaries may not.
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