Retro Book Review: Schoenberg: Fundamentals of Musical Composition

The "retro review" theme is one that I occasionally resort to here. I don't have much interest in reviewing current CDs (or the streaming equivalent), films, tv shows or books, though I have reviewed a concert or two. But the idea of taking a second look at some important ones that have achieved more recognition over time appeals to me. I think one of the best ones I did was a review of several different recordings, from the 70s through the 90s, of recordings of the Bach Goldberg Variations on harpsichord. That was a lot of fun.

I'm reading a "life and works" bio of Schoenberg right now so that means that he is sort of in the back of my mind a lot and I started thinking about this book. I have not worked through it in any detail, but I have browsed it fairly extensively and today I decided to have another look at the section on theme and variations. Here is a quote:

Production of an entire piece through the application of variation is an approach to the logic of larger compositions.

As the name indicates, the piece consists of a THEME and several VARIATIONS upon it. The number of variations is determined by whether it is a movement in a cyclic work, like Op. 26-I, Op. 14/2-II, Op. 111-II; or an independent piece like the 32 Variations in c minor, or the 33 Diabelli Variations, Op. 120. A middle movement in a cyclic work includes a lesser number of variations. Often the piece is concluded by a coda, finale or fugue. In other cases the last variation is extended; and sometimes there is no special ending after the last variation. [Schoenberg: Fundamentals of Musical Composition, p 167.]

I know what you are thinking--that semi-colon in the last sentence is really redundant! Oh, that's not what you were thinking? Perhaps it was that this seems strangely cryptic because it is a quote ripped out of context? Actually, this is from quite near the beginning of that chapter. So what are those compositions referred to only by opus numbers? Who was the composer? The reference to "Diabelli Variations" gives the game away, of course, as the most famous composer who wrote a set of those was Beethoven. But who wrote the mysterious "Op. 26-I"? For the answer we turn to the Explanatory Note in the beginning of the book where it says:

ALL citations of musical literature which do not specify the composer refer to works by Beethoven. If the title is not specified the reference is to his piano sonatas.

Huh? I mean, huh? Isn't Schoenberg one of the notorious enfants terrible of 20th century music? The man who, almost single-handedly destroyed tonality and emptied concert halls everywhere with the screeching dissonance of his music? Isn't he, along with Stravinsky, the father of modernism in music? And you are trying to tell me that in his most important textbook on composition, written between 1937 and 1948, i.e. his mature thoughts on the subject, he doesn't even mention atonality and the overwhelming majority of musical examples are Beethoven? How does this compute?

Well, the truth is that the perception of Schoenberg, like the perception of Stravinsky, is wildly different from the reality. Malcolm MacDonald, the author of the Oxford monograph on Schoenberg, stresses over and over and again that Schoenberg's music is really not atonal and in fact he hated that term. Even his later music, written using serial principles, is often an extension of some kind of tonality.

In 1947 Schoenberg wrote an essay titled "Brahms the Progressive" and his first large-scale compositions were actually attempts to apply the abstract principles of Brahmsian composition to program music. In an interesting irony, Pierre Boulez wrote an essay in 1952 titled "Schoenberg est mort." Perhaps now we could write an essay titled "Schoenberg the Conservative" because I suspect that a close look at his life and work will lead one to the conclusion that everything Schoenberg did was based on a thorough understanding of music history and a reasoned extension of the fundamental concepts of musical structure.

But we have to add a caveat: in the years between when he first made major breakthroughs in composition, around 1908, and when he worked out the concepts of composition with twelve tones in the 1920s, he went through a period of intense musical expressionism where he did everything by sheer intuition. But even there you will find his music thoroughly permeated by intricate imitative counterpoint which itself goes back to Renaissance and Baroque musical structures.

About forty years ago I read R. G. Collingwood's The Idea of History and while I forget a lot of the argument, I do remember one point. He observes that you can look at history from two differing perspectives: in terms of innovation and dislocation, i.e. what has changed, and in terms of continuity, i.e. what has not changed. The bias towards modernism has made all recent music histories look at it from the former point of view. The important composers are supposedly all revolutionaries, radicals and innovators--the rest are merely derivative. But it is equally valid to look at it from the other point of view and see what continued, what was conserved, what was not radical and innovative. Mozart is in no sense a lesser composer for being more of a synthesist than an innovator.

I haven't done much reviewing of the book, have I? The important thing is that this is Schoenberg's major practical guide to music composition. Really, do you have to know much more?

Let's have an envoi of a little music by Beethoven. Here are those mysterious 32 Variations in C minor with pianist Evgeny Kissin: