Some Schoenberg Quotes

Most composers are either poor at communicating in words or tend to lie. One of the exceptions is Arnold Schoenberg who left quite a lot of written prose on a wide variety of topics--mostly music related of course. There is a fat book, Style and Idea, collecting his writings over his whole life that is worth looking into. I am also going through his text, Fundamentals of Musical Composition, and I notice some very quotable passages there and not ones that tend to appear when he is quoted. Here are a couple:

• "A piece of music resembles in some respects a photograph album, displaying under changing circumstances the life of its basic idea--its basic motive."
• "The concept that music expresses something is generally accepted. However, chess does not tell stories. Mathematics does not evoke emotions. Similarly, from the viewpoint of pure aesthetics, music does not express the extramusical. But from the viewpoint of psychology, our capacity for mental and emotional associations is as unlimited as our capacity for repudiating them is limited. Thus every ordinary object can provoke musical associations, and conversely, music can evoke associations with extramusical objects." [Compare to Stravinsky's famous comment that "Music is powerless to express anything at all."]
• The first sentence of his essay "My Public" reprinted in Style and Idea, written in 1930: "Called upon to say something about my public, I have to confess: I do not believe I have one."
• From "On My Fiftieth Birthday, September 13, 1924": "I am obliged to mention one clear symptom of age which is present in my case: I can no longer hate as once I could. Sometimes, and this is worse still, I can even understand without feeling contempt."
• From "Circular to my Friends on my Sixtieth Birthday, September 13, 1934." Forced to leave his post in Berlin because of the Nazi regime, he landed in the US with some disappointing teaching jobs. On the occasion of a performance by the Boston Symphony, which he thought quite good, he mentions: "The permanent conductor is Serge Koussevitzky, once a travelling double-bass virtuoso, who in the ten years he has been there has never played a single note of mine. In my firm opinion he is so uneducated that he cannot even read a score..."

There is probably a book to be written about the influence of political circumstances on the careers of the two most significant composers of the first half of the 20th century, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Schoenberg had to leave Europe because of the rise of anti-semitism and did not easily adapt to circumstances in the United States. Despite some handsome offers from Juilliard and other institutions in New York and Chicago, he could not accept them because his health could not endure winters in the Northeast. He ended up in Hollywood (as did Stravinsky) where his music was less well understood. Stravinsky adapted much better to life outside Russia. First in France, where he was lionized, then in the US. He was always given many performances, unlike Schoenberg. It might also be interesting to note that Stravinsky, at least before the Second World War, was an admirer of Mussolini.

Schoenberg wrote an essay titled "How One Becomes Lonely" in which he tries to explain how his music is not as difficult to enjoy as many early listeners thought. In it he cites examples from Verklärte Nacht and his String Quartet No. 1. Certainly at this point in time, it is hard to see how the audience at their first performances reacted so strongly.