Judge Dennis Davis
Schönenberg: A Musical Revolutionary?

Judge Dennis Davis - Schöenberg: A Musical Revolutionary?

- Evening or good afternoon to everybody. This is, of all the lectures that I’ve given on music; in some ways this is the most difficult one because Arnold Schöenberg, who we are going to talk about this evening, is hardly anything other than a complex character in the musical world. You could well say, that at least a hundred years ago, probably, certainly more than that, when he began to compose a whole range of music; he seemed to have stepped off the known musical, the cliff of the known musical world. After all, if you talk about Schöenberg, you are always talking about atonal music. And when you’re talking about atonal music, what you’re talking about is the rejection of tonal scenality, which means organising musical compositions around a central note, which of course is called the Tonic. And with atonal music; it rips up all these rules, takes a different approach. There are no discernible keys or typical harmonies composition sounds perhaps chaotic to some, weird to others compared with traditional tonal compositions. So, it’s difficult to lecture on Schöenberg partly because his music is difficult to the ear because in a sense, it broke with the tradition, and yet in many ways, he’s regarded as a vitally important component of 20th century music. Now, in the talk I’m about to give you, I will illustrate some of Schöenberg’s music with brief clips. But I decided that the complexity of Schöenberg requires a real authority, and you shall see that I’ve managed to procure the assistance of Leonard Bernstein in this regard, with the only lengthy clip that I’m going to show you. Which I believe is incredibly useful in trying to explain the manner in which Schöenberg tore up the rules, which ultimately had been dominant in the musical world for hundreds of years.

Now, who was he? Well, he was born in 1874. His father, Samuel Schöenberg, came from the German speaking Jewish community in Pressburg, now Bratislava in Slovakia. He landed up in Vienna as a young man and he was a shopkeeper. There he met and married Pauline Nachod, who came from a family of cantorial singers, which itself was quite interesting; reasons we’ll come to a little later. They were very modest. There was not even a piano in the house and the way in which Schöenberg began to learn music was not entirely dissimilar from Mahler, because as I’ve discussed many times in various talks to you, Mahler, of course, is particularly influenced by the military bands which floated around roundabout where he was living as a child. And the same thing happened with Schöenberg. And in fact, Schöenberg was clearly a genius as a child, didn’t really have much in the way of formal musical instruction, but he did have some lessons from Alexander Zemlinsky who was a composer of some sort. Now, Zemlinsky’s father was a Catholic, the mother was a daughter of a Sephardic Jew and a Bosnian Muslim. And in 1901 Schöenberg married Zemlinsky’s sister, Mathilde. More about her in a moment. Interesting enough, he began life as a bank clerk, taking on various odd musical jobs and his first major musical job, which is not uninteresting either in relation to if one listens to all his music, when in 1901 he moved to Berlin to serve as a musical director for a form of cabaret.

It was called the Buntes Theatre, and was the brainchild of someone called Ernst Von Wolzogen, who hoped to import to Berlin, the kind of cabaret which had dominated places like Paris. Now, he was there for some while but in 1904 he returned to Vienna, where he placed a notice in the announcing that he was seeking pupils. And amongst his pupils was of course one Anton Webern, and the other was significantly Alban Berg, whom has been mentioned previously in these discussions. Now, Schöenberg certainly seemed to have been able to liaison and have contact with the great musicians at the time. So for example, he was regularly invited to the Mahlers, and according to Alma Mahler, he would incite heated arguments by offering up quote “paradox of the most violent descriptions.” And on one occasion, Gustav Mahler said to Alma, “Take good care you never invite that conceited puppy to the house again.” But apparently he came quite often. Now, Mahler had a really schizoid relationship with Schöenberg’s music. On the one hand, he regarded it as maddening. On the other hand, he thought there was something really there. And he said at one point, “Why am I still writing symphonies if this,” listening to Schöenberg, “is supposed to be the music of the future.” After rehearsal of Schöenberg’s first chamber symphony, Mahler asked the musicians to play a C minor triad, said, “Thank you” and walked out. But he had made a show of applauding Schöenberg’s most controversial works possibly because he himself, as we’ve discussed previously, had experienced the awfulness of Vienna music critics.

It’s also interesting to some extent talking about Mahler, and I’ve hinted at this before, if you just analyse the ninth symphony of Mahler, which seems to prefigure not just Mahler’s death, but the death of music as Mahler had known it, and as he saw himself as being the custodian of the music tradition, running from Bach through Beethoven and Brahms. People do speculate that had he finished his 10th symphony and more, he may well have, like Schöenberg, decided that the tonal system was too restrictive for the creativity that he wished to unleash. One does not know, but one also knows that Schöenberg had a lot of contact with Strauss and they met quite often, particularly in the couple of years that Schöenberg was in Vienna. Sorry, in Berlin. It does appear that they seem to get on rather better because Schöenberg was rather obsequious to Strauss. At one point he said, “I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you, honoured master, once again for all the help you’ve given me at the sacrifice to yourself in the most sincere manner. I’ll not forget this for the whole of my life and always be thankful to you for it.” So there was a real link between Strauss and Schöenberg and Mahler, as the case may be. Schöenberg as well, is interesting for the following reason; he has a sort of parallel process to some extent to Debussy because he was influenced first by poetry and then by art. Whereas Debussy was influenced by Verlaine and Mallarmé, Schöenberg seemed to be interested by the visions of Richard Dehmel, who furnished the story of Transfigured Night and some of the early Schöenberg’s were clearly influenced by these literal engagements.

But the really important first step and where we will pause to listen to a little bit of Schöenberg, is to locate him in the midst of a major crisis. And the major crisis was this; I said to you that Schöenberg had married Mathilde, and it turned out that Mathilde was not as nice. It was not as committed to Schöenberg as Schöenberg might have been to her, and the result of which was she fell for the affections of their neighbour, the expressionist painter, Richard Gerstl. And Schöenberg was really upset by this because of the fact that he had drawn Gerstl into their family circle, invited and joined him, joined them when they went on various holidays out of the city. And when Schöenberg confronted Mathilde with the fact that she had, as it were, behaved in flagrante with Gerstl, she decided that well, Gerstl was a lot better than Schöenberg; abandoned him and their two small children, eventually being persuaded to return home by Webern. Gerstl was not particularly happy at this either, and he set fire to his paintings in his studio, drove a knife into his chest and hanged himself. He was 25. So this was the charming context in which Schöenberg was writing a piece, which was the first one to really elicit a huge amount of protest within the music community. And that is his second string quartet, which was heard for the first time in Vienna on the 21st of December 1908, just seven weeks after the suicide. And the point about this piece was clearly had been written, in many instances, the last little bits of it were certainly written under extraordinary emotional duress.

Now, the first movement, one of the critics said went totally well because it followed broadly the tradition. It was broadly within the, the scheme of tonality, but then the second movement was a different matter. Any sense of harmonic security through that system, kind of trying to figure out if there was a tonic key, whether there was that kind of a tonal structure quickly evaporated. And when Schöenberg in this quartet briefly quoted the nursery rhyme, Ach du liebe Augustine, its homely familiarity basically was in sharp contrast to the strangeness of the music. Eventually there was a pause in the music, somebody sneezed; provoking howls of laughter on the basis of someone saying, “Well, is that also part of the music?” And then in the last few movements, the audience got increasingly angry because breaking with more than 150 years of tradition, Schöenberg had now decided to introduce a soprano together with the two violins, viola and cello. And the soprano had been silent for the first two movements, but when she began to sing in the third movement, people began to hiss and there were shouts of, “For goodness sake, stop singing!” and “We’ve had more than enough!” And as one critic described it, the music could only be played to the close, to the close under bombardment of loud protestation for the rest of the audience. As a result of which the Vienna press regarded this as the Schöenberg affair. Not entirely dissimilar from that which Stravinsky encountered in Paris, but certainly was the beginning of, as it were, of the controversies relating to Schöenberg.

So let us just, I’m going to play you on a very short clip from the third movement of the second string quartet. I got it slightly wrong, I wanted to get a little bit more of the soloist, but you can see the kind of incongruity of all of this when you’re coming to see a string quartet and all of a sudden in the third movement, along comes a singer. So, if we could have the first clip, Emily. I want to just fast forward if I may, from 1908, from this oddity of the soprano singing in part of this. And you can see, just from the short clip that I’ve played you, just how strange the music must have appeared to people at the time. I want to fast forward almost 30 years because in 1933, the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin began the purge of Jews from the institute where Schöenberg had taught since 1925. And it was at this point, he had been, luckily he was in France and he decided to move the family to the US. And it was at a time that he was, that he was preparing his violin concerto, which he completed and which ultimately was premiered in I think, 1936. And the interesting thing about it was that itself created its own controversies. Let me just read to you from the notes, which accompanied the performance which Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra with Russian born violinist Louis Krasner played in 1940, some five or six years after the world premier.

He wrote some notes, which were then reproduced again when this concerto was played in the 70’s under the conducting of Seiji Ozawa. And this is what Krasner said, “It’s a matter of hysterical,” sorry, “historical record that almost all of the first performances of Schöenberg’s music were carried out in an atmosphere of belligerence, scandal and indeed sabotage. The first performance of the concerto auspiciously scheduled by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski had to endure its share of problems. Indeed the event was marked by ongoing opposition and controversy between the orchestra’s management and its music director, who did not want the piece to be played, thinking it was musical nonsense. Efforts were exerted repeatedly to thwart the performance and to effect its consolation. The only reason that the performance actually took place was because of the persistence of Stokowski. The orchestra players were at first hesitant in their attitude and interest, but for the most part they worked seriously and attentively prodding on perhaps by, prodded on by a handful of colleagues who were personally involved in composition and avant garde music. The Schöenberg concerto has very complex work. It’s magnificent in its scope. The ultimate, I would say, in design and conception of the solo part. The musical responsibilities it imposes on both fingerboard and bowing techniques carry the player to the very edge of instrumental brinkmanship.” And then, the last passage, “With Stokowski’s masterful control, together with the growing interest of the orchestra, rehearsals progressed satisfactorily.

At some point along the way, Stokowski spoke of his difficulties with management and explained that they’d refused to budget a soloist fee and he’d personally pay for my honorariums of the violinist. And it is interesting that it was played very few times, but by 1935, Schöenberg had in a sense, moved away from the kind of style of composition that I briefly alluded to in the second string quartet and there was some hint of a reversal to the tonal structure. I’m going to just play the first few bars from the first movement of the violin concerto of interest is that the soloist . If I was in an audience with you, I’d ask you to guess who it is, but obviously I can’t do that. The soloist is Michael Barenboim, the son of Daniel Barenboim who’s playing this. Although I can highly recommend, those who’s interested, to buy or acquire or you may have it, the Hilary Hahn version of the Schöenberg Violin Concerto, which was coupled with Sibelius Violin Concerto; it was absolutely fabulous. But just let’s listen to the first few minutes of the violent concerto, which gives you a sense of the range within which Schöenberg was operating. So that gives you, by the way, the conductor there was Pierre Boulez, who himself was hardly irrelevant to the pushing of the boundaries of music with many of the compositions that he wrote in addition to what he’s conducting. You get a sense in the second piece there, the violin concerto, of the way in which Schöenberg sought to re, as it were, configure the structure which shooed so much of the harmonic traditions which had come certainly prior thereto.

Now in order to understand this best, I thought we need to dwell a little more into the history and we need to dwell a little bit more into what we mean by atonality, which I skipped over rather quickly at the beginning. So in order for us to do this, I’ve inspanned somebody who really does know about the stuff, probably the greatest musical educator we’ve ever had; Leonard Bernstein. This is something that someone had obviously recorded, so it’s got a couple of strange aspects to it from the Norton lectures. But I think that the seven or eight minutes that I’m going to play will give you a very good understanding of what Schöenberg was on about in relation to the revolutionary rupture in the traditional structure of music which he sought to create. So this is Bernstein’s take.

• So now in 1908, Schöenberg is already giving up the struggle to preserve tonality, to contain those post-Wagnerian chromaticisms. In this very year of 1908, he is writing a second string quartet that clearly announces the upheaval and his renunciation of tonality. In the last movement of this quartet, he resorts to the human voice; a soprano who sings Stefan George’s prophetic words, "I feel air from another planet.” And it sounds like this. And then she sings; And indeed, Schöenberg does feel that air and we feel it too. This opus 10 is to be his last tonal piece for many years to come. By Opus 11; we are already breathing that new air. Listen. Do you feel that new air? You breathing it? This is atonality to use that awful and frequently misunderstood word. Not the atonality of Debussy’s whole tone row. The whole tonal scale that we studied last week, which was always, if you remember, tonally contained. This atonality is not contained, either diatonically or in any other way. For better or worse, non-tonal music has been born. And so we can see this 20th century split as having a common impetus the way a great river divides into two forks. On the one hand, there are tonal composers guided by Igor Stravinsky, who are seeking to extend musical ambiguities as far as possible by constant transformations, but always somehow remaining within the confines of the tonal system. While on the other hand, non-tonal composers led by Schöenberg were seeking their new metaphorical speech through one huge convulsive transformation. Namely, transforming the entire tonal system into a new and different poetic language.

But these two apparently hostile camps, with all their antagonisms and disputes about which side really represented modern music, actually shared the same motivation; increased expressive power. Stravinsky and Schöenberg were after the same thing in different ways. Stravinsky tried to keep musical progress on the move by driving tonal and structural ambiguities on and on to a point of no return, as we will see next week. Schöenberg foreseeing this point of no return and taking his cue from the Expressionistic movement in the other arts, initiated a clean total break with tonality altogether, as well as with syntactic structures based on symmetry. It’s interesting to note that Schöenberg was also a talented painter. Free atonality was, in itself, a point of no return. It seemed to fulfil the conditions for musical progress. It seemed to continue the line of romantic expressivity in a subjective way, from Wagner and Brahms through Bruckner and Mahler. The expressionism seemed logical, the atonality inevitable; but then a dead end. Where did one go from here? Having abandoned all the rules, for one thing, the lack of constraints and the resulting ungoverned freedom produced a music that was extremely difficult for the listener to follow, in either form or content. This remained true in spite of all the brilliant and profuse inner structures to be found in this piece; canonic procedures and inverted phrases, retrogrades and all the rest.

And secondly, it was not easy for the composer to maintain his atonality because of that innate tonal drive we all share universally. And this was particularly true of Schöenberg, who was so gifted with his own innate musicality. Even the last song of Pierrot Lunaire yields to old triadic harmony when Pierrot or Schöenberg, if you will, sings . “Old fragrance from once upon a time.” And at that moment, it sounds like this. That is a really touching moment; that yearning for the universal. It’s a moment that could have been Mahler. Now for all these reasons, some new system had to be found, a new system for controlling the amorphousness of free floating atonality. And so Schöenberg gradually evolved his famous serial method. Gradually, already before this, in his Opus 19, which is a set of piano pieces, he was already veering toward a concept of the 12 chromatic tones, whereby they are all used constantly but with no particular tonal relationship to one another. You understand what I mean? Like the first piece of this set, which begins like this. Now in the course of those two bars, all 12 tones are indeed employed, but there’s still a ghost of tonality hanging over them. See the chromaticism is still, just barely, but still contained. Listen to the melody alone. Perfectly tonal, in fact it outlines a B major triad. All right, with this one, not very startling, appoggotiuara which resolves as conventionally as in Mozart or Mahler. In fact, it sounds rather like Till Eulenspiegel, doesn’t it?

And as it continues, the chromatic wandering is not very different from the Berlioz’ Romeo and Juliet music we heard last week. It still suggests B major, right? Where the difference lies is in the accompaniment, which has nothing at all to do with B major. And now listen to how it goes on. What is resonating in that phrase? Do you remember Tristan? And now listen to Schöenberg. “Son of Tristan” or is it “Tristan rise again”. I think, maybe “Tristan’s revenge”, but whichever it is, there’s still no escaping the past. The need for a control system is pressingly clear, you see that? And so by the early 1920’s, Schöenberg had arrived at a 12 tone system which guaranteed or your money back that you would never slip into old tonal habits. No more B major, no more Tristan. And more important; that any piece you wrote could be consistent, could make sense formally and stylistically from beginning to end. In other words, aesthetic order had been restored.

• I just wanted to give you that because it’s sort of, I think, you know, Bernstein is just a brilliant educator, gives you some sense of what Schöenberg was on about. It’s interesting, if I can just make one, since I’m running, I think, somewhat short of time. One addition, it’s interesting that Schöenberg was actually very friendly with Kandinsky. And it is said that Kandinsky’s third impression painted in 1911, was actually based on Schöenberg as it were inspired by one of his concerts. And of course, that that level of abstraction and the fact that Schöenberg was trying to do in music what Kandinsky was doing at art replicates to quite a considerable extent, precisely what Bernstein was talking about in the conditions of the early part of the 20th century. One can say much more about this, but I want to save the last few minutes for two major works that Schöenberg composed, both with the Jewish theme and that’s why I want to end with them. The first of course is Moses und Aron, and just by the way it is; A R O N. And Schöenberg dropped the one A in order that what would otherwise have been 13 letters then became 12 in the title; replicating the 12 tonality system. And what this opera is about, is it’s about the Israelites in the desert having cast off slavery from Egypt. It’s really a nice time to talk about this, just off the Pesach and coming up to Shabbat.

And they feel the abandonment by their leader Moses, because of course, Moses for 40 days, had been on Mount Sinai getting the receipt of the 10 Commandments and they’re beginning to lose faith in God. And effectively, what they want is a tangible God who can help them in their adversity. And so whilst Moses is away, Aaron makes the golden calf and much of that represents the theme of the opera. There are a series of remarkable features about this. In the opera, Moses argues that it’s absolutely wrong to try to represent God at all i.e. through the golden calf. And in a way, through responding to this, Schöenberg scored the voice of God in his opera, in six different ways. Giving them three sung and three spoken voices. Another oddity given that Moses insisting on monotheism over pagan polytheism, and yet you’ve got all these different voices which are floating. And Schöenberg was attracted to the bibbling material after an incident in 1922, when his family fled the Austrian resort of Mattsee in the face of Antisemitism. “I had at last learned the lesson that has been forced upon me this year,” he wrote to the painter, Kandinsky. “It is that I am not a German, I’m not a European, indeed, perhaps scarcely even a human being.

At least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me; but that I’m a Jew.” And this realisation prompted him to reconsider. He had converted to Protestantism in 1898. I mean replicating to some extent, one of his great heroes, Mahler. But he reconnected with his Jewish identity and therefore wanted to explore his people’s emergence from persecution. Hence, he was particularly attracted to this theme. Now I should say that Moses und Aron was never finished. He scored two acts in 1932, wrote a libretto for the third, sometimes performed without music. It is a very philosophical piece of music. We are just going to pick up a very short little bit where Moses is engaging with the burning bush right at the commencement of the first act. You’ll have to bear with me because you’re going to see some magnificent shots of the Vienna Opera House to start with, ‘cause it was this whole opera, which I’ve just taken the first couple of minutes, comes from a performance in Vienna. Absolutely magnificent, this Opera House. I’ve been there of course, it always reminds me that this is where Mahler conducted.

• It just gives you a sense, or really, just the opening. I wanted to give the feel of, it’s quite a stark, but it’s a very philosophically engaged opera about the episode of the Golden Calf. And I want to end with another piece of music from Schöenberg which has significant Jewish connections and which I have spoken about before. And that is The Survivor from Auschwitz, which was a piece of music that he wrote in 1947. Interesting enough, after the aftermath of having had a very serious heart attack from which many thought he might not recover. And Schöenberg was clearly moved in composing this piece of music from stories of actual survivors. And he particularly heard about the prisoners who began singing the Shema Yisrael as they were led away to the death camp. And he wanted to dramatise this as best he could. The story is told through the eyes of a narrator who speaks for the Jews who’ve been discovered hiding in a sewers of Warsaw. He creates a a very jarring orchestral sound, which basically encompasses the narration. He has specific notation in this regard, that they should never be sung, how they should be sung. The German police are represented by sharply biting, percussive shouts by the narrator in German, set against jarring orchestral sounds as the prisoners represented by the male chorus, are rounded up, asked to count out loud and about to be sent to the camps. They sing a version of Shema Yisrael. That’s what it’s about, it’s really a remarkable piece. I can’t do more than just give you first couple of minutes before we conclude.

• [Narrator] I cannot remember everything. I must have been unconscious most of the time. I remember only the grandiose moment when they all start to sing, as if prearranged, the old prayer they had neglected for so many years; the forgotten creed. But I have no recollection how I got underground to live in the sewers of Warsaw for so long a time. The day began as usual. Reveille! When it still was dark. “Get out!” whether you slept or whether worries kept you awake the whole night, you had been separated from your children, from your wife, from your parents. You don’t know what happened to them. How could you sleep? The trumpets again, get out! The sergeant will be furious! They came out; some very slowly. The old ones, the sick ones, some with the nervous agility. They fear the sergeant, they hurry as much as they can. In vain. Much too much noise, much too much commotion, and not fast enough! The Feldwebel shouts; The sergeant and his subordinates hit everyone; young or old, strong or sick, guilty or innocent! It was painful to hear the groaning and moaning! I heard it though I had been hit very hard, so hard that I could not help falling down. We all on the ground who could not stand up were then beaten over the head! I must have been unconscious. The next thing I heard was a soldier saying, “They are all dead.” Where upon the sergeant ordered to do away with us. There I lay aside, half conscious. It had become very still; fear and pain. Then I heard the sergeant shouting. They started slowly and irregularly. One, two, three, four. The sergeant shouted again. They began again, first slowly. One, two, three, four, became-

• So that just gives you a little snippet of what is really quite a remarkable piece of music.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: I want to end by just answering one question, which I got 'cause we’re past time. If Catherine asks the question, “Would it be possible to say that atonality as the breaking of musical conventions, foreshadows the coming upheaval for the 20th century? Would that be stretching the argument?”

A: I don’t think it does stretch the argument. And I think that if we, if I’d had time, and maybe when I revisit Mahler, I can talk about this. If you look at the Mahler’s ninth, he foreshadowed to a large degree, not just his own death, but the death of tonal music. And he foreshadowed, in a sense, the breakup of the world as he saw it. Of course, which gave rise to the First World War. There’s a real sense of apocalypse coming there, and I suppose it’s not so hard to believe that people like Schöenberg and others were battling with the dismantling of the structures. Which ultimately, with the governing structures in which music had been located for so long. So it’s a really fine question to ask.

Thank you very much and goodnight to all.