CREATIONS

Five
Schoenberg and the Origins of Atonality

Ethan Haimo

Seen from the vantage point of the 1990s, the birth of atonality is an accomplished and inarguable fact, one of the most significant events in the history of Western music. Placed as we are in time — after this complete transformation of musical thought — it is difficult to imagine that it could have been otherwise.

But, at least as far as the arts are concerned, I am no historical determinist. Atonality was not the ineluctable consequence of the development of musical style, not an inescapable historical necessity.^[1] To be sure, by 1900 many composers felt that tonality as it had been understood was at the point of exhaustion and that substantive changes in musical language were in store. Nonetheless, it is by no means certain that, without Arnold Schoenberg, we would have seen the emergence of music that we would define as atonal. Rather, we probably would have seen (and did, in fact, see) new scales or modes, new definitions of dissonance or methods of dissonance treatment, new procedures for voice leading, new kinds of harmonic progressions, and so forth. Nevertheless, however sharply the pre-World War I music of Stravinsky, Bartók, Debussy, Scriabin, and others diverges from tonality as it had been understood before the turn of the century, their music retained many significant aspects of tonal organization. It is reasonable to wonder whether without Schoenberg we would ever have seen anything like the Klavierstücke, op. 11. And it should not be forgotten how seminal that opus was. As Reinhold Brinkmann pointed out, op. 11 was the first Schoenberg work that Bartók got to know,^[2] and Stravinsky studied it while composing Le sacre du printemps.

If indeed the idea of atonality was not so much the product of anonymous historical forces as it was the specific notion of a single thinker, then we are faced with a basic problem in the epistemology of music: What was there in Schoenberg's thought that brought about the birth of atonality?

To answer this question, however, we must recognize that the birth of atonality was not sudden, did not emerge complete in all of its details. Schoenberg did not abandon all aspects of tonality between one composition and the next. Rather, there was an extended period in which the syntax and idioms characteristic of tonal music gradually disappeared and nontonal procedures began to take their place.^[3] Recognizing that there was such an evolutionary process is important for the understanding of the birth of atonality, for it is my central contention here that Schoenberg's idea of atonality emerged from his conception of tonality. Therefore the question might be reformulated as, What was there in Schoenberg's view of tonality that motivated the birth of atonality?

It is tempting to consider approaching the reconstruction of Schoenberg's compositional thought in the years roughly between 1900 and 1909 simply by examining the compositions, preferably in chronological order. And although the chronology of the compositions in the period leading up to World War I is hardly ironclad, there is relatively reliable chronological information about almost all of the most significant compositions of this period.^[4] But analysis of the compositions alone may not be completely satisfactory. It would be best if it were possible to support analytical observations with the composer's contemporaneous writings, diaries, letters, or polemics.

The problem is, however, that Schoenberg did not become an author until the period in question was already well under way. His first formal essays, a few short, angry responses to the ever intensifying tidal wave of criticism of his music, were not written until 1909, after the completion of opp. 11 and 15, and are in any event irrelevant to the topic under discussion.^[5] Most of Schoenberg's later (and usually rather general) comments on the subject in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s are necessarily colored by the complete transformation that had taken place in his artistic thinking in the intervening years, not the least of which was the evolution of the twelve-tone method. Furthermore, these later articles, like "My Evolution," "Wie man einsam wird" ("How One Becomes Lonely"), and others, were written, at least in part, in response to the many violent assaults on the legitimacy of his music.^[6] Slanted, as they necessarily were, by the exigencies of providing a defense for his musical style, these polemics may not be as reliable or useful as would testimony gathered during the period of Schoenberg's gradual turn toward a new kind of musical organization.

There is, however, one text from the period that has the potential to supply us with what is needed, though only if it is used carefully. I refer, of course, to Schoenberg's Harmonielehre.^[7] As Jan Maegaard has shown,^[8] Schoenberg began writing this massive theoretical/philosophical treatise in 1910 and finished and published it in 1911 — that is, after the George -

Lieder, op. 15, the Piano Pieces, op. 11, the Five Orchestra Pieces, op. 16, and Erwartung, op. 17.

Having dismissed other post-1909 texts as unsuitable for revealing important features of Schoenberg's compositional thinking in the period of the birth of atonality, it might seem illogical that I now suggest examining a 1911 treatise for that purpose. But the Harmonielehre has some crucial differences from the other writings. If we except some of the later chapters and various scattered passages in which Schoenberg self-consciously attempts to describe and justify some of his latest compositional developments, the book is in no sense designed as a primer for Schoenberg's emergent style. Rather, it represents a species of music-theory textbook that fundamentally no longer exists: a text designed to teach a beginning pupil how to become a composer of tonal music.

The very fact that this is a textbook makes it particularly effective as a vehicle to help us re-create Schoenberg's compositional thinking. It can be used in much the same way that Walter Frisch used Schoenberg's pedagogical writings to good effect for the clarification of Schoenberg's concept of developing variation.^[9] Because he is writing a text for a beginning student interested in learning how to compose tonal music, Schoenberg is forced to begin at the beginning, with fundamental principles. Examination of the practical details of his instructions for voice leading, chord formation, and harmonic progression enables a reconstruction of some of the most significant underpinnings of Schoenberg's idea of tonality. And it is in Schoenberg's conception of tonality that the most useful clues for the origins of atonality can be found.

I would like to preface my analysis of the evidence I believe to be most useful by describing some material from the Harmonielehre that contributes to the overall picture, though I suspect it may not be completely reliable. I refer to passages such as the extended discussion of consonance, dissonance, and the overtone system in chapter 3. This discussion includes Schoenberg's assertion that the difference between the closer and more remote overtones is a matter of degree, not of kind. If this view of the overtones was indeed a determinant of Schoenberg's thinking before circa 1908, it would be an obvious source for the origins of atonality. A compositional method grounded on the notion that the distinction between dissonance and consonance is artificial would provide much of the appropriate philosophical/acoustical background for the birth of atonality. And it would not be the first time that theories of consonance and dissonance — credible or not — had determined the direction of musical style.

But these remarks — and there are other, similar ones — seem suspiciously like ex post facto justifications, appeals to history and the laws of nature to justify a musical transformation that had already taken place,

thus perhaps reflecting the concerns of the composer of 1910 rather than the composer of earlier tonal compositions.^[10] Therefore I intend to restrict my discussion to the practical material of the Harmonielehre, of which there is more than enough for my purpose.

There are at the very least three basic ways in which Schoenberg's theory of tonality, as expressed in the practical sections of the Harmonielehre, can cast light on the origins of atonality: through his concept of harmonic progression, through his notion of the hierarchy of the diatonic collection, and through his procedures for chord formation.

In chapters 4 and 5 — the first chapters in which he gets down to the nitty-gritty of practical musical, as opposed to philosophical or acoustical, details — Schoenberg shows the beginning student how to form all of the diatonic triads, seventh chords, and their inversions. After enunciating basic principles of voice leading, Schoenberg demonstrates how to connect chords one to another. It is quite remarkable that the emphasis is exclusively on connections from chord to chord. Absent from this extended discussion (which lasts nearly a quarter of the entire book and includes sixty-nine musical examples) is any systematic discussion of harmonic progression. This entire stretch of the book includes no theoretical framework to organize the successions of harmonies into progressions directed toward a tonic, as opposed to merely ending on the tonic. The omission is also reflected in the musical examples, many of which include harmonic successions that wander about rather aimlessly.^[11] Moreover, although Schoenberg several times employs the useful pedagogical technique of introducing a new concept with an example containing an error, he defers until the beginning of chapter 7 any mention of the possibility that these aimless harmonic progressions need improvement.

When he finally does get around to this topic, he introduces his theory of harmonic progressions — a theory that, as Robert Wason has shown, is distantly related to Simon Sechter's (and Anton Bruckner's) theories of chord progression.^[12] Schoenberg's theory is founded on three types of chord progressions: strong (or ascending), weak (or descending), and over-skipping (or superstrong). He formulates his theory of chord progressions as a dictum: "in planning our root progressions we shall give absolute preference to the ascending progressions and shall use the descending ones primarily in those chord connections where the total effect is still that of ascent."^[13]

The generally negative verdict that subsequent musical theorists have expressed regarding this theory of harmonic progressions is irrelevant here. I am interested in this theory not so much for its own sake but for what it reveals about Schoenberg's view of tonality. As a matter of fact, his theory is uncommonly revealing, for it does virtually nothing to address the issue of what other theories of tonality would consider to be the harmonic aimlessness of Schoenberg's progressions. Indeed, using Schoenberg's in-

structions one can readily produce progressions that express no functionally integrated, tonic-defining structure. As a result, his theory of strong/weak/superstrong progressions is no different in kind or focus from the ideas in the preceding one hundred pages of his text; just as chapters 4 and 5 placed their emphasis on chord-to-chord connections, so too is Schoenberg's theory of progressions, in the final analysis, largely a refinement of that idea.^[14]

In the next section of the chapter, when at long last he brings cadences into the picture, Schoenberg's approach finally begins to yield harmonic progressions that resemble those of more traditional theories of harmony. When one limits the number of chords in a progression to a relatively small number; when one begins and ends a phrase in the tonic, preparing the close with one of the traditional cadential formulas; when one chooses chords utilizing only tones of the diatonic collection; and when one follows Schoenberg's dictum that strong progressions are to be given absolute preference — the resultant harmonic progressions, as shown in Schoenberg's examples, are virtually indistinguishable from progressions one would find by theorists or figured-bass authors as diverse as Hugo Riemann and Paul Vidal.

But in Schoenberg's post-1900 music few of these restrictions hold. The cadence was — in true late-Romantic style — unlikely to be found in unambiguous form at the end of every phrase or period. Rather, it was a device of some rarity, avoided entirely or deferred to the very end of a composition or important section. Similarly, the tonic triad (or dominant chord) was not always clearly demarcated at the beginnings or endings of phrases. Nor did Schoenberg limit himself to the diatonic tones of a scale or to relatively short harmonic progressions. Therefore, even when Schoenberg gives absolute preference to strong progressions in his connections from chord to chord, his harmonic progressions frequently lack any strong sense of tonal identification. They become not tonic-defining progressions with a directional push toward the tonic but successions of chords, each of which is related most strongly to its immediate predecessor and successor, and absent of any clear tonal goal — exactly as we might conclude from his theory of progressions. Therefore, the tonic definition of a phrase or passage (if it exists at all) is likely to be established not so much by the underlying harmonic progressions as by other factors — frequently by beginning or ending a phrase or section on a chord that by agogic emphasis or temporal placement seems like the tonic, or sometimes by the melodic points of emphasis in the outermost voices. This is not to say that Schoenberg never wrote phrases whose progressions begin on the tonic, move to a dominant preparation chord, continue on to a dominant, and return to the tonic. But it is clear that in his tonal thought, progressions of this sort were not regarded as normative, nor even necessary for what he saw as tonic definition.

Given the unique character of virtually every one of his works, it is a risky

business to cite examples and present them as representative of Schoenberg's compositions. There is the real danger that whatever examples one chooses might be — at least in some dimension — representative only of that work and of no others. With this caution in mind, I would like to cite an example that I believe is illustrative of the view of tonic definition that emerges from Schoenberg's Harmonielehre.

The song "Mädchenlied," op. 6, no. 3 (1905), begins with a fairly clear expansion of an E-minor triad in measure 1 (see example 1). By virtue of its placement as the first chord of the composition and its comparative agogic emphasis, we can — even on first hearing — take E to be the tonic, a judgment that is confirmed by the song's conclusion. Schoenberg begins the second stanza of the poem (measure 9) again in E minor, reestablishing E by the same temporal and agogic emphases that were used at the beginning of the song. Between these two comparatively unambiguous tonal reference points there is a plethora of identifiable triads, seventh chords, augmented triads, and so forth. And the successions from chord to chord are invariably structured to move primarily by strong or superstrong progressions, faithfully following the principles of chord progression and voice leading outlined in the Harmonielehre.

If, however, one were presented with only measures 2 through 7, it would be impossible to identify E minor (or any other sonority) as the tonic of this passage, or to anticipate the return of E minor at the beginning of measure 8. Nothing in the intervening harmonic progressions defines E minor as the tonic, nor does any other tone suggest a tonic lasting beyond one chord.

Although this is but a single example, I believe it to be highly representative of Schoenberg's approach to tonality. It is frequently the case in his works that the tonic is neither established by, nor deducible from, the harmonic progressions. Instead Schoenberg normally establishes the tonic by temporal placement or agogic emphasis. Without such emphases or placement it is difficult or impossible to identify the tonic.

The theory of harmonic progressions in the Harmonielehre is not a fluke, not an error, not even a pedagogical simplification. Rather, it represents an essential aspect of Schoenberg's thinking. As such it is one of the most significant clues in our search for the origins of atonality, for it yields a musical style employing the traditional vocabulary of tonality (triads and seventh chords) and traditional syntax (no parallel fifths, proper resolution of sevenths, and so forth) without defining or establishing the tonic as the referential sonority by means of harmonic progression.

A further source of the idea of atonality can be found in a second basic aspect of Schoenberg's view of tonality. In most other theories of tonality, both before and since Schoenberg, the diatonic scale is accorded a special hierarchical standing. The diatonic collection is normally considered to be

Example 1.
Arnold Schoenberg, "Mädchenlied," op. 6, no. 3, mm. 1-8

potentially key defining, and thus relatively stable. It follows that the remaining five tones of the chromatic scale are less stable; they must normally resolve to, be seen as elaborators of, or be heard in reference to one of the seven diatonic tones. In the beginning stages of his treatise Schoenberg restricts himself to chords built only on the diatonic degrees, and it might appear that he too is respecting the hierarchical standing of the diatonic collection. However, in a telling passage from chapter 10, Schoenberg reaches back to the church modes as the justification to explain the presence of tones outside of the referential diatonic collection. In so doing, he draws a distinct line in the sand between his theories and those of his contemporaries and predecessors:

I have already mentioned that peculiarity of the church modes wherein variety was produced in the harmony through accidentals (sharps, flats, naturals, which momentarily and incidentally alter diatonic tones of a scale). Most textbooks commonly try to replace this richness with a few instructions pertaining to chromaticism. That is not in itself the same thing, however, nor does it have the same value for the pupil since it is not sufficiently systematic. What took place in the church modes happened without chromaticism, so to speak, diatonically, as we can still see in our minor mode. . . . Now, should our major and minor actually contain the entire harmonic wealth of the church modes, then we must include these characteristics in a manner consistent with their sense. It becomes possible thereby to use in a major key all the nondiatonic tones and chords that appeared in the seven church modes.^[15]

To be sure, had Schoenberg recommended forming specific passages solely with the elements of a given church mode, there would not necessarily have been a challenge to tonality. But that is not what he is suggesting. Rather, he is justifying the use of the five chromatic tones as functionally equivalent replacements for any of the seven diatonic tones at any time and in any place, a procedure that — if employed freely — would make it impossible to identify a specific seven-tone diatonic collection as the referential collection.

This is not Schoenberg's only justification for extensive chromaticism. In another passage, where he shows how to connect distantly related chords to one another, he remarks:

There is a means that is always appropriate for making such chord connections smoothly and convincingly: chromaticism. Formerly, when we were dealing with simpler connections, with the most immediate relationships, a diatonic scale segment from the fundamental key or a related key assumed the responsibility for what happened harmonically. Here, more and more, a single scale assumes all such functions: the chromatic scale.^[16]

The potential consequences that these two approaches have for tonality should be clear. Schoenberg's view of the modes, and of the voice-leading

Example 2.
Arnold Schoenberg, "Traumleben," op. 6, no. 1, mm. 1-7

connections necessary to connect distantly related harmonies, encourages both equal standing for and the constant circulation of all twelve tones. That being so, a key cannot be defined by its collection, nor can a move from key center to key center be effected through changes in the referential collection: all "keys" have the same basic collection, all twelve tones.

Although the previously cited Schoenberg passage about modes might be read to imply that free use of the chromatic (that is, "modal") tones was normative, such an interpretation is not entirely borne out by Schoenberg's tonal music, at least not by his early tonal music. Initially — that is, before about 1904-1905 — he tended to use chromatic tones more in the way he describes in the second passage cited earlier: as segments of chromatic scales. For instance, the four-measure phrase that begins the song "Traumleben," op. 6, no. 1 (1903), even concludes with the tonic chord, prepared by a root-position dominant-ninth chord (see example 2). As is often the case, all twelve tones appear within this phrase, mostly as segments of chro-

Example 3.
Arnold Schoenberg, "Jane Grey," op. 12, no. 1, mm. 1-3

matic scales. One could certainly argue that the referential collection of E major is deducible from this phrase, thus permitting us to describe the nondiatonic tones not as tones of equivalent standing (as the first quotation would suggest) but as chromatic elaborators of relatively stable diatonic tones, originating from the connection of distantly related chords.

Nonetheless, the virtually constant use of chromatic segments in all of the voices, both in this example and in many others like it, makes it very difficult to identify a referential diatonic collection and, consequently, to establish a clear tonal hierarchy. It might be possible to make such distinctions if a clear diatonic collection at the beginning were the norm, or if the tonic could easily be inferred from the harmonic progressions. But that is rarely the case in Schoenberg's tonal music.

Another example shows how difficult it is to decipher which are the diatonic tones; it also serves to demonstrate what Schoenberg might have meant in justifying the chromatic tones through recourse to the modes. Example 3 presents the first three measures of the 1907 ballad "Jane Grey," op. 12, no. 1. Although the tonality with which the work concludes is D, the first measures are difficult to reconcile with D minor or, for that matter, with any key. In these first three measures all twelve tones appear. Unlike the example cited from op. 6, no. 1, here the chromaticism is not the product of chromatic-scale segments within the strands of polyphony. But the very complexity of the formations makes it impossible to identify a referential diatonic collection that is stable. Is the B-natural in the right hand a chromatic tone or a diatonic tone? Is it B-natural or C-flat? Which of the two tones, D-flat or D-natural, is the structural tone in the bass?

Passages of this sort are hardly atypical in Schoenberg's tonal music, and they reflect precisely what his theories suggested we would find — twelve

tones being used in free circulation, without any firm hierarchy or even distinction between the seven diatonic tones and the remaining chromatic tones.

Another source for atonality that I can trace to ideas in the Harmonielehre concerns Schoenberg's method and procedures for chord formation. A substantial proportion of the book is devoted to identifying and classifying chords — hardly unusual for a book on harmony, to be sure, but I know of no other treatise that is more exhaustive in its search for all possible variants.

Schoenberg is careful in the initial stages of the book to make a clear distinction between chordal types — consonant chords and those that contain a dissonance. When he introduces the VII-chord, for example, he makes it clear that unlike the other diatonic chords, this one contains a dissonance, and chords with dissonances have special voice-leading requirements. In this respect Schoenberg's approach, for all of its philosophical musings about dissonance, is rather traditional. In regarding sevenths, for instance, as essential dissonances that need resolution and demand a change of harmony, he is following a well-trodden path that can be traced back to Kirnberger. In the simpler chords — the diatonic sevenths, for example — it is of course a relatively trivial matter to identify the dissonance, and as a result Schoenberg's instructions for voice leading do not differ appreciably from previous approaches.

However, the more complex the chromaticism and the more alterations in the chord, the greater the difficulty in discriminating between dissonance and consonance, and the greater the possibilities for ambiguous results. It is not that it is impossible to identify whether a chord is (or is not) dissonant according to the rules of tonal theory. It simply becomes difficult or impossible to determine which of the tones in the chord is the unstable tone, and which are the stable ones. When the dissonance cannot be identified, its resolution cannot be directed. And when that happens the emancipation of the dissonance is at hand — not as the result of theoretical speculation about the more remote overtones of the harmonic series but as a consequence of the extension of the methods of chordal formation to include multiple altered and elaborative tones.

Here, too, the theories implicit in the practical sections of the Harmonielehre are amply reflected in Schoenberg's music. Dissonance treatment in Schoenberg's post-1900 music is not suddenly abandoned; rather, it is gradually made so complex as to cease to have a functional role. The conjunction of two chords both of which contain dissonances but in neither of which it can be ascertained which of the tones are the dissonances eventually leads to the nonfunctionality of dissonance. "Emancipation of the dissonance" is a marvelous slogan, carrying subtle undertones of a kind of musical-liberation theology. The practical facts were probably far more

Example 4.
Arnold Schoenberg, First String Quartet, op. 7, mvt. 1, mm. 8-10

mundane: Schoenberg was not searching for stable intervals when he reached toward the more remote overtones of the harmonic system; instead, his principles of chord formation made it impossible to identify which tones needed resolution. The consequences of this are profound. If dissonance cannot be identified, it cannot be resolved. And if it cannot be resolved, then the very notion of consonance and dissonance becomes moot.

One example can stand for many. In the First String Quartet, op. 7 (1904-1905), a succession of complicated sonorities appears in measures 8 through 10 (see example 4). On the last beat of measure 8 the chord consists of the tones E-flat, A, C-sharp, and F. This chord is followed on the first beat of measure 9 with a chord that includes A-flat, C, F-sharp, and (eventually) E-flat, and on the second beat with the sonority C, B-flat, F-sharp, and D. All three of these chords contain dissonant intervallic relationships — in some cases, many such dissonant intervals. But which tone is the dissonance? In the first chord the orthography might suggest that the E-flat is the seventh of the chord and C-sharp the raised fifth, and that those tones might be identified as the dissonances in the harmony. But this is belied by the part-writing connections to the next chord. In any event, Schoenberg stated clearly that in complicated chords he would choose his spelling for the convenience of the performer, not the analyst.^[17] But even respelling this sonority in various ways does not produce an unambiguous harmonic structure with both clearly defined stable tones and identifiable dissonances.

The same situation obtains for the remaining chords in this phrase, up

to and including the chord that, introducing a dramatic pause, closes the phrase (F-sharp, D, B-flat, G-sharp). One after another, the chords seem to be composed of four elements — that is, they seem to be types of seventh chords. But each of these chords is so constructed as to make it impossible to determine which tone might be the root, seventh, ninth, raised fifth, lowered fifth, or other traditional dissonance.

This, in conjunction with the two previous concepts, reveals that some of the essential pillars of tonality have been pulled down: the lack of directed harmonic progressions throws the existence of a tonic into doubt; the lack of hierarchy abolishes the diatonic scale as a referential collection; the inability to identify the dissonance erases the distinction between consonance and dissonance. Indeed, the challenges to tonal coherence posed by the three concepts are, in many senses, interrelated. If it were possible to identify an unambiguous referential collection, it might be possible to determine which tones in a chord were structural and which elaborative. If the tonic could be identified from the harmonic progressions, it might be possible to identify a referential collection. If the chords could be deciphered, perhaps the tonic could be identified. Rarely in Schoenberg's tonal music is any one of these steps possible, let alone all three together.

I have identified three important technical features in Schoenberg's view of tonality that I believe were essential in providing the conceptual basis for his idea of atonality. Of course, these features in and of themselves would not have led to atonality were it not for some other very important aspects of his intellectual makeup. Let me conclude by briefly sketching some of these features.

Schoenberg was, as is readily seen in both his compositions and his writings, very much taken with the idea of progress in the arts. He saw artistic value not merely residing in immanent aesthetic qualities, but also stemming from the historical importance of the work, which, in his thought, is often tied up with chronological precedence; witness Schoenberg's controversy with Hauer over the twelve-tone system,^[18] and with Webern over Klangfarbenmelodie.^[19] Because he was so concerned that his compositions be at the cutting edge of modernity, it was essential that each new composition be in some manner innovative. It is no wonder that each new composition had the effect of pushing back the frontiers of what was possible in tonal organization.

The second essential character trait relates to Schoenberg's commitment to organicism. Schoenberg, like many late-nineteenth-century German composers and theorists, was strongly influenced by the idea that in order to have merit, a composition must be constructed so that all events are derived from a fundamental idea stated at the beginning of the work; in Schoenberg's case this was seen primarily in motivic terms. One consequence of organicism in his late tonal music was to make normative within

a composition whatever harmonic/motivic event was the first to occur in the work. Thus when, as in the case of op. 14, no. 1, a composition began with two chords, neither of which was a stable, classifiable, tonal sonority, the concept of organicism dictated that this harmonic succession become the structural foundation of the entire composition. The consequences of this for the destabilization of tonality are clear.

Finally, the consequences of Schoenberg's pedagogical background for the idea of atonality should not be underestimated. It was not, as one wag has suggested, that the problem with autodidacts is that they have such terrible teachers. In Schoenberg's case it might be more accurate to say that the advantage of autodidacts is that they do not have overbearing teachers. Because he was largely self-trained, Schoenberg was capable of seeing possibilities that might have been suppressed had he had a more traditional education.

The birth of atonality was the result of a single composer's intellectual and artistic makeup. It was not alone the fact that Schoenberg was an organicist, or that he believed in and acted upon the notion of progress in the arts, or that his training was informal. Rather, the combination of all of these factors — together with a view of tonality in which harmonic progressions no longer aimed for a tonic, hierarchical distinctions disappeared between diatonic and chromatic tones, and dissonances could no longer always be identified and resolved — resulted in the possibility of a new and unprecedented idea of musical organization.

Six
The Refractory Masterpiece:
Toward an Interpretation of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, op. 9

Walter Frisch

It has often been remarked that in the early part of this century Schoenberg forged his path to the new music not primarily in the modern genres of music drama or symphonic poem, but in the tradition of chamber music.^[1] The series of works he composed mainly in Vienna between 1899 and 1908 dramatically rerouted the mainstream of Austro-German music. Verklärte Nacht, op. 4; the First String Quartet, op. 7; the First Chamber Symphony, op. 9; the Second String Quartet, op. 10: each of these pieces brings to the fore — problematizes, one might now say — fundamental questions of genre, form, harmony, and thematic style in ways that were decisive not only for Schoenberg himself but also for much of the music that followed in the twentieth century.

The Chamber Symphony is arguably the key work, and the most dialectical, within this group. The tensions embodied in it may be represented broadly as follows:

These oppositions must be explored in order to develop an appropriate understanding of how the Chamber Symphony fits into Schoenberg's musical, intellectual, and cultural world.

I

Schoenberg was not the first to use the title "Kammersinfonie." In 1905 a composer in Berlin, Paul Juon, had published with that title a work for

strings, woodwinds, and piano.^[2] Several more similarly named pieces were to appear over the next decade or so.^[3] But unlike the chamber symphonies of his contemporaries, Schoenberg's may be said to have created a new genre, in which two previously separate traditions, those of chamber and symphonic music, merge — or, more precisely, collide. Reinhold Brinkmann has aptly called op. 9 a "gepresste Sinfonie," a compressed symphony;^[4] it might be equally considered a piece of "explodierte Kammermusik." The best way to get a sense of this dialectic of chamber/symphonic, which in turn incorporates some of the others mentioned above, is through the interpretive frameworks developed by Paul Bekker, Theodor W. Adorno, and Carl Dahlhaus, upon which I draw in the following discussion.

From the late eighteenth century the two streams of chamber and symphonic music, though independent in many respects, had tended to share instrumental structures such as the sonata form. Over the course of the nineteenth century they began to diverge both sociologically and compositionally. Symphonic music, especially as embodied in the symphonies of Beethoven, tended to address a large public audience. Beethoven's symphonies were conceived, Bekker asserted, in the spirit of human liberation and brotherhood — Menschheitsbefreiung and Menschheitsverbrüderung.^{[ 5]} As such, they are authentically gesellschaftsbildend, community forming. For Adorno, the Beethoven symphonies were "orations to mankind."^[6] Chamber music, on the other hand, was aimed at a more select, sophisticated audience — at first, from the Renaissance through the late eighteenth century, an aristocratic one; then, after the late eighteenth century, an educated, musically cultivated bourgeoisie.

These social aspects had compositional ramifications. As a public genre, and like a public oration, the symphony tended toward bolder, blunter effects. This is not to suggest any lack of compositional sophistication in the symphonies of Beethoven, but, as Adorno says, "in principle, they are simpler than chamber music despite their substantially more lavish apparatus."^[7] Chamber music — and here the late quartets of Beethoven are probably the paradigms — has a more inward and intricate compositional language. Adorno defines chamber music as being characterized by the principle of "motivische-thematische Arbeit," or motivic-thematic working.^[8] Dahlhaus adds to this definition the technique of "obbligato accompaniment," in which ostensibly secondary parts take on great thematic importance. He asserts also that chamber music became "intimately bound up with" a further compositional principle, that which Schoenberg called developing variation, the procedure of spinning out large, continuous spans from the constant transformation or reinterpretation of very reduced thematic or motivic material.^[9]

As exploited by German composers from Haydn to Schoenberg, all three of these principles — motivic-thematic working, obbligato accompaniment,

and developing variation — led to increasing compositional sophistication and, concomitantly, greater technical and interpretive demands on players. The result was a radical, perhaps even paradoxical, transformation of the status of chamber music. As it became too demanding both intellectually and technically for the private amateur player, chamber music was forced out into the public concert hall and into the hands of professional ensembles. String quartets — from the Schuppanzigh in Beethoven's day, down through the Hellmesberger in Brahms's, to those of Rosé and Kolisch in Schoenberg's (and now the Arditti and Kronos in our own) — were formed in large part to bring the music of modern composers before the concertgoing public.

From Beethoven's late quartets through the works of Brahms and Schoenberg, chamber music became a kind of refuge for the most advanced compositional techniques. In the case of Brahms, the complexity of the music and the comprehension of the public seemed still to coexist in a delicate balance. But with Schoenberg's early chamber works, a crisis point in this development was reached. In Adorno's words: "The requirements of Schoenberg's chamber music could not be reconciled any more with Hausmusik, with the ambience of domesticity. They were as explosive in content as in technique. They obliged chamber music to make its definitive move to the concert hall."^[10] And as is well known, the public reaction to Schoenberg's early chamber music was mainly hostile. Dahlhaus captures the paradox: "The isolation into which Schoenberg fell is to be understood primarily as the distancing of the chamber-music composer from the chamber-music listeners, from the musically cultivated audience."^[11]

II

Schoenberg's First Quartet, op. 7, and First Chamber Symphony, op. 9, were premiered within a few days of each other in Vienna, on 5 and 8 February 1907, respectively. The report filed in a local paper on 11 February by a critic identified only as "rbt" is characteristic of much of the public and critical response:

Still more painful than the String Quartet was the Chamber Symphony for 15 solo instruments. Just think: Schoenberg and 15 solo instruments! Oh, when they are let loose! Each of them plays away frantically, with no concern for the other. Schoenberg deliberately avoids the natural consequences of individual voices coming together at a harmonic resting point. He sees it openly and earsplittingly as true counterpoint, which refrains completely from harmonic consideration, and he believes that the true harmony is that which places itself above all laws of euphony and musical logic. The new harmony instruction, which he has figured out, knows only one rule: consonances are to be used only in passing and then only seldom. Not one in ten listeners

can endure even for a moment compositions based on this maxim, and thus a portion of the public fled during the cacophonies of the Chamber Symphony without awaiting the end.^[12]

On one level, these remarks, with their condemnation of unbridled polyphony and harsh dissonance, are just a vivid example of the kind of critical fustian heaped upon so much new music at the turn of the century. But the conjunction of the Chamber Symphony and the comments of "rbt" can also open a broader window onto cultural-intellectual aspects of the period.

In his fine article from 1977 on what he calls the geschichtlicher Gehalt, the historical content, of the Chamber Symphony, Brinkmann has suggested that the polyphonic density that disturbed listeners and critics is representative of the crisis of subjectivity felt throughout Austro-German culture around 1900.^[13] Many leading artists and intellectuals felt it was no longer easy, or even possible, to perceive (and thus project) a comfortable or reassuring unity in the world around them. Brinkmann persuasively adduces passages from two of the best-known Viennese writers of the period, Hermann Bahr and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Bahr, who always had his finger on the pulse of his age, saw contemporary literature dissolving by 1891 into the communication of "sensation, nothing but sensation, unconnected and momentary imprints on the nerves of rapidly occurring events."^[14] Hofmannsthal, in the famous Lord Chandos Letter of 1902, describes the fragmentation of thought and language that became known at the turn of the century as the Sprachkrise. The implied author of the letter confesses that he can no longer engage in creative writing: "I have utterly lost my ability to think or speak coherently about anything at all." He describes how he came to this point, how the world around him crumbled perceptually: "Everything fell into fragments for me, the fragments into further fragments, until it seemed impossible to contain anything at all within a single concept."^[15]

For both Bahr and Hofmannsthal, experience and art are characterized by a lack of coherence and continuity. They share with other writers of the Jahrhundertwende a strong sense of isolation and individualism.^[16] Brinkmann sees these attitudes and circumstances trickling down to Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony:

The historical position of the First Chamber Symphony is evident in the renunciation of an epic worldview and in the withdrawal into the subject. The artistic subject of this symphony no longer sees itself in the position to experience reality as a unity, to perceive its broad outline, and to transcend it. Rather, the subject seeks to preserve its identity exclusively through an extreme submersion in the self, through the location of the source of artistic production solely in the isolated subject.^[17]

The sonic manifestation of this subjectivity is, for Brinkmann, precisely the intense profiling of the individual voices in the Chamber Symphony that "rbt" identified.

One might argue that the analogy of polyphony and subjectivity is too simple, too essentialist. What about the dense counterpoint and independence of voices in the music of J.S. Bach? Are these technical features necessarily reflective of an Identitätskrise in eighteenth-century Saxony? Caution is always necessary when relationships between notes and people are being proposed. Yet there can be little question that both "rbt" and Brinkmann are onto something: there is an air of crisis and urgency about Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, however we may wish to define it.

Another name has often been attached to the musical traits identified by "rbt" and Brinkmann: expressionist, which we normally take to mean a style prevalent in the arts primarily in Germany and Austria in the two decades after 1900, and in which an individual artist's expression and representation of some "inner necessity" (Kandinsky's term, also taken up by Schoenberg) takes precedence over traditional formal-structural considerations. Brinkmann suggests that "if any work in the realm of music should be called expressionistic, it is this Chamber Symphony, op. 9, by Arnold Schoenberg."^[18]

This view has intriguing consequences for traditional music historiography. In standard accounts, the Chamber Symphony is seen as part of a group of works by Schoenberg (and other early-twentieth-century composers) that retain strong ties to late-Romantic forms and styles, especially those of Liszt and Strauss. It is Schoenberg's atonal works of 1908-1909 — the Three Piano Pieces, op. 11; the Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16; and especially the monodrama Erwartung, op. 17 — that are normally considered the "classic" expressionist compositions, in which outward form is (or seems) completely determined by the content. Identifying the Chamber Symphony of 1906 as "expressionist," a position not without merit, can cast a rather different light on music at the turn of the century. Above all, what the attachment of such a label reveals is that our conventional historicalstylistic categories for music around 1900 (as for many other musics) are largely arbitrary, and they are inadequate to the task of representing the powerful crosscurrents that constituted musical "reality" at the time.^[19]

There is a further perspective on the Chamber Symphony that construes its subjectivity in a much less extreme or drastic fashion than does Brinkmann or "rbt." This viewpoint emerges from a remarkable review published by Elsa Bienenfeld on 12 February 1907 in the Neues Wiener Journal. Bienenfeld, a musicology student of Guido Adler, taught music history at the same Schwarzwald School in Vienna where Schoenberg had given lessons in harmony and counterpoint in 1903. Bienenfeld's reviews of Schoenberg's

works from this period are consistently the most balanced and thoughtful. Unlike most critics, who are a priori hostile, she starts from the belief that Schoenberg's works are serious, expressive contributions to a tradition. In her review, which covers both the Chamber Symphony and First Quartet and merits quotation at length, she grapples with the relationship between these works and the past:

The gap that separates Schoenberg from his forebears consists not in the content of what he is representing. Sorrow, repentance, longing remain always the same emotions and will always constitute the problems of art. Rather, the distinction lies in their outward form, in the possibility of their representation. Longing for peace can be incorporated in poetry such that only the charm of valleys, only the loveliness of a gentle evening is depicted: Eichendorff's poetry or the style of Mörike. Others, though, in ways that neither elevate nor diminish the value of their work, are obliged to represent the struggle and the conflicting ecstasies that precede peace and have it as their goal. He who loves Goethe, he who reads Knut Hamsun, will long since have recognized that. But there is still a third possibility open: to represent feelings in persons each of whom has different character traits yet all of whom experience equally sorrow that is unfortunate, different, but for each inevitable. Each [sorrow] is itself both goal and necessity; and only he who sees all the characters at once will perceive a harmony that gives all these passionate figures a common middle point and a common compassion. This is the manner of representation that Dostoyevsky, living in a more confused emotional state, employed in order to convey the single essential and sublime aspect of his ideas out of the multiplicity of characters and the momentary quality of situations. Schoenberg, working in a different art, with other means, seems to me to want to attain the same thing. Whether the public wants to grant him the achievement of this goal remains up to the pleasure of each individual listener.^[20]

Like her contemporaries Bahr and Hofmannsthal, Bienenfeld seems to acknowledge a crisis of subjectivity in her culture, or at least within the culture that art represents. But for her the crisis is able to be overcome, and indeed is so in Schoenberg's works. It is striking that Bienenfeld compares Schoenberg with a novelist like Dostoyevsky or Goethe, who must manipulate many different characters. For Bienenfeld, the extreme subjectivity of Schoenberg's piece, as represented by the different "characters," must be perceived as a collective whole in order to be understood properly.

What is also interesting about Bienenfeld's remarks is that they present the Chamber Symphony as an essentially Romantic work, one in the tradition of the great novelists. For her, the piece occupies an expressive sphere in which reconciliation and closure are real possibilities. For Brinkmann and the critic "rbt," as we have seen, the Chamber Symphony inhabits a very different world, where no such transcendence or unity is achievable.

III

Still another historical-critical perspective on the Chamber Symphony is that offered by Adorno in his 1955 essay on Schoenberg in Prisms. This passage, to my mind the most stimulating (but also the most difficult) written on the piece, merits citation and consideration at some length:

Yet the compulsion to purge music of everything preconceived leads not only to new sounds like the famous fourth chords, but also to a new expressive dimension beyond the depiction of human emotions. One conductor has felicitously compared the area of resolution at the end of the big development section to a glacier landscape. For the first time a break is made in the Chamber Symphony with what had been a basic stratum of music since the age of the basso continuo, from the stile rappresentativo, from the adjustment of musical language to the significative aspect of human language. For the first time Schoenberg's warmth turns around into the extreme of coolness, whose expression consists in the absence of expression. Later he polemicized against those who demand "animal warmth" of music; his dictum, which proclaims that what music has to say can only be said through music, suggests the idea of a language unlike that of human beings. The brilliant, dynamically reserved and yet barbed quality which increases throughout the First Chamber Symphony, anticipated almost fifty years ago the later objectivity, without any preclassical gestures. Music which lets itself be driven by pure, unadulterated expression becomes irritably sensitive to everything representing a potential encroachment on this purity, to every intention to ingratiate itself with the listener as well as the listener's reciprocal effort, to identification and empathy. The logical consequence of the principle of expression includes the element of its own negation as that negative form of truth which transforms love into the power of unremitting protest.^[21]

If for Bienenfeld the Chamber Symphony was essentially a Romantic work and for Brinkmann a protoexpressionist one, for Adorno it is proleptically neoclassical in its anticipation of the new "objectivity" or Sachlichkeit associated with Hindemith and others in the 1920s.^[22] What Adorno identifies as "objective" in the Chamber Symphony is the work's brittle, almost anti-expressive quality. The path by which he arrives at this characterization is intriguing and — for this listener, at any rate — leads to real insights about op. 9.

For Adorno, expression in the Chamber Symphony is so extreme, so naked ("pure, unadulterated"), that it short-circuits (my metaphor, not his) and thus becomes transformed into its opposite, the lack of expression. This is the "coolness" he identifies, "whose expression consists in the absence of expression." As he says, summing up the dialectic or the paradox, the principle of expression contains within itself the element of its own negation. For Bienenfeld the musical language of the Chamber Symphony, like that of a nineteenth-century novel, clearly manifests the "animal warmth" that

Example 5.
Arnold Schoenberg, Chamber Symphony no. 1, op. 9, mm. 355-359; 364

allowed for communication with and about human beings. But for Adorno the human element is stripped away from the language of the Chamber Symphony.

Adorno's language may be extreme, but his characterization (by way of an unnamed conductor) of the end of the development section of op. 9 as a "glacier landscape" seems particularly apt. Here the principal fourthstheme of the work is presented in a dizzying series of crisscrossing, interlocking statements that eventually "freeze" at measure 364 into a six-part simultaneity of stacked fourths (see example 5). At the outer extremes of this chord are the pitches E and F, which as key areas have played a crucial role in the Chamber Symphony to this point. This remarkable chord, which is repeated fff over four measures and utterly resists being perceived tonally as related to a key, is indeed without human warmth. It is a sonority with which a listener cannot easily identify or empathize, to use Adorno's terms. The chord can be said to embody a dialectic between the tonalities of E and F that is as central to the piece as those tensions listed at the outset of this article.

IV

Although compelling, Adorno's vision of the Chamber Symphony requires some adjustment. The piece does not, of course, end on the frozen chord at the end of the development section: that sonority thaws into a series of ascending fourths, which then set the recapitulation in motion. Eventually, in an exhilarating coda, E major is confirmed as the tonic. Schoenberg probes one last time the E-F tonal dialectic that framed the frozen six-part chord. The tonalities of E and F had already been juxtaposed at the very outset of the Chamber Symphony, where a cadence to F major (measures 1 through 4) is followed by one in E major (measures 8 through 11).^[23] The

Example 6.
Arnold Schoenberg, Chamber Symphony no. 1, op. 9, mm. 582-584; 593

central pitches of these keys are then, as we have seen, superimposed at the climax of the development section. At the very end of the piece, Schoenberg pits the two tonalities against each other, and the conflict is now resolved decisively in favor of E, to which F or an F-major chord moves again and again (see example 6).

What these resolutions suggest is that for all its dialectical rhetoric, the Chamber Symphony is ultimately an affirmatory work; it reasserts the power of tonality to unify, organize, make coherent. In this sense Bienenfeld's interpretation of an overarching "harmony" that brings together the different "characters" is closer to the mark than either Brinkmann's or Adorno's more pessimistic interpretations, in which subjectivity prevents any Welterfassung. One might say that the oppositions set out above are resolved in favor of the first element: symphony, public, communal, homophonic, objective.

Schoenberg's own remarks of 1937 on the Chamber Symphony suggest that at the time of composition he very much shared the optimistic viewpoint:

After having finished the composition of the Kammersymphonie . . . I believed I had now found my own personal style of composing and that all problems which had previously troubled a young composer had been solved and that a way had been shown out of the perplexities in which we young composers had been involved. . . . It was as lovely a dream as it was a disappointing illusion.^[24]

These comments imply that what followed in Schoenberg's development represented a significant break. And indeed, the works of 1907-1909 differ radically in style from the Chamber Symphony.

Immediately after completing op. 9 in the summer of 1906, Schoenberg began another chamber symphony, for a slightly larger ensemble (eighteen

instruments). Progress was slow and sporadic. Although Schoenberg managed to complete most of the first movement by the fall of 1908, the Second Chamber Symphony was to remain a fragment until 1939, when it was published (in two movements) as op. 38. The portion written in 1906-1908, which makes up most of the first movement, is a lyrical masterpiece in an advanced and very subtle tonal idiom.^[25] But there is little engagement with the intense dialectics of the First Chamber Symphony. Perhaps for this reason — because there was more to say about the issues raised in op. 9 — the Second Chamber Symphony failed to advance and became displaced in Schoenberg's workshop in 1907 by the Second String Quartet, op. 10.^[26]

This quartet, which was to be the last of the early series of chamber works, revisits some of the dialectics set out in the First Chamber Symphony. In the remarkable finale to op. 10 the pull is again between individuality and collectivity, now cast much more specifically than in op. 9 in terms of atonality versus tonality. The opening of the movement, in which the four different instruments successively take up the main melody, is resolutely — and famously — polyphonic. The linear independence then gives way after a few minutes to the very harmonically, even triadically, conceived setting of "ich fühle luft von anderem planeten."

The individual/collective dialectic also forms the premise of the George poem "Entrückung" that is sung in the movement: the persona floats alone, set free from his earthly context. Yet this liberation, representing apparently the ultimate degree of subjectivity, soon turns into its opposite, as he dissolves his identity into music's collectivity: "ich löse mich in tönen." At the end, in the last line, he becomes "ein funke nur vom heiligen feuer. . . . ein dröhnen nur der heiligen stimme" (only a spark of the holy fire, only a roar of the holy voice). The individual is thus completely subsumed or absorbed by a greater force.

This paradoxical negation or reversal — liberation becoming enslavement — is analogous to that posited by Adorno for the expressive (or anti-expressive) world of the Chamber Symphony. But in the Second Quartet, as in the Chamber Symphony, the process can be given a positive spin: transcendence is possible, and in this case brings with it a sweeping, indeed interplanetary, worldview.

It could be argued (though it is not possible to do so here) that Schoenberg never lost the goal of transcendence articulated musically in the Chamber Symphony and the Second Quartet, that he never succumbed to the pressures of subjectivity so prevalent in his Viennese culture (and in his music) at the beginning of this century. Throughout numerous Kulturkrisen, geographic displacements, and two world wars, he might be said to have retained the affirmatory vision and found different ways of communicating it in his compositions for half a century.

Seven
Whose Idea Was Erwartung?

Bryan R. Simms

Schoenberg's Erwartung is a paradigm of modernism. Its conception, both of musical language and of dramatic form, has no direct or immediate antecedent. Its text anticipates by several years the style of German expressionist drama, and its music is experimental to a degree that Schoenberg never surpassed. Yet despite an originality that has long attracted the attention of specialists in twentieth-century music, Erwartung continues to guard its secrets. One of these prompts the title of this article. Did the dramatic content of Erwartung originate with Schoenberg, which he then asked Marie Pappenheim to flesh out? Or was Pappenheim responsible for the libretto's initial concept as well as its execution? These questions presuppose others. Is there one essential idea underlying the work, and did the librettist and composer proceed from a common starting point? And, finally, does Schoenberg's music conform to the objectives of Pappenheim's text, or does it carry the listener along a fundamentally different path?

Schoenberg believed that the basic idea for the opera was his. Shortly after beginning to compose the music on 27 August 1909 he wrote to Ferruccio Busoni:

I have started on a new composition; something for the theater; something quite new. The librettist (a lady), acting on my suggestions, has conceived and formulated everything just as I envisaged it. More news shortly; for at present I am head over heels in work and hope to be finished in 14 days.^[1]

Schoenberg's view of the origins of the opera was transmitted by Egon Wellesz in his 1921 biography of the composer, and it has been accepted by most later writers. What is known about the temporary rupture in Schoenberg's marriage and the circumstances leading to the suicide of Richard Gerstl — events that transpired shortly before the opera was writ-

ten — seems to support the assumption that the tale of infidelity and violent death was based on an outline that originated with the composer and reflected his own experiences and innermost feelings. Also identifying Schoenberg with the text is the line near the end of Erwartung that reads "tausend Menschen ziehen vorüber"; this is virtually identical to the first line of John Henry Mackay's poem "Am Wegrand," which Schoenberg had set to music in 1905 and later included in his Eight Songs, op. 6.

But Marie Pappenheim told a very different story about the origins of the opera. In an interview with Dika Newlin in 1951 she flatly denied having received any suggestions regarding the opera's subject or content,^[2] and she reiterated this in a letter to Helmut Kirchmeyer in 1963, three years before her death:

I received neither directions nor hints about what I should write (I would not have accepted them anyway). When Zemlinsky or Schoenberg spoke about libretti, it was about Schreker's, about Pelléas et Mélisande, etc.^[3]

Before addressing the contradictions between these two accounts, it will be useful to review the history of the work. Erwartung was composed during Schoenberg's vacation retreat in Steinakirchen, in lower Austria, during the summer of 1909, when the composer joined Alexander Zemlinsky, Erwin Stein, Marie Pappenheim, and others for a customary summer period of work, discussion, and relaxation. It was a productive time, for in addition to composing all of Erwartung Schoenberg completed the Five Orchestra Pieces, op. 16, and the last of the Three Piano Pieces, op. 11. Pappenheim, an acquaintance and possibly distant relative of the Zemlinskys, joined the gathering in Steinakirchen after completing her medical studies at the University of Vienna in June.^[4] Although her arrival in Steinakirchen marked her first meeting with Schoenberg, she may already have been known to him by reputation, since four of her poems had been published in 1906 in Karl Kraus's journal Die Fackel.^[5]

Pappenheim told Kirchmeyer in 1963 that Schoenberg asked her to write an opera text for him. She had agreed and then left to visit other friends in Traunkirchen, where within three weeks she drafted a "lyric poem" for what she termed a monodrama. Fully anticipating that Schoenberg would demand many changes, she was surprised to find that he asked for very few revisions and had indeed begun to compose the music virtually upon receipt of the first draft. Apparently there was no further personal contact between them before Schoenberg completed the score on 12 September 1909.^[6]

Pappenheim's previous literary efforts were closely related to her profession as a physician. In two of the poems published in Die Fackel, "Seziersaal" and "Prima graviditas," she wrote from the perspective of a clinician who probes the emotional as well as the physical constitution of her patients. In

"Seziersaal" (autopsy room), the lifeless features of a corpse still betray emotions, which the narrator sympathetically describes:

His mouth is pale and his eyes weary,
as one who stares nightly into the darkness.

. . . . . . . . . .

How sadly his desire wafts about me,
so much that my own heart betrays its torture.^[7]

In "Prima graviditas," too, the subject is the emotions, now associated with pregnancy. In these poems a clinical or pathological condition stimulates an outburst of feelings both from the patient and from the observer, a point of view to which Pappenheim would return in Erwartung.

Pappenheim later specialized in dermatology, but like her intellectual and artistic Viennese contemporaries she was aware of the emerging study of psychoanalysis.^[8] The writings of Sigmund Freud and his associates projected a scientific model for a deeper understanding of the workings not only of the mind but also of the emotions, a special interest of Pappenheim's. She had yet another reason to be interested in psychology: her kinswoman Bertha Pappenheim, who had suffered from hysteria in the 1880s, was the subject of the first celebrated case history of psychoanalysis.^[9] Bertha's physician, Josef Breuer, gave her the pseudonym "Anna O." in the 1895 Studien über Hysterie, which he wrote in collaboration with Sigmund Freud.^[10]

According to Breuer and Freud, hysteria can result when an individual responds to a traumatic event by channeling its memory into the unconscious mind. The trauma can persist in the form of physical ailments — among them amnesia, hallucinations, and disorders of vision and speech — for which there is no pathological basis. In the case of Anna O., hysteria was brought on by the illness and subsequent death of her father. Her symptoms were especially severe and, in addition to anorexia and paralysis of the limbs, included hallucinatory visions of snakes, periodic loss of recent memory, and a speech defect. Breuer's treatment was ingenious. During periods of self-induced hypnosis — states that Breuer termed conditions secondes — he led her through a "talking cure." She was coaxed to relive the painful memories and emotions associated with her father's death, thus exposing them to her rational mind, where they could be coped with, dispelled, or worn away. Following this cathartic process her abnormal symptoms disappeared.

The Woman in Erwartung exhibits classical symptoms of hysteria as they were defined by Breuer and Freud in the Studien über Hysterie. Her ailments stem from the loss of her beloved to another woman, a disturbance all the more unbalancing because she had become totally dependent upon him. In a jealous rage she murders him in the vicinity of the house of her rival.

Like Anna O. she thereupon experiences amnesia, partially banishing the murder from her conscious mind while beset at the same time by a speech impediment and hallucinations involving imaginary slithering or crawling animal forms.

The Woman's wistful recollections of her lover indicate that her hysteria is also associated with a frustrated sexual relationship. In this Pappenheim followed Freud's distinctive analysis of the disease rather than Breuer's. Breuer had determined that Bertha Pappenheim's hysteria had no sexual origin; according to him "sexuality was astonishingly undeveloped in her."^[11] But for Freud hysteria almost always stemmed from sexual causes; in the Studien he wrote: "In so far as one can speak of determining causes which lead to the acquisition of neuroses, their aetiology is to be looked for in sexual factors."^[12]

The clinical model that underlies Erwartung would have been plain to the many readers of the Studien über Hysterie around the year 1909. But Pappenheim's underlying message in Erwartung goes beyond scientific models or case studies of neurotic disease. Eva Weissweiler has argued persuasively that Pappenheim's Erwartung is essentially an attack upon the Viennese upper class, of which she sees the Woman as representative.^[13] According to this interpretation, the crucial message in Pappenheim's text is to be found not in the details of the Woman's hysteria or in her jumbled emotions but in the circumstances that led to the acquisition of her symptoms. And here Breuer's analysis is again influential.

Breuer concluded his study of Anna O. by speculating that her hysteria resulted ultimately from her upbringing, one typical of upper-class Viennese girls. She had been assiduously protected from life, kept in a monotonous, sheltered family routine. But her intellect and curiosity about the world could not be suppressed, and her only outlet was through daydreaming, which became a regular and prolonged habit with her. This daydreaming, according to Breuer, began to dissociate her conscious from her unconscious faculties, inviting traumatic events and emotions in her life to be repressed into the unconscious.

Susceptibility to neurosis is the central subtext in Pappenheim's libretto. The Woman's predisposition to hysteria, Pappenheim tells us through the Woman's words, was caused by an excessive reliance upon her partner, by having yielded her independence: "My one and only love. . . . How much, oh how much I loved you. . . . What am I to do here alone? . . . My boundary was where you were. . . . I lived isolated from everything. . . . All I knew was you."^[14]

It is very unlikely that Schoenberg interpreted the text of Erwartung as Pappenheim had intended, as a realistic study of hysteria with feminist overtones. Instead his own reading of the poem focused directly on the jumble of emotions that the Woman experiences. In his comments on the opera

Schoenberg stated explicitly that the subject of Erwartung was the emotions in a heightened state of intensity. His viewpoint was first made public in a 1920 article by Egon Wellesz, who no doubt drew on information received from the composer when he wrote:

The poem of the monodrama Erwartung sets out to give a dramatic portrayal of the problem of what transpires in a person in a moment of greatest tension and intensity of feeling. Marie Pappenheim, to whom Schoenberg communicated this idea, attempted to solve the problem in such a way as to disperse the tension throughout a succession of scenes.^[15]

Schoenberg restated this interpretation himself in a marginal annotation to a 1924 review by Paul Bekker, in which Bekker postulated a close relationship between Erwartung and Wagner's operas, especially their concluding love scenes. Common to all, Bekker had written, is

the idea of a music of womankind, of sounds representing erotic feelings, of a music that forces its way out of the conscious over into the unconscious, of a music of liberation, transfiguration, and redemption.^[16]

In his copy of Bekker's review Schoenberg dismissed this interpretation:

Not at all. It [the opera] is, as I have often explained, the slow representation of things that go through the mind in a moment of great anxiety. What does Erwartung have to do with redemption? The Woman may have been wrong in her fearful states of mind, or not (this is not clear, but, all the same, these are only fearful imaginings and they become manifest). She is not at all redeemed by them.^[17]

Schoenberg asserts, in other words, that the basic subject of the opera is the nature of an individual's mental condition when the emotions are heightened, in this case by fear. Whereas the physician Pappenheim was concerned with the Woman in Erwartung as an individual, a "patient" whose tortured emotions are symptoms of an illness she could have avoided by taking possession of her emotional life, the musician Schoenberg dealt in Erwartung with the emotions per se; for him, the Woman's individuality and psychology were secondary, even arbitrary.

Schoenberg's intention to paint an operatic portrait of the emotions rather than to create a work with psychological or sociological implications is apparent in the changes that he made in Pappenheim's original text.^[18] Relatively few in number, they are limited almost entirely to deletions. But in addition to deleting minor redundancies and references to sounds, Schoenberg made a significant change in Pappenheim's text by deleting the disjointed references that the Woman makes to the murder of her beloved. In one passage, for instance, the Woman, lying beside the corpse, in

the original version utters these lines, all subsequently removed by the composer:

What are they [your eyes] staring at in the trees. . . The moon is consumed, as from horror . . . open as though crying for help. . . What have they done to you. . . Oh you . . . you . . . I wasn't here. . . The evening was so peaceful . . . The leaves trembling against the sky . . . your hair is bloody . . . your soft brown hair. . . And blood on my hands . . . and blood on the ground . . . Who did this. . . Who did this to you?. . . You are the only thing here, you must know. . . You spiteful face of stone. . . How your lips are pressed together . . . Don't you smirk. . . The shadowy hollows . . . the den of thieves . . . Here he backed against the tree trunk . . . And then the shot . . .^[19]

In this passage Pappenheim reveals clearly enough that the Woman murdered her beloved, although she blurts out memories of the crime in a disjointed manner amid denials and a tangle of other memories and conflicting emotions. Schoenberg's elimination of the passage, so crucial for the coherence of Pappenheim's narrative, indicates that he did not wish the poem to be construed as a realistic or objective study but instead as a hallucination. "The whole drama can be understood as a nightmare," Schoenberg remarked later.^[20] Pappenheim was of course well aware that such deletions changed the emphasis of her text, and she later confided to Kirchmeyer:

One of these changes was for a long time very disagreeable to me — namely, deletions in the scene where she sees the dead body. With these deletions, which I have long forgotten, the mystical or, as it were, the hallucinatory quality became strengthened, while I was by no means sure that it was not a realistic occurrence. But perhaps the change made the overall effect more powerful after all.^[21]

Schoenberg's focus in Erwartung upon the emotions is symptomatic of his broader interest in the human psyche as the source of artistic creativity and of his own atonal musical language. His writings from 1909 and 1910 return repeatedly to the role of intuition and unconscious mental activity in the creative process. In a letter to Ferruccio Busoni, written only days before beginning to compose Erwartung, Schoenberg spoke of emotions as the gateway to the unconscious mind and the very basis of expressivity in his new music:

And the [musical] results I wish for:

no stylized and sterile protracted emotion.

People are not like that:

it is impossible for a person to have only one sensation at a time.

One has thousands simultaneously. And these thousands can no more readily be added together than an apple and a pear. They go their own ways.

And this variegation, this multifariousness, this illogicality which our senses demonstrate, the illogicality presented by their interactions, set forth by some mounting rush of blood, by some reaction of the senses or the nerves, this I should like to have in my music.

It should be an expression of feeling, as our feelings, which bring us in contact with our unconscious, really are, and no false child of feelings and "conscious logic."^[22]

Despite Schoenberg's use of concepts that were shared with psychoanalysis, his understanding of emotions and their role in the psyche is only partly true to Freudian theory. Freud and Breuer had described the unconscious as a turbulent realm of painful, repressed memories and emotions that spoke to an individual through dreams and neurotic symptoms. But for Schoenberg it was the source of creativity, communicating to an artist through emotion and instinct rather than reason: "It is only unconscious creative strength that has creative power," he wrote to Busoni.^[23]

Schoenberg was closer to the Freudian model in his statements concerning the compulsive nature of artistic instincts. A great composer, he believed, was compulsively driven to adopt a certain musical language. "The artist must," he wrote in 1911 in "Problems in Teaching Art." "He has no say in the matter, it is nothing to do with what he wants."^[24] This often repeated statement seems to suggest Schoenberg's belief in a predetermined mode of development for music, a course through which music must progress. But in light of his statements about the origins of creativity in the unconscious mind, his dictum takes on an entirely different meaning. If music must express the feelings and thus "bring us in contact with our unconscious" rather than with our rational faculties, then the artist can no more control the musical outcome than the hysterical patient can control the symptoms of her ailment.

Schoenberg's theory of emotions that erupt incoherently and irrationally from the unconscious mind and provoke a composer's work must surely have been discussed at the gathering in Steinakirchen in 1909, and in all likelihood it is at the heart of what he thought he had communicated to Pappenheim at that time. Schoenberg had good reason to assume that Pappenheim had taken his meaning; after all, the emotions of the Woman in Erwartung conform exactly to Schoenberg's prescription for what the feelings "really are": irrational, highly divergent, and jumbled one upon the other. Schoenberg's theory of emotion is also a key to understanding the highly experimental musical language of Erwartung, which deviates so strikingly from his music prior to 1909. The opera was composed rapidly, with virtually no sketching, no conventional motivic work, and no use of traditional formal archetypes. It is concise, free in expression, and highly diversified in its motivic content — indeed, an embodiment of just those qualities that he told Busoni he wanted in his music.

Schoenberg's study of the emotions in Erwartung is carried to a more universal level by its conjunction with its companion work, Die glückliche Hand. Although he never insisted that the two one-act operas be performed as a pair, he conceived of them as such and hoped to see them staged together: "It is my burning desire to have [Die glückliche Hand ] performed with the monodrama," he wrote to Albertine Zehme.^[25]

Schoenberg began to conceive Die glückliche Hand even before the monodrama was completed. In an undated letter from Pappenheim to Schoenberg, probably written in early September 1909, in which Pappenheim asks about revisions, she also self-effacingly comments upon the second opera:

In Vienna it is rumored that you are writing an opera with Kokoschka. Maybe he would have been better after all. I don't like my monodrama much.^[26]

She must have been more than a touch bemused to hear that the companion opera to Erwartung might use a text by Kokoschka, in whose writings female characters were often drawn as distorted types. In his play Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, for example, which had been performed publicly in Vienna in July 1909, women are violent, sex-crazed warriors who plunge into a life-and-death battle with any men who happen by. Although his collaboration with Kokoschka never came to pass, Schoenberg's own text for Die glückliche Hand was decisively influenced by Kokoschka's use of gender types as dramatic symbols.

The Man in Die glückliche Hand symbolizes the creative individual, whose other attributes include generosity, naïveté, and persistence in the face of mundane failure and the antagonism of society. The Woman is his opposite: she possesses no trace of intellect or creativity, and she is also faithless, weak, and cunning. Her character is derived from the unflattering female image that was common in such turn-of-the-century German literature as Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter and writings by Frank Wedekind, Karl Kraus, and August Strindberg, all of which Schoenberg admired.

But Die glückliche Hand is ultimately a drama about the Man alone: the other characters are mere projections and personifications of his inner aspirations and destiny. This is the interpretation Erwin Stein expressed in a 1928 article whose content was probably received directly from the composer, in which Stein asserts that all the constituent elements of the opera — text, music, and staging — contribute directly to an "inner experience" that embodies the idea of the work. "And this experience," he concludes, "is precisely the experience of a single person, the Man. It is his drama, which is projected outward by the staging."^[27]

Die glückliche Hand forms the complement to Erwartung. One is the opera of a man whose nature it is to be creative; the other is the opera of a woman who suffers from an emotional condition then thought common among women. Given Schoenberg's view of emotion and creativity as both oppo-

sites and complementary, it is not surprising that he should have turned to a significantly contrasting musical language for his second opera. The music of Die glückliche Hand represents a far more structured and systematic approach to composition than is evident in Erwartung. Die glückliche Hand contains examples of themes shaped according to classical forms, motivic and sectional recurrences, counterpoint, and regular rhythm and meter, all formulated through extensive sketching.^[28] The image of a systematically composed music reinforces and symbolizes the drama of the creative man, just as a music that rises "in a stream of unconscious sensations" — Schoenberg's description to Busoni of his music at the time of Erwartung — symbolizes the drama of emotions beyond rational control.

Following Die glückliche Hand Schoenberg did not return to a music of the emotions as it existed in Erwartung. His future direction was steadily on the path of an ever more systematic approach to composition, a course that led him eventually to the twelve-tone method. Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand were destined to stand on opposite sides of a peak in his lifelong quest for new musical resources. On one side the peak was approached through ever greater freedom from existing formal principles; on the other side was a return to a classical conception of music reformulated for the twentieth century.

Eight
"Heart and Brain in Music:"
The Genesis of Schoenberg's Die glückliche Hand

Joseph Auner

In the 1946 essay "Heart and Brain in Music" Schoenberg challenges the "misconception . . . that the constituent qualities of music belong to two categories as regards their origin: to the heart or to the brain."^[1] He argues that the so-called cerebral aspects of his musical language such as intricate counterpoint and "sophisticated form" were in fact often the products of spontaneous inspiration, whereas "beautiful melodies" that appeared to be pure emotional outpourings were produced by "deliberate calculation." Referring to the rapid composition of many of his works and the frequent lack of sketches or revisions, Schoenberg acknowledges that "it often happens to a composer that he writes down a melody in one uninterrupted draft and with a perfection that requires no change and offers no possibility of improvement."^[2] But many compositions required hard work. Of the First Chamber Symphony, for instance, he notes that his "perfect vision" of the whole work included only the "main features";^[3] the details had to be worked out in the course of the composition. In language he had used in several previous essays he concludes:

But one cannot pretend that the complicated ones required hard work or that the simple ones were always easily produced. Also, one cannot pretend that it makes any difference whether the examples derive from a spontaneous emotion or from a cerebral effort.

. . . But one thing seems to be clear: whether its final aspect is that of simplicity or of complexity, whether it was composed swiftly and easily or required hard work and much time, the finished work gives no indication of whether the emotional or the cerebral constituents have been determinant.

. . . everything of supreme value in art must show heart as well as brain.^[4]

No doubt this essay was in part a response to the frequent charge that twelve-tone composition was a purely cerebral exercise.^[5] More important,

however, I believe the essay addressed a fundamental conflict in Schoenberg's mind about the relationship between compositional process, structure, and expression.

The intensity with which Schoenberg in 1946 argued for the interdependence of inspiration and intellect was matched by his insistence on their incompatibility in the years leading up to the First World War. With the completion of that remarkable series of works in the summer and early fall of 1909 — the Three Piano Pieces, op. 11; the Five Orchestra Pieces, op. 16; and Erwartung, op. 17 — Schoenberg felt he was on the threshold of a new intuitive art unmediated by the intellect and convention. Music, he wrote to Ferruccio Busoni in 1909, "should be an expression of feeling, as our feelings, which bring us in contact with our subconscious, really are, and no false child of feelings and `conscious logic.'"^[6] Anticipating the language of his later critics, Schoenberg wrote in even stronger terms to Kandinsky in 1911:

art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one's taste, or one's upbringing, or one's intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive. And all form-making, all conscious form-making, is connected with some kind of mathematics, or geometry, or with the golden section or suchlike.^[7]

Such revolutionary pronouncements have understandably been treated with skepticism. It is difficult to reconcile Schoenberg's claims of unconscious, instinctive expression with the elaborate organizational strategies in many of his atonal works.^[8] Moreover, Schoenberg's remarks are themselves full of ambiguities; alongside his most radical utterances he often hints at underlying continuities with the past.^[9] In fact, increasingly in his later writings Schoenberg contradicted or repudiated many of his earlier statements, stressing instead the evolutionary features of his development and his continuity with tradition.

Nonetheless, a study of Schoenberg's writings and works from the prewar years suggests that the ideal of direct emotional expression continued to have a profound impact on his compositional process and his approach to musical structure in the works he composed from the end of 1909 to early in 1912, when he began Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21. These works include op. 11, no. 3; op. 16, no. 5; Erwartung; the unfinished Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra (1910); the Six Little Piano Pieces, op. 19 (1911); and Herzgewächse, op. 20 (1911).^[10] But at the same time that he sought to make his vision of spontaneous, intuitive creation a reality, he found that composition was becoming increasingly problematic. In his writings he began to question his ability to live up to the demands of his creative ideal, and whether the path might be an error. With Pierrot lunaire and the works that followed, he began to distance himself from his most radical stance.

Die glückliche Hand, op. 18, provides unique insight into this crucial turning point in Schoenberg's attitude toward the "heart and brain." In contrast to the rapid composition of most of the atonal works, Schoenberg wrote this "drama with music" in a number of stages between 1910 and 1913. The work thus bridges a period of tremendous diversity in his creative output. Vestiges of these stylistic transformations remain in the opera. In its dramatic content, musical structure, and what can be traced of its creation it provides a record of Schoenberg's painful acceptance of the distance between inspired vision and attainment. Whereas some passages resemble Erwartung's constant change and diversity, other sections are closer to Pierrot's thematic development, clearly defined form, and use of contrapuntal devices. Scholars have noted the differences between Die glückliche Hand and Erwartung, but insufficient knowledge about the genesis of the work has made it difficult to fit the opera into a comprehensive view of the period.^[11] Examined in the light of a new compositional chronology, the sketches document that in the course of the work's evolution Schoenberg's approach to musical organization and the creative process changed as he began grudgingly to acknowledge a role for the "conscious intellect."^[12]

Schoenberg left little direct information about the composition of Die glückliche Hand. The libretto bears a June 1910 date of completion, and the composition's beginning and ending are indicated on the draft as 9 September 1910 and 18 November 1913, respectively. Through references in Schoenberg's correspondence it is possible to establish at least five separate stages during which Schoenberg worked on Die glückliche Hand, and the many surviving compositional materials for the work suggest chronological layers in the score corresponding to these five stages. On the basis of these sources the chronology of Die glückliche Hand may be summarized as follows: only the libretto, some of the artwork for the staging, and a few musical sketches originated in 1910;^[13] the earliest portion of the draft, starting at measure 58 and extending to the end of scene 2 and possibly the beginning of scene 3, dates from the second period of composition, in the summer of 1911; the bulk of the score, including the third and fourth scenes as well as much of the first two scenes, was composed in 1912-1913, after Pierrot lunaire.^{[ 14]}

In "Heart and Brain in Music" Schoenberg maintained that it made no difference whether a work was composed quickly or with great effort, but in 1910 he believed that the true artist was defined by the ability to compose spontaneously. The central climax of Die glückliche Hand occurs when the main character, the Man, outrages a group of artisans by forging a jeweled diadem with a single hammer stroke. The polarity between a craftsman's repetitive labor and the miraculous creation of genius reflects Schoenberg's conviction that a work of art must be created fully formed, not assembled from component parts. In 1912 he wrote:

For the work of art, like every living thing, is conceived as a whole — just like a child, whose arm or leg is not conceived separately. The inspiration is not the theme, but the whole work. And it is not the one who writes a good theme who is inventive, but the one to whom a whole symphony occurs at once.^[15]

It followed that Schoenberg regarded sketching, planning, and revision as unwanted intrusions of the conscious intellect, and in fact in the period leading up to Die glückliche Hand he sketched very little and the draft manuscripts show few revisions.^[16]Erwartung is perhaps the culmination of this tendency: the 426 measures of the draft were written in seventeen days, and the only sketches for it are a few brief ideas jotted down in the text manuscript. But the compositions that followed — the Six Little Piano Pieces, the unfinished pieces for chamber orchestra, and Herzgewächse — were also composed very rapidly and without sketching. And, although more sketches are preserved for Die glückliche Hand than for any of the other atonal works, there are few sketches for the early stages of its composition.

The sketches consist of six pages bound in a typed copy of the libretto, which Schoenberg labeled Compositions Vorlage, and a collection of nineteen pages.^[17] These two sources differ in many ways, most importantly in what they reveal about Schoenberg's creative process. Although all the sketch material is undated, a number of factors suggest that many of the Compositions Vorlage sketches represent Schoenberg's earliest thoughts on the score; most of these sketches correspond to passages at the end of scene 2 and the beginning of scene 3. Other sketch pages from the Compositions Vorlage, which relate primarily to the second half of scene 3 and scene 4, appear to date from the later stages of the composition in 1912-1913. Figure 10 reproduces two facing pages from the Compositions Vorlage, showing the libretto and adjacent musical sketch that correspond to measures 58 through 61. Like the sketches in the text manuscript of Erwartung, these notations do not record Schoenberg actively working with material in various forms; rather, they represent small autonomous passages that he incorporated into the final score with few changes.^[18] This kind of sketch is associated with a particular point in the text and does not serve as a source for themes or motives that are subsequently developed in the score. This is in sharp contrast to Schoenberg's approach in the later stages of the work or in Pierrot lunaire, where sketched material is developed over substantial passages.^[19]

The idea of eliminating "the conscious will in art" had a profound impact on Schoenberg's organization of musical structure as well. Increasingly he had come to regard the "craftsmanly deftness, technique, and play with material" of traditional developmental procedures with suspicion. Schoenberg in 1911 makes a sharp distinction between intellect and feeling, talent and genius, craft and art:

Fig. 10.
Schoenberg, Die glückliche Hand, Compositions Vorlage, sketch for
mm. 58-61. 61. Reproduced courtesy of Lawrence Schoenberg.

Mathematics and mechanics cannot produce a living being. Inspired by a true feeling, a rightly functioning intellect brought this form to completion. But a rightly functioning intellect almost always does the opposite of what is appropriate to a true feeling. A true feeling must not let itself be prevented from going constantly down, ever and anew, into the dark region of the unconscious, in order to bring up content and form as a unity.^[20]

Schoenberg was of course aware that his works did not fully live up to this ideal. Writing to Busoni of the challenge of allowing "nothing to infiltrate which may be invoked either by intelligence or consciousness" he ac-

knowledged that "perhaps this is not yet graspable. It will perhaps take a long time before I can write the music I feel urged to, of which I have had an inkling for several years, but which, for the time being, I cannot express."^[21] Intuitive expression was thus not a free reverie in which the results would be accepted without critique but involved editing out any aspects of musical language that he regarded as impurities.^[22] The works of 1908-1911 show a gradual elimination of what he described to Busoni as the "architectural values and . . . cabalistic mathematics" of tonality,^[23] and conventional structural elements such as thematic statements and development, form based on repetition, and imitative counterpoint. As he wrote in the 1911 essay "Problems of Teaching Art":

There is no style to carry one through, no ornament to give a lift; pomposity is out of the question, and fraud too. This is morality; an idea makes its appearance for what it is worth — no less, but no more either.^[24]

Perhaps no concepts are more frequently linked to Schoenberg's music and thought than logic, construction, and comprehensibility. Looking back in 1941 to the period before World War I, Schoenberg wrote of the inevitable emergence in a composer of the "desire for conscious control" and the quest for knowledge of the "laws and rules which govern the forms which he has conceived `as in a dream.'"^[25] But at the time of Erwartung his reliance on intuition was accompanied by a deep ambivalence about the value of order and logic in composition. In his 1911 Harmonielehre he wrote: "It should not be said that order, clarity, and comprehensibility can impair beauty, but that they are not a necessary factor without which there would be no beauty; they are merely an accidental, a circumstantial factor."^[26] Although Schoenberg did not renounce "all symbols of cohesion" in even his most radical works, there the unifying elements are attenuated to an unprecedented degree as a result of pursuing an image of composition as the transcription of the constantly changing and irrational unconscious. He described this to Busoni in 1909:

[I]t is impossible for a person to have only one sensation at a time. One has thousands simultaneously. . . . And this variegation, this multifariousness, this illogicality which our senses demonstrate, the illogicality presented by their interactions, set forth by some mounting rush of blood, by some reaction of the senses or the nerves, this I should like to have in my music.^[27]

As Robert Morgan has suggested, the mysterious quality of music was for Schoenberg one of its most distinguishing features.^[28] In a letter to Kandinsky from 1912 he objected to the painter's notion of a higher order standing behind apparent disharmony, adding, "We must be conscious that there are puzzles around us. And we must find the courage to look these puzzles in the eye without timidly asking about the `solution.'"^[29]

Works like Erwartung, Herzgewächse, and the early compositional stages of Die glückliche Hand show that Schoenberg attempted to carry out his vision of an intuitive art in the years 1909-1911. Despite his achievements during these years, the initial feelings of liberation soon gave way to anxiety and doubt as composition became increasingly difficult. In 1910, after making only a few isolated sketches, he set Die glückliche Hand aside and completed no other work that year. In 1911 he completed only the Six Little Piano Pieces and Herzgewächse, both composed in just a few days. In all of his writings from the prewar years Schoenberg stressed the necessity for abso-

lute self-confidence for the composer who would abandon theory and eliminate the conscious will, but Schoenberg's own courage was faltering, and his writings during 1910-1911 reflect his preoccupation with the themes of failure, doubt, error, and a loss of faith.^[30]

In a program note to the January 1910 performance of parts of Gurrelieder and Das Buch der hängenden Gärten Schoenberg proclaimed his break-through into a new art free from "every restriction of a bygone aesthetic," but acknowledged at the same time that

though the goal toward which I am striving appears to me a certain one, I am, nonetheless, already feeling the resistance I shall have to overcome; I feel how hotly even the least of temperaments will rise in revolt, and suspect that even those who have so far believed in me will not want to acknowledge the necessary nature of this development.^[31]

Schoenberg's self-doubt was certainly motivated in part by the outrage and incomprehension his works had encountered. Nevertheless, rejection was not something new in the period after Erwartung. I believe that a more significant cause for Schoenberg's creative crisis was his inability to live up to the uncompromising demands of his own aesthetic beliefs, as well as a growing sense that his exclusive reliance on intuition was an error. In contrast to the bold pronouncements about eliminating the conscious will in art, Schoenberg increasingly characterized the relationship between heart and brain as a struggle in which, as he wrote in "Franz Liszt's Work and Being," "one must avoid the disturbing intervention of the constantly worried frightened intellect";^[32] he describes an "undissolved residue" between the artist's "expressive urge and his powers of depiction," and the resultant need to rely on technique to unify "the outward phenomena to disguise the gaps and deficiencies of the inner."^[33] In the Harmonielehre Schoenberg wrote that although what really matters is the ability "to look deep into oneself[,] . . . [t]he average person seems to possess this ability only in a few sublime moments, and to live the rest of the time, not according to his own inclinations, but according to principles."^[34]

Schoenberg's changing attitude toward an art free from tradition and technique is also reflected in his involvement with painting. He had started to paint around 1907 and continued to do so sporadically throughout his life, but in 1910-1911 painting assumed a central place in his creative life. For a time he considered pursuing it as a second career.^[35] Like many of his contemporaries, especially Kandinsky and Kokoschka, Schoenberg's turn to an art form other than that in which he had been trained was motivated by the desire to liberate himself from the constraints of inherited technique. He was a gifted painter, and many of his portraits show considerable technical ability,^[36] but that aspect held little interest for him; he explained his point of view to the painter Carl Moll, who had discouraged him from

showing his paintings because of what he perceived as their primitive level of achievement.

At first glance it must seem strange that I assume that someone who can do nothing is suddenly capable of doing something. However, I do not consider this unusual; it is with me, in any event, routinely the case. I have always been able to do only that which is suited to me — absolutely, immediately and almost without any transition or preparation. On the other hand, the things that others can do — that which passes for "education" — have always caused me difficulties.^[37]

However, despite promising developments in his painting career, as he began to question the intuitive ideal, his enthusiasm for painting also waned. Just before beginning Pierrot he wrote to Kandinsky:

I do not believe that it is advantageous for me to exhibit in the company of professional painters. I am surely an "outsider," an amateur, a dilettante. Whether I should exhibit at all is almost already a question. Whether I should exhibit with a group of painters is almost no longer a question.^[38]

It is not that he could no longer produce paintings like the intuitive "gazes" or "visions," but rather that he no longer felt that this approach to painting — without technique or training — was valid. By denying that his paintings were legitimate, by calling himself an "amateur, a dilettante," Schoenberg called into question the basic premise of intuitive art and reaffirmed the traditional conception of art as dependent on acquired skills and "artistic methods."

To admit this in connection with his painting, however, was much easier than to accept the resurrection of craft and technique in his composition. Schoenberg had invested so much in the moral-religious-aesthetic nexus of the intuitive aesthetic that abandoning it meant losing all foundations for his thought.^[39] If faith in oneself is the main prerequisite for the creative genius, any lack of conviction or faltering of courage becomes an admission of both creative and spiritual failure. Schoenberg's creative ideal allowed no compromise, as he wrote in the Harmonielehre:

The artist who has courage submits wholly to his own inclinations. And he alone who submits to his own inclinations has courage, and he alone who has courage is an artist.^[40]

Composition of Pierrot lunaire between March and July of 1912 provided a temporary release from Schoenberg's aesthetic quandary. The fact that the work resulted from a commission gave him a feeling of detachment from the project, as he described to Kandinsky:

perhaps no heartfelt necessity as regards its theme, its content (Giraud's "Pierrot lunaire"), but certainly as regards its form. In any case remarkable

for me as a preparatory study for another work, which I now wish to begin: Balzac's Séraphita.^[41]

It is revealing of his state of mind that he was able to complete the "preparatory study," while the more heartfelt work remained a fragment. As he began Pierrot Schoenberg still clearly aspired toward a spontaneous, intuitive expression. After completing the first of the melodramas, "Gebet an Pierrot," no. 9, he wrote: "The sounds here truly become an animalistically immediate expression of sensual and psychological emotions. Almost as if everything were transmitted directly."^[42] Yet, although the twenty-one pieces that make up Pierrot exhibit an enormous range of approaches, the work shows the return of many traditional formal and developmental techniques. As Theodor W. Adorno noted, the ironic character of the work allowed Schoenberg to establish links to tradition without subjecting them to the intense scrutiny of aesthetic legitimacy.^[43]

In contrast to his experience with preceding works, Schoenberg here felt less constrained in his compositional process as well; he considered different orderings of the cycle and made sketches for several movements.^[44] Although most of the sketches, like those for Erwartung, are brief marginal notes in the text manuscript, they represent a very different working method and consequently a different attitude toward musical structure. Unlike the sketches for Erwartung or the early stages of Die glückliche Hand, which represented a single point in the completed score, many of the Pierrot sketches contain thematic and motivic material explicitly developed over the entire movement.

While he was completing Pierrot lunaire in the summer of 1912 Schoenberg again took up the score of Die glückliche Hand, but despite the relative ease and rapidity with which he had composed Pierrot, the opera still proceeded slowly. Again he set the work aside. It was completed only after a fourth period of composition at the end of 1912 and a final stage in the summer and fall of 1913. At each successive stage of work on the music drama, both compositional process and musical structure reflect the ongoing transformation of Schoenberg's aesthetic stance. Unlike the early stages from 1910-1911, the work Schoenberg did on it in 1912-1913 shows that he depended increasingly on thematic and motivic development, imitative counterpoint, and a clearly defined form based on large- and small-scale repetition. Though aspects of parody undoubtedly remain, all of the traditional techniques and procedures that had been reintroduced as ironic references in Pierrot lunaire were now used as legitimate, "genuine" features. The new structural approach was paralleled by a transformation in Schoenberg's working method, as is clear from the large number of sketches for the later compositional stages, including multiple sketches for several sections.

The thematic clarity and developmental logic of the end of the third scene, measures 166 through 202, strikingly demonstrate the distance Schoenberg had come. This passage is based on the contrapuntal development of a nine-measure theme first presented in the horns in measures 166 through 174, and repeated five times in complete and partial statements. More sketches survive for the horn-theme section than for any other part of Die glückliche Hand, and they record Schoenberg's experimentation with the horn theme and various canonic treatments of it, and culminate with a fully worked-out particell for measures 166 through 200.

Sketch page 2,440 contains sketches for the horn theme and the contrapuntal continuation (see figure 11). At the letter B he copied a version of the theme from a preceding sketch, then crossed out the final two measures of the theme at "2." Lower on the page at D he subsequently sketched a new conclusion that corresponds very closely to the final version. A significant addition to this revision is the sixteenth-note passage inserted before the concluding gesture, which recapitulates in order the first eleven pitches of the horn theme. The insertion prepares the cadence of the theme by returning to the pitch material of the opening. In a similar procedure, the diminution of the horn theme returns near the end of the passage, measures 193 and 194, to provide closure for the entire horn-theme section.

Schoenberg began with the intention of following the horn theme with a fairly strict canon-in-inversion based on the theme. This is worked out in detail in another sketch, but also hinted at here and at A, which presents the first two measures of the untransposed inversion of the horn theme (D-flat — C — A). At E he introduces a new countertheme, which appears with a whole-step transposition of the horn theme. While freer than the first version, this countertheme is closely related to the inversion, beginning with the same interval pattern and following the same general developmental process. Although Schoenberg did not ultimately use the literal inversion of the horn theme as the countertheme, he does refer to it in the oboe and chordal accompaniment in the winds of measures 174 and 175, which are sketched at C. In the second half of the measure, the first three pitches of the inversion of the horn theme (D-flat — C — A) are stated melodically along with D. These same four pitch classes are also stated harmonically at the first of the descending gestures, exemplifying his growing interest in equating horizontal and vertical presentations.

Schoenberg applied the clarity and logic of Die glückliche Hand in a still more refined way in the unfinished symphony he drafted in 1914-1915. His comment to Zemlinsky that the symphony would be a "worked composition," in contrast to the preceding "purely impressionistic works," could be taken to describe both the extensive sketching and planning, and his experimentation with protoserial structures.^[45] Nevertheless, the conflict be-

Fig. 11.
Schoenberg, sketch for Die glückliche Hand (ASI microfilm 2440, box 18). Reproduced courtesy of Lawrence Schoenberg.

tween heart and brain was by no means resolved. There was a clear tension in Die glückliche Hand between the rigorous structures worked out in the sketches and the less systematic realizations of these passages that made their way into the final score. And although the symphony remained fragmentary, Schoenberg did complete the Four Orchestra Songs, op. 22 (1913-1916), which are in large measure consistent with his earlier structural ideals.

In his later writings Schoenberg minimized the differences in both style and aesthetic foundations between his twelve-tone works and his earlier tonal and atonal music. In his interpretation of his own development he focused on the continuity of his later works with tradition and on demonstrating that "the method of composing with twelve tones grew out of a necessity."^[46] In 1928, for example, he wrote: "To be quite precise, I have been saying the same thing for about 25 years (if not more), only I am constantly saying it better."^[47] Although there are undoubtedly significant continuities throughout his many stylistic transformations, the reintroduction in Pierrot lunaire and Die glückliche Hand of the conventional structural means he had systematically eliminated or suppressed between 1909 and 1911, and the solidification of the new compositional procedures, reflect Schoenberg's fundamental redefinition of the nature of art. And it is clear from his writings and the various compositional materials that this redefinition — in the course of which he had to abandon the Romantic image of the godlike artist and turn from an aesthetic ideal of "illogical" variegation to one of creation based on cohesion and logic — represented a profound crisis in his creative and spiritual life.

When he emerged from the most intensive period of self-examination early in 1912, he acknowledged to himself that he had passed a major turning point. As he began Pierrot, he wrote:

And maybe this is the reason why I suddenly, for two years, no longer feel as young. I have become strangely calm! This is also evident when I conduct. I am missing the aggressive in myself. The spontaneous leaving of all [physical] constraints behind oneself and attacking, taking over.^[48]

The impossibility of "leaving all constraints behind," of bridging the gulf between the material and spiritual through near-miraculous creative feats, became a central theme in his writings and compositions after Erwartung. Whereas the George texts for the Second String Quartet of 1908 describe crossing "endless chasms" with ease to merge with the "holy fire," by the time of Die glückliche Hand the rift between vision and worldly attainment had become unbridgeable. The central two scenes of Die glückliche Hand

play out this pessimism in the recurrent drama of deception by the false lures of creative and personal fulfillment, symbolized by the "beautiful vision" of the Woman that cannot be captured but will "only slip away from you when you grasp it."^[49] At the beginning of the work, the chorus laments:

Be still, won't you? You know how it always is, and yet you remain blind. Will you never be at rest? . . . Will you not finally believe? . . . Once again you trust in the dream. Once again you fix your longing on the unattainable. Once again you give yourself up to the sirens of your thoughts, thoughts that roam the cosmos, that are unworldly but thirst for worldly fulfillment!^[50]

Despite his many remarkable achievements, Schoenberg never lost this sense of defeat. Indeed, in the essay "Composition with Twelve Tones" he describes human creativity as a "long path between vision and accomplishment" where "driven out of Paradise even geniuses must reap their harvest in the sweat of their brows."^[51]

It was with the completion of Die glückliche Hand that Schoenberg laid the aesthetic and structural foundations for his subsequent compositional development, yet the bitter struggle and sense of loss that accompanied this transition still resonated with him more than thirty years later. It is surely not a coincidence that Schoenberg begins "Heart and Brain in Music" with a reference to Balzac's novel Séraphita, the work that in 1912 he intended to use as the basis for a massive oratorio describing the angelic Séraphita's ascent into heaven. By 1946, however, Schoenberg identified more with the mortal earthbound character Wilfred; he begins the essay by quoting Balzac's description of Wilfred "as a man of medium height as is the case with almost all men who tower above the rest. His chest and his shoulders were broad and his neck was short, like that of men whose heart must be within the domain of the head."^[52]

Nine
Schoenberg's Incomplete Works and Fragments

Jan Maegaard

Incomplete works and fragments may form quite a substantial portion of a composer's entire output. Together with completed works that were either withdrawn or never considered for publication, this body of works cannot be expected to contribute much to an author's image. But a closer examination may well contribute considerably to an understanding of the composer's creative development and perhaps even influence the evaluation of the completed and published works. The main purpose of this article is to give a survey of Arnold Schoenberg's incomplete works and fragments and attempt to group them into categories, with the hope that this may encourage further investigation. Because there are far too many incomplete works to allow a detailed consideration of each, only the larger fragments will be discussed more fully.

The materials Schoenberg left unfinished range from a few notes jotted down in haste to extended passages. At times it is difficult to distinguish clearly between the ways in which the items are unfinished. In an attempt to provide some provisional order in the wilderness, I propose a division into three categories: sketch, outline, and fragment.

A sketch shall be defined as a brief notation of a musical idea at any point within a work. It is often monophonic and shows the composer at work on some detail. There are numerous sketches, not included here, that pertain to finished works, as well as those that do not seem related to any identifiable work. Such cursory notations may be very hard to identify, and an unidentified sketch may, upon closer examination, turn out to belong to a known composition.

An outline shall be defined as a musical trajectory of some length. It transcends the shortness of the sketch and is focused not on details but rather on a comprehensive view of a part or several parts of a composition.

A fragment shall be defined as a piece of music, of any length, that starts at the beginning and is worked out in detail but not concluded. A large number of fragments contain only the first five to twenty measures of a composition. Normally such a fragment will be identical with what Schoenberg called an Einfall — a spontaneous idea, hastily notated in full or almost full detail, that was intended to be worked out and developed. This concept plays a crucial role in Schoenberg's compositional practice as well as in his teaching. On one of the first pages of his posthumously published textbook on composition he states:

The motive generally appears in a characteristic and impressive manner at the beginning of a piece. The features of a motive are intervals and rhythms, combined to produce a memorable shape or contour.^[1]

In 1911, immediately following the completion of the Harmonielehre, Schoenberg conceived another textbook, Das Komponieren mit selbständigen Stimmen. It exists in the form of two outlines, which show several subject headings and their chapters and subchapters. In part 1, under the heading "Das Wesen des Satzes mit selbständigen Stimmen" (The essence of the texture of independent parts), Schoenberg concludes:

Homophony and polyphony are just two different manifestations of the same matter, two principles of style — the same matter of art, the same matter of music, therefore identical laws, but different applications of them.^[2]

He goes on to say that in homophony, harmony is form creating and restricted by melody, whereas in polyphony, melody is restricted by harmony. This explanation — which pertains to very short bits of music — makes explicit what kind of texture Schoenberg had in mind as a primary goal in his teaching of composition. It conforms with what he demanded from the Einfall. Twenty years later, in 1931, in a commentary on Ernst Kurth's 1917 Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts, he stated this even more clearly:

"Whatever happens in a piece of music is nothing but the endless reshaping of a basic shape." . . . [T]here is nothing in a piece of music but what comes from the theme, springs from it and can be traced back to it; to put it still more severely, nothing but the theme itself.^[3]

Such beginnings of just a few measures are conspicuous among Schoenberg's fragments. Out of the total of 111 fragments, which span every stage of his creative career, 77 are twenty-five measures long or less; 41 of these are twelve measures long or less.

In the following tables, the sketches, outlines, and fragments are listed by category. Each item is identified by title (or, if untitled, by an indication of genre or instruments) and date (in editorial brackets if the date is derived from internal evidence); items whose date cannot be established are

listed separately under "Undated." Titles in italics are by Schoenberg, those in square brackets by the author. Similarly titled works from the same year are distinguished by Roman numerals following the year. Most of the material is located in the archives of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, Los Angeles (abbreviated as ASI), in which case the microfilm, sketch, or sketch-book number is given. If the item is located or cited elsewhere, it is identified as follows:

Whereas the sketches that do not pertain to previously known music add little to our insight into Schoenberg's composing, other outlines and fragments reveal important details about his life and creativity. The fragments, for instance, illustrate Schoenberg's concentration on the initial motive as the starting point of a composition. This motive tended to come to him spontaneously in a moment of inspiration. His term for it, Einfall, and inspiratio, the Latin root of inspiration, actually have identical meanings — something that comes from outside one, that "falls" or "is blown" into one's mind. On several occasions Schoenberg stressed the importance of inspiration, as in a letter to the conductor Fritz Reiner regarding the Band Variations, op. 43, in which he wrote: "I know it is inspired. Not only because I cannot write even 10 measures without inspiration, but I really wrote the piece with great pleasure."^[4] Many, if not all, of the fragments document just such moments of inspiration.

Schoenberg's dependence on inspiration is also documented by the fragment of an early piano piece in A-flat major (see dated fragment no. 13). At the point where Schoenberg broke off, after bar 46, he wrote:

Continuation follows . . . If only I knew how the continuation should be! — Twice I have been mistaken about it. Now I dare not hope, or fear, anything any more. Will continuation follow? — Arn. Sch. February 1901.^[5]

This illustrates how Schoenberg set out, hoping from the beginning that the initial inspiration would carry him through. It also illustrates how such

an attempt could fail, even at times when composition of other works — in this case, Gurrelieder — was proceeding successfully. Furthermore, it reveals Schoenberg's own doubts as to whether he would be able to get back on track once he had lost the inspiration. Later developments, such as the 1900 symphony fragment, Die Jakobsleiter, and Moses und Aron, show that his doubts were well founded.

Among the outlines, two of Schoenberg's attempts to write a symphony (not his first attempts at the genre) are of particular interest. One is a fragment of a symphony dating from February 1900 (dated fragment no. 12), that is, a little earlier than the piano piece just mentioned; the second is a sketch from 1905 (dated sketch no. 6). The first manuscript shows a complete introduction of seventy-three bars in G minor followed by a short sketch of the beginning of the main part of the movement, an Allegro moderato in G major. There it stops abruptly. It is unlikely that Schoenberg would have composed such an extended introduction, and even written one page of it out in full score as a fair copy, as he did, without having had

a notion of what it was to be an introduction to. Nonetheless he abandoned the Allegro after those first seven bars and never returned to it. We do not know why, but can only surmise that it was put aside in favor of the composition of Gurrelieder, which he had begun in March of that year. And after that he may have felt that his orchestral and compositional technique had developed too far in another direction.

However, it could not have been easy for a young composer of that era to give up the idea of writing a symphony — a young composer who had witnessed the conclusion of Bruckner's and Brahms's careers and experienced the premiere of one Mahler symphony after another. Despite initial reservations about Mahler, Schoenberg's attitude at some time between 1904 and 1908 took a turn. When the Eighth Symphony was given its premiere in Munich in September 1910, an event that marked the climax of Mahler's career as a composer, Schoenberg would have studied the work carefully as a matter of course, even though he did not attend the performance. It is evident from his obituary lecture on Mahler, first held in Prague in March 1912, that he knew the work well, at least from study.^[6]

Schoenberg's next symphonic project (dated outline no. 8) may well have taken its impetus from Mahler's Eighth Symphony. Although it also includes many sketches and fragments, I have found it most appropriate to place it in the category of outlines. The concept goes back further than the date of the item would indicate, to a short fragment of an oratorio from December 1912, entitled Seraphita and based upon Honoré de Balzac's novel of that name (dated fragment no. 36). At about the same time Schoenberg wrote to the poet Richard Dehmel, whom he greatly admired, about his intention to write an oratorio; he describes the contents he envisions:

how this modern man, having passed through materialism, socialism, and anarchy and, despite having been an atheist, still having in him some residue of ancient faith (in the form of superstition), wrestles with God . . . and finally succeeds in finding God and becoming religious. Learning to pray!^[7]

As Schoenberg tells Dehmel, he had initially intended writing the text himself, then considered adapting Strindberg's Jakob ringt, and finally decided to start with positive religious belief by adapting the final chapter of Balzac's

Séraphita. "But," he writes, "I could never shake off the thought of `Modern Man's Prayer,' and I often thought: If only Dehmel . . . !"^[8] In his reply Dehmel sent Schoenberg his Oratorium natale, which he had written the previous year but not yet published.

In his subsequent work on the text of this symphony Schoenberg included poems by Dehmel — some of them from Oratorium natale — and by Rabindranath Tagore, along with several texts from the Old as well as the New Testament. By January 1915 he had finished his own text, Totentanz der Prinzipien, which he designated as "3rd Movement," and three days later he started writing the text of Die Jakobsleiter under the heading "4th Movement." This seems to have been completed in May 1917. This ambitiously designed work, which thus goes at least as far back as 1912, ended up as the extensive fragment Die Jakobsleiter (dated fragment no. 40). Later, when mentioning the work, Schoenberg always referred it to 1914-1915, which is actually when most of the musical sketches for it were composed.

The original concept, which was to undergo so many changes, bears some analogy to Mahler's Eighth Symphony. However, whereas it had been Mahler's endeavor to sum up European man's feeling for religion and love, from the medieval "Veni creator spiritus" to Goethe's Faust, Schoenberg's concept evidently was to interpret what was left of religious feeling and love in European man at the beginning of the twentieth century, and to do so by means strikingly similar to those of Mahler's symphony. Schoenberg conceived his work on an even larger scale. Not only did he at first plan to have five huge movements, but he foresaw an orchestra of ten to twelve flutes, oboes, and bassoons, twelve to sixteen clarinets, twelve French horns and tubas, six to eight trumpets and trombones, two to three contrabass tubas, and a number of harps, celestas, glockenspiels, and xylophones, in addition to the traditional complement of percussion instruments, twenty stands of violins, ten to twelve stands of violas, cellos, and double basses, and on top of that a number of soloists and a large chorus.

Schoenberg's concept is significant in yet another respect, in that it marks a radical departure from the expressionistic outburst of 1909, represented by the Three Piano Pieces, op. 11, Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, and Erwartung, op. 17. In fact, the uncompleted concept would have been a far more radical departure than that of the completed and published works: the Six Little Piano Pieces, op. 19, Herzgewächse, op. 20, and Pierrot lunaire, op. 21.

Between June and September 1917 Schoenberg composed almost the entire first part — 603 bars — of Die Jakobsleiter. Then he was called up for military service, and although he was released after less than three months, it proved difficult for him to resume work. During the following years, until 1922, he managed to compose only a further one hundred bars, which extended to the end of part 1 and the beginning of an interlude. It is readily

apparent that Schoenberg was unable to continue work on the composition at the same time that the "method of composing with twelve tones only related to one another" was being born in a series of new works. The desire to complete Die Jakobsleiter remained alive, however, and in 1944, at the time of his retirement from UCLA, Schoenberg resumed work on the score. In 1945, when he applied unsuccessfully for a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, Die Jakobsleiter was mentioned among the projects he hoped to complete. Finally, less than one month before his death in July 1951, he asked his former pupil Karl Rankl to help him finish part 1.^[9]

Schoenberg's last attempt to write a symphony occurred in January and February 1937. On seven sheets he conceived the outline of a dodecaphonic symphony in four movements, which in a programmatic manner was intended to depict the contemporaneous situation of the Jewish people, their frustrations, and their hopes.^[10] But this project, too, remained uncompleted. Thus three of Schoenberg's four symphonic projects were not carried out beyond the preliminary stages, whereas the one project that ended up as a huge fragment was more oratorio than symphony.

In the 1920s Schoenberg started another ambitious work that was also destined to remain a fragment, the opera Moses und Aron. The circumstances surrounding this work are well documented and do not need to be repeated in detail here. The idea for the text sprang from Schoenberg's theater play Der biblische Weg of 1926-1927 and had initially been intended as an oratorio text. Schoenberg apparently made the decision to turn it into an opera at the time he began to compose the music in 1930. He completed the first two acts within two years. But neither the final version of the text nor the music of the third act ever materialized. In 1933 Schoenberg told Walter Eidlitz that he had had difficulties with the text because of contradictions in the Bible, and that he had rewritten it at least four times.^[11] He is known to have resumed work on it again in 1934 and 1935. Years later he gave permission for a performance of Moses und Aron with the 1934 version of the third act either as a spoken dialogue or left out altogether.^[12] Some musical sketches do exist for this act, but nothing that could justify an attempt to reconstruct it. Thus Moses und Aron too has remained a large fragment.

A third work of a comparable scale deserves to be mentioned in this connection — namely, Gurrelieder. Schoenberg composed the music during 1900-1901, and had completed the orchestration up to the Peasant's Song at the beginning of part 3 by 1903. Then he laid the work aside. Fortunate circumstances caused him to arrange for a performance of part 1 in a version for pianos in a concert in Vienna in January 1910; also on that program were the first performance of the fifteen songs from Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, op. 15, and the Three Piano Pieces, op. 11. In the often cited program note that Schoenberg wrote for that recital it is stated that the two

new and groundbreaking works are presented together with the older one so as to show "that not lack of inventiveness or of technical ability or of familiarity with the demands of traditional aesthetics" had driven him in that direction, but that he had followed an inner compulsion stronger than education.^[13]

That performance gave rise to a desire in Schoenberg to hear the entire Gurrelieder in the orchestral version and with the big choruses of part 3. An added inducement was Franz Schreker's eagerness to perform it with his newly founded Vienna Philharmonic Chorus. As a result Schoenberg completed the score during 1910-1911, and Schreker conducted the first performance of the work in Vienna in 1913, which was a great success. That Schoenberg was able to take up and finish this large work after eight years of stylistic development seems to be due to the fact that in this case the music had actually been composed at an earlier stage.^[14] It only remained for Schoenberg to complete the orchestration as of the end of the Peasant's Song. If the situation had been otherwise, Gurrelieder might well have shared the fate of Die Jakobsleiter and Moses und Aron.

There is only one additional fragment of a length exceeding 150 bars — namely, the Serenade in D major from 1896. Schoenberg completed the first movement, an Andante, but the two subsequent movements, a Scherzo and Finale, remained fragments of 63 and 198 bars, respectively. There is no reason to believe that he would have felt inclined to complete this work at any later stage.

The consideration of big fragments in Schoenberg's oeuvre would be incomplete without a word about the Moderner Psalm for narrator, mixed chorus, and orchestra, op. 50C. This was certainly also intended to be a work of considerable dimensions, as can be seen from the texts. Ten psalms seem to have been intended as a first group; beyond that there are five further psalms and a text fragment. Schoenberg began composing the music in October 1950 but had notated only eighty-six bars, together with a few sketches for the continuation, before his death on 13 July 1951. The last words Schoenberg ever set to music were "Und trotzdem bete ich." (And nevertheless I pray).^[15]

In the course of half a century Schoenberg's music passed through stylistic changes more far-reaching than had ever been seen in music history during such a short span of time; his musical language developed through many stages, and not always in a straightforward fashion. That state of constant change allowed very little time for the composition of large, time-consuming works. Almost as if he were aware of this, Schoenberg at an early stage developed the ability to compose very quickly. Thus the 426 bars of

the monodrama Erwartung were composed in one burst of inspiration in the two weeks between 27 August and 12 September 1909. But whenever Schoenberg was interrupted in the middle of a big project, it was usually impossible for him to pick up the thread again. In 1917 work on Die Jakobsleiter was interrupted, first by military service and then by Schoenberg's preoccupation with developing the dodecaphonic technique. In 1932 work on Moses und Aron was interrupted, first by difficulties with the text and then by Schoenberg's flight from Germany in October 1933. In 1902 the orchestration of Gurrelieder had been similarly interrupted by Schoenberg's need to earn money by orchestrating operettas; he resumed work on Gurrelieder in 1903 but again gave it up, presumably because the possibility of having the colossal work performed in Vienna at that time seemed so slight. Fortunately Schoenberg was able to finish the score when the opportunity presented itself in 1910, but he himself admitted that the parts orchestrated in 1910 and 1911 sound different from the rest.

The same is true of another work that was saved from remaining a fragment. Schoenberg began his Second Chamber Symphony in 1906, right after completing the First Chamber Symphony, but soon thereafter gave it up. After resuming it in 1911 (upon completion of the Gurrelieder orchestration) and again in 1916, he did eventually complete the work in 1939, more than thirty years after its initial stages. No wonder that in this work, composed over a span of so many years, there are striking differences to be heard between the various parts.

Taking the pace of Schoenberg's stylistic development and the turbulence of his life into consideration, it is not surprising that throughout his creative life one or two of his most ambitious compositional projects were always pending, waiting to be completed. From 1900 on it was Gurrelieder, which took another twelve years to reach completion; from 1912 on it was the symphony that ended up as the Jakobsleiter fragment; and from 1930 on it was Moses und Aron. Given this situation, it is truly amazing — and testifies to his enormous vitality — that in September 1950, despite old age and failing health, Schoenberg had the courage to enter upon yet another big project, the Moderne Psalmen. There is no other great composer in whose oeuvre huge unfinished works play a role as decisive as they do in the oeuvre of Arnold Schoenberg.

Ten
Schoenberg's Philosophy of Composition:
Thoughts on the "Musical Idea and Its Presentation"

Patricia Carpenter and Severine Neff

Throughout his creative life Schoenberg wrote about various aspects of his philosophy of composition — that is, the system of motivating beliefs, concepts, and principles that constitutes his basic theory. Here we are concerned not with his technical theory but rather with the ground for technical matters. We shall discuss the development of Schoenberg's concept of the "musical idea" first by describing the chronology of manuscripts dealing with his theory and philosophy of composition, then by tracing the intellectual evolution of the concept of the "musical idea" in his theoretical writings. Finally we shall turn to Schoenberg's notion of the "musical idea" and its presentation by glossing the familiar passage on artistic creation in the 1941 twelve-tone lecture "Composition with Twelve Tones"^[1] in light of the theoretical and philosophical concerns of earlier manuscripts.

I

Upon publication of the Harmonielehre in 1911 Arnold Schoenberg wrote to his publisher Emil Hertzka at Universal Edition:

I would perhaps be ready to draw up a contract for my entire activities as a writer on music. I plan in the near future the following writings (in addition to the counterpoint [book]^[2] ): an instrumentation text. There is nothing like this now, for all available books deal with the instruments themselves. I wish to teach the art of composing for orchestra!! This is a major distinction and something absolutely new!!

Then a Preliminary Study of Form: An Investigation into the Formal Causes of the Effects of Modern Compositions. This writing will probably be limited to the study of Mahler's works. Then, later, also as a preliminary to the study of form, Formal Analysis and Laws Resulting from It. Finally, Theory of Form.

All of these books are texts or teaching aids. They form in their entirety an Aesthetic of Music, under which title I wish to write a . . . comprehensive work. For all of these works I already have ideas and also notes. I can finish all of them in the course of five years!^[3]

Not until six years later, however, in April 1917, did Schoenberg begin working simultaneously on the instrumentation and form books and on a counterpoint book distinct from Das Komponieren mit selbständigen Stimmen, to which he had referred in his letter to Hertzka.^[4] At the same time, he also began work on a newly conceived book on musical coherence (rather than one on aesthetics).

By 1922 Schoenberg was planning both a Lehre vom musikalischen Zusammenhang (Theory of musical coherence) and a Kompositionslehre (Theory of composition).^[5] However, two years later he wrote, "More recently I have made some discoveries which compelled me to revise the small work entitled Lehre vom musikalischen Zusammenhang into the more ambitious Die Gesetze der musikalischen Komposition [The laws of musical composition]."^[6] The book on coherence and the book on compositional theory thus had become identified as a single project on composition.

The "discoveries" to which Schoenberg referred almost certainly concerned the twelve-tone method, which he began to use almost exclusively in 1923. A manuscript entitled "Der musikalische Gedanke" (The musical idea) also dates from 1923.^[7] That same year he proposed a book to be entitled Komposition mit zwölf Tönen (Composition with twelve tones), but in 1924 he decided that an article with this title was sufficient.^[8] This chronology suggests that his work on the twelve-tone method confirmed Schoenberg's belief that the nature of coherence in any piece of music (tonal, atonal, twelve-tone, and so forth) is the expression of a musical idea.

In one of the ensuing Gedanke manuscripts, "Der musikalische Gedanke, seine Darstellung und Durchführung" (The musical idea, its presentation and development), written between 1925 and 1929, Schoenberg again brought up the idea of a unified theory of composition:

At present the theories of harmony, counterpoint, and form mainly serve pedagogical purposes. With the possible exception of the theory of harmony, the individual disciplines completely lack even a truly theoretical basis emanating from other external criteria. On the whole, the consequence is that three different disciplines, that together should constitute the theory of composition, in reality remain separate because they lack a common point of view.^[9]

By 1929 Schoenberg saw his concept of the musical idea as grounds for such a unified theory of composition: "Composition . . . is above all the art of inventing a musical idea and the fitting way to present it."^[10] The concept

of the musical idea thus superseded the earlier general theory of coherence as the core of Schoenberg's theory of composition.

Schoenberg's manuscripts on the "musical idea" were an ongoing attempt to formulate his unified theory of composition, a goal he never achieved to his satisfaction. There are twelve such incomplete manuscripts, written over a period of thirteen years, the first a brief paragraph from 1923, the last a 150-page text written between 1934 and 1936.^[11]

1. "zu `Darstellung des Gedankens'" (on "presentation of the idea"), dated 19 August 1923

2. "Der musikalische Gedanke, seine Darstellung und Durchführung" (The musical idea, its presentation and elaboration), dated 7 July 1925

3. "zu: Darstellung d. Gedankens" (on: presentation of the idea), dated 12 November 1925

4. "Der musikalische Gedanke und seine Darstellung" (The musical idea and its presentation), undated, with added notes dated 7 April 1929 and 1940

5. Untitled, undated^[12]

6. "Zu: Darstellung des musikalischen Gedankens" (On: presentation of the musical idea), dated 16 August 1931

7. "Entwurf zum Vorwort/(Komp.lehre)" (Sketch for the preface/[theory of composition]), dated 17 August 1931

8. "Zu: Darstellung des Gedankens" (On: presentation of the idea), dated 3 August 1932

9. "The Musical Idea," dated 4 June 1934

10. "Der musikalische Gedanke und die Logik, Technik, und Kunst seiner Darstellung" (The musical idea and the logic, technique, and art of its presentation), dated 5 June to 24 August 1934, and late September to 15 October 1936

11. "Der musikalische Gedanke; seine Darstellung und Durchfuehrung" (The musical idea: its presentation and elaboration), undated

12. Untitled, undated^[13]

A phrase in the title of many of these manuscripts, "the musical idea and its presentation," expresses both the technical and philosophical sides of Schoenberg's theory of composition. In speaking of the musical idea and its presentation, the composer used a specific vocabulary. For "idea" he generally used Gedanke, a concrete thought, in contrast to Begriff, a concept. In its narrowest sense the idea is a musical relation, but in its broadest sense it is the totality of a piece, "the idea which its creator wanted to present."^[14] Schoenberg used Darstellung (presentation) in a particular way — as he said, "to signify the presentation of an object to a spectator in such a way that

he perceives its composite parts as if in functional motion."^[15] The notion of a part "in functional motion" characterizes a nineteenth-century philosophy of the artwork as a living organism.

In the ensuing sections of this essay we will trace in Schoenberg's thought the theoretical and philosophical aspects of the "musical idea and its presentation."

II

Schoenberg opened Gedanke manuscript no. 6 (1931) with the statement "Composing is thinking in tones and rhythms. Every piece of music is the presentation of a musical idea. " Schoenberg maintains that musical thinking is subject to the laws and conditions of all our other thinking. All thinking consists essentially in bringing things (concepts, and so forth) into relation. That being so, thinking searches out coherences; every idea is based on coherences. An idea is the production of a relation between things that would otherwise have no relation. Therefore an idea is always new.^[16] In the opening of Gedanke no. 12 (undated) he distinguishes a "musical idea":

A musical idea is sheerly musical. It is a relation between tones.

If one may designate as ideas the production of relations between things, concepts, and the like (thus also between ideas), then in the case of a musical idea such a relation can be established only between tones, and it can be only a musical relation.^[17]

In the theoretical literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the musical idea (Gedanke or Idee) was commonly taken to be the theme or melody. Beginning with this traditional meaning, Schoenberg moved toward an understanding of the idea as standing for the wholeness of a work. He expressed this in the familiar passage in "New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea":

In its most common meaning, the term idea is used as a synonym for theme, melody, phrase or motive. I myself consider the totality of a piece as the idea: the idea which its creator wanted to present. But because of the lack of better terms I am forced to define the term idea in the following manner.^[18]

Describing the manner in which a state of unrest or imbalance grows throughout most of a piece, he then goes on to state that "[t]he method by which balance is restored seems to me the real idea of the composition."^[19] With this concept of the idea as the totality of a work he created a powerful conceptual tool, the development of which is demonstrated in the series of Gedanke manuscripts.

Already in the early Gedanke manuscripts Schoenberg confronted the problem of the integrity of the theme, and by 1925 he had begun to turn

his attention from the theme as a whole to its smallest parts. Discussing the presentation of the idea independently of its substance, he distinguishes in the idea its components, Gestalt and Grundgestalt. On the one hand, the more primitive a musical idea and the piece based on it, the fewer and more closely related the Gestalten that may be enlisted; on the other hand, the more artful the idea, the richer the number of Gestalten and the more remote in form from the Grundgestalt.^[20] He distinguishes even smaller components of an idea, its "characteristics" — that is, specific pitch and rhythmic relationships. Ultimately the characteristics of a motive — what he called its "features," its intervals and rhythms — could themselves be treated as motives.^[21] By reducing the theme to these smallest components, Schoenberg destroyed its role as musical idea and transformed the material, freeing intervals and rhythms to be used for their own sake.

In an unpublished manuscript dated 5 October 1923 and entitled "Zur Terminologie der Formenlehre,"^[22] Schoenberg raised the crucial matter of whole and part: Is the idea a part, the theme, or somehow the whole? He comments on the ambiguity of the term musical idea, observing that although it is preferable to theme, motive, or phrase, one must still distinguish the main or secondary ideas of an entire piece from individual smaller or smallest parts. This ambiguity is likewise taken up in Gedanke no. 12 (undated):

The idea can be the subject of a longer or shorter work, it can exist for itself alone, but it can also be part of a larger whole. This larger whole will then itself usually break down into more or less numerous sections, steps, parts, and the like, which in part can again be ideas. Such ideas will in some way be connected with each other or juxtaposed, or will otherwise have a relation to each other which will probably be referable to the whole.^[23]

Schoenberg resolved the relation of the idea to the whole by means of his remarkable vision of the dynamic of the musical work. He saw the potentiality for musical motion in the single tone, as he stated in the Harmonielehre.

The primitive ear hears the tone as irreducible, but physics recognizes it to be complex. In the meantime, however, musicians discovered that it is capable of continuation, i.e., that movement is latent within it. That problems are concealed in it, problems that clash with one another, that the tone lives and seeks to propagate itself.^[24]

In even the smallest component there is the potential for unrest and imbalance, as Schoenberg discussed in Gedanke no. 10 (1934-1936): "Through the connection of tones of different pitch, duration, and stress . . . an unrest comes into being: a state of rest is placed in question through a contrast. From this unrest a motion proceeds."^[25] He conceived of the whole as a bal-

ance of forces between the unrest inherent in the material, the imbalance produced by such unrest, and the restoration of balance. The idea, then, is the contrast that challenges the state of rest — and the means by which that state is restored.

The source of Schoenberg's investigations of the musical idea was of course his experience as a composer. Ultimately he turned to his own experience to explain the relation of the idea to the wholeness of the work. A work is a totality because it is the realization of a single idea, the composer's vision — and that idea is always new.

III

Schoenberg's philosophy of composition is based on this principle of totality. He elaborated on it in a passage in the 1941 version of his lecture "Composition with Twelve Tones," which epitomizes his view of artistic creation. "To understand the very nature of creation," Schoenberg began, "one must acknowledge that there was no light before the Lord said: `Let there be Light."'

We . . . should never forget what a creator is in reality.

A creator has a vision of something which has not existed before this vision. And a creator has the power to bring his vision to life, the power to realize it.

. . . . In Divine Creation there were no details to be carried out later; "There was Light" at once and in its ultimate perfection.

Alas, human creators, if they be granted a vision, must travel the long path between vision and accomplishment; a hard road where, driven out of Paradise, even geniuses must reap their harvest in the sweat of their brows.

Alas, it is one thing to envision in a creative instant of inspiration and it is another thing to materialize one's vision by painstakingly connecting details until they fuse into a kind of organism.

Alas, suppose it becomes an organism, a homunculus or a robot, and possesses some of the spontaneity of a vision; it remains yet another thing to organize this form so that it becomes a comprehensible message "to whom it may concern."^[26]

Having set up an antithesis between divine and mortal creation, between the composer's instantaneous vision and the arduous road from revelation to consummation, Schoenberg goes on to discuss several points in turn: inspiration, materialization, form, and idea.

A work, Schoenberg says, originates in an instant of inspiration. Der Einfall, or "inspiration," is a word he also uses for "idea," as in "der blitzartige Einfall, "^[27] the idea that strikes like lightning. In 1931 he described the first thought that must dictate the structure and texture of the work as an "unnameable sense of a sounding and moving space, of a form with charac-

teristic relationships."^[28] The first thought is thus the source of the totality of a musical work.

But an instantaneous creative vision is one thing, its materialization quite another. The artwork materializes the vision in a particular way, as a kind of organism. Schoenberg's model for artistic creation is natural generation.

[A]rt does not depend upon the single component part alone; therefore, music does not depend upon the theme. For the work of art, like every living thing, is conceived as a whole — just like a child, whose arm or leg is not conceived separately. The inspiration is not the theme, but the whole work.^[29]

The distinction between organic form, achieved by a process analogous to natural growth, and mechanical form, imposed from without, was prevalent in the nineteenth century and was stated succinctly by August Wilhelm Schlegel in his influential "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature" of 1809-1811:

Form is mechanical when it is imparted to any material through an external force, merely as an accidental addition, without reference to its character. . . . Organic form, on the contrary, is innate; it unfolds itself from within, and reaches its determination simultaneously with the fullest development of the seed. . . . In the fine arts, just as in the province of nature — the supreme artist — all genuine forms are organic.^[30]

Schoenberg espoused the same distinction in his most extensive Gedanke manuscript, no. 10 (1934-1936). In the final essay of that manuscript, entitled "Prinzipien des Aufbaus" (Principles of construction), he elaborated on the principle that in art the construct is not a mechanical one, like a clock, but an image resembling an organism in its vital unity.^[31]

An organism implies totality — indeed, a certain kind of totality. The properties of an organic whole cannot be derived from the sum of its parts; it cannot, to use Schoenberg's metaphor, be built up the way a bricklayer, for example, builds a wall.^[32] The whole is prior to the parts; its unity is therefore diametrically opposed to the aggregate of bricks gathered to build a wall. Organic unity entails a certain relation of parts and whole, a relation that is not arbitrary, but as close and intimate as that among the organs of a living body. An artwork conceived organically is a totality because its author, by virtue of his creative imagination, has fused its elements into a single entity.

In "Prinzipien des Aufbaus" Schoenberg pursues this traditional concept of organicism. He proposes that to symbolize the construction of a musical work, one can think of a living body that is whole and centrally controlled, that puts forth a certain number of limbs by means of which it is capable

of exercising its life function. In music, he says, only the whole itself is that central body.^[33]

Schoenberg declares that the composer must organize the form of that body in such a way that it can be grasped by the listener. Now, form is an ambiguous word, but Schoenberg is quite specific when in Fundamentals of Musical Composition he defines "musical form" as the organization of the whole, in which the parts function like those of an organism.^[34] Form is not a schema to be abstracted from or imposed upon the work, not something separable from the work — "a solid and inflexible body like a mold in which to cast material."^[35] As he defined it in his 1925 essay "Tonality and Form," Schoenberg's notion of form begins with the musical "body":

The form of a composition is achieved because (1) a body exists, and because (2) the members exercise different functions and are created for these functions.^[36]

Form organizes, articulates the musical organism.

Articulation is the central concept in Schoenberg's theory of form. As he wrote in Fundamentals of Musical Composition, articulation disposes parts to produce a "surveyable whole," entailing delimitation and subdivision, as well as the distinction between main and subordinate matters, by giving to each its correct place, length, importance, form, and so forth.^[37] He discussed this in even greater detail in the Gedanke manuscript no. 10, where he wrote that parts of a work are differentiated according to function:

Above all (perhaps always) a piece of music is an articulated organism, whose organs, limbs and their definite functions exercise their own external effect as well as that of their mutual relationship.^[38]

Schoenberg goes on to distinguish the parts of an inanimate object from limbs of a biological body and states that truly functioning limbs are found only in organisms and that, unlike parts — which are actually dead, alive from event to event only through an external power — limbs sustain their power as a result of their organic membership in a living organism.^[39] Our way of receiving music, he says, is mostly as the comprehension of parts. And only a very precise knowledge of the whole and all its parts and their functions enables a few among us to comprehend a whole.^[40]

Finally, with regard to the idea, Schoenberg insisted that the material, tonal body is worthless unless it transcends itself to become something immaterial, a comprehensible message, an idea. He believed that the inner force giving the tonal body its life is the musical idea this body represents. Form, he wrote elsewhere, is the embodiment of a content, the "outside" of the "inside."

All form-making, all conscious form-making, is connected with some kind of mathematics, or geometry, or with the golden section or suchlike. But only unconscious form-making, which sets up the equation "form = outward shape," really creates forms.^[41]

Because the outer form corresponds to the inner nature of the idea, it makes the idea comprehensible. In the Harmonielehre he wrote:

In music we assume that the components of . . . an idea are expressed as melodic or (harmonic) progressions. That is correct, insofar as it concerns the visible or audible in music that can be perceived by the senses; it is correct only by analogy for that which makes up the actual content of a musical idea. . . . We may still assume that, as in any well-built organism[,] . . . the form and articulation manifested by the notes corresponds to the inner nature of the idea and its movement, as ridges and hollows of our bodies are determined by the position of internal organs.^[42]

As Schoenberg wrote in the 1934 article "Problems of Harmony," "The effort of the composer is solely for the purpose of making the idea comprehensible to the listener. For the latter's sake the artist must divide the whole into its surveyable parts, and then add them together again into a complete whole."^[43] In his 1941 twelve-tone lecture Schoenberg continued that discussion:

Form in the arts, and especially in music, aims primarily at comprehensibility. The relaxation which a satisfied listener experiences when he can follow an idea, its development, and the reasons for such development is closely related, psychologically speaking, to a feeling of beauty.^[44]

The form of the work therefore articulates the idea as well as the organic body. To borrow notions from the traditional concept of beauty, form so clarifies the musical body, makes it so lucid, that the idea it embodies shines through. Toward the conclusion of his article Schoenberg declares: "Formerly, sound had been the radiation of an intrinsic quality of ideas, powerful enough to penetrate the hull of the form. Nothing could radiate which was not light itself; and here only ideas are light."^[45]

These, then, are the main points of Schoenberg's philosophy of composition, from a description of his concept of the musical idea as representing the total dynamic of the artwork to a discussion of its role in artistic creation. Schoenberg's creative process begins with the idea, the instantaneous inspiration of the whole, the first thought. It proceeds with its materialization or presentation in the musical organism, the work. And this in turn is so articulated, so formed, as to clarify the material, allowing the idea and its presentational body to be grasped as a unity. As Schoenberg

says in his short essay "Konstruierte Musik" (Constructed music), written around 1930:

[I]n my case the productive process has its own way; what I sense is not a melody, a motive, a bar, but merely a whole work. Its sections: the movements; their sections: the themes; their sections: the motives and bars — all that is detail, arrived at as the work is progressively realized. The fact that the details are realized with the strictest, most conscientious care, that everything is logical, purposeful and organically deft, without the visionary images thereby losing fullness, number, clarity, beauty, originality or pregnancy — that is merely a question of intellectual energy. . . .

The inspiration, the vision, the whole, breaks down during its presentation into details whose constructed realization reunites them into the whole.^[46]