One
Music and the Critique of Culture:
Arnold Schoenberg, Heinrich Schenker, and the Emergence of Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna

Leon Botstein

But I wept as I listened to the Fourth Quartet. Now I know for certain that you are the last Classical composer: your cradle was Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, where there is none of that Russian, French, or English folklore, and the barbarism of presenting a symbol instead of a direct experience. . . . Bach, Beethoven, and Schoenberg are the last composers capable of erecting a musical structure that can — must — be regarded as an organic world. . . . All music but theirs is either galvanized, artificially stimulated folkweave . . . or purely abstract geometry with queer sounds and odd effects touting for the listener's custom.
OSKAR KOKOSCHKA TO ARNOLD SCHOENBERG 19 AUGUST 1949

I

Arnold Schoenberg's contemporary, the painter Oskar Kokoschka, grasped the historical paradox represented by Schoenberg's career precisely in 1949. Like Schoenberg, Kokoschka at the start of his career in pre-World War I Vienna was regarded as an outsider and as the quintessential modernist enfant terrible.^[1] Although Schoenberg's work was heralded and reviled during the first quarter of this century as the embodiment of radical modernism, from the vantage point of the last quarter of this century he may turn out to have been, as Kokoschka observed, the last great exponent of a late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century tradition of music and music making. As Kokoschka shrewdly observed, in the name of Schoenberg's innovations a modernism entirely foreign to Schoenberg's own work had come into being during the 1940s.

Hegel's notion about the "cunning of reason" in history comes to mind when one considers that a crucial factor behind Schoenberg's notoriety as a standard-bearer of modernism was the debt his work demonstrated to a nostalgic, idealized conception of classicism. Before 1914 his music was regarded as offensive by audiences and critics because it challenged a conceit of musical connoisseurship in Vienna, a place that Schoenberg in 1909 sarcastically called "the city of song." Schoenberg's first Viennese opponents saw themselves as the standard-bearers of a unique local musical sensibility

derived from Viennese classicism. The demands made by Schoenberg's pre-World War I compositions on listeners revealed, however, that the Viennese rhetoric of defense on behalf of hallowed cultural values masked a deterioration of the very values conservatives claimed needed protection from an arrogant new generation of artists.

The circumstances of late-nineteenth-century Vienna and Schoenberg's relationship to them suggest that Schoenberg's modernism was shaped by the politics of culture. His music triggered audience insecurity and doubt. Evident beneath the expressions of distaste were fears about appearing inept, superficial, and self-deluded. Like the child in the fairy tale about the emperor's new clothes, Schoenberg pointed out to the powerful — affluent Viennese middle-class music lovers and amateurs — that they were naked, as it were, when they paraded around defending classical notions of beauty and refinement. Schoenberg's music explicitly asserted a traditional ideal of musical discourse that exceeded the capacities of the audience. The radically modern was the premodern past reborn.

The role Arnold Schoenberg played in defining the future course of twentieth-century music history has one clear historical precedent from the nineteenth century: the pervasive influence exercised by Richard Wagner. Schoenberg's importance, like Wagner's, did not derive solely from his compositions and the originality of his musical imagination. No doubt the first performances of the two quartets, opp. 7 and 10, and the Chamber Symphony, op. 9, between early 1907 and late 1908 in Vienna and the premiere of Pierrot lunaire in Berlin in 1912 were watersheds in the history of twentieth-century concert life.^[2] The sharp and divided responses by audiences, critics, and musicians were turning points in twentieth-century modern art and culture.

As in the case of Wagner, the extramusical resonance emanating from Schoenberg's work and its reception was striking. While this might be said as well of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, in the context of Vienna during the nearly twenty years between 1892, when Don Juan was first performed at the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Viennese premiere of Der Rosenkavalier in 1911, a qualitative difference can be discerned.^[3] Shouting and scuffling accompanied the 1908 premiere of Schoenberg's Second Quartet in the Bösendorfersaal. A near-riot erupted on March 31, 1913, at an orchestral concert in Vienna in which works by Mahler, Berg, Webern, Zemlinsky, and Schoenberg were played. By then Schoenberg's name and public reputation were as responsible for the disruptions as the sounds of music that emerged. Why did Schoenberg's music and name — years before the development of his mature style — become a cause célèbre in the reaction against early-twentieth-century modernism?

As Walter Frisch's excellent recent monograph on the early Schoenberg shows, the composer's early music is remarkable in its synthesis of simplicity

and clarity.^[4] However, the more admiring we become of Schoenberg's compositional mastery and profound understanding of traditional practices revealed in the years between 1893 and 1908 (as he moved from his first neo-Brahmsian works to a period marked by closer affinities to Wagner and then to his own "direction"), the more baffling the pattern of reception he encountered early in his career becomes. These works lost their appearance of radicalism long ago.

Schoenberg's efforts to deflect research into his early career by his cursory but authoritative accounts of his own development are evidence of the importance of the Vienna years.^[5] In retrospect, Schoenberg knew that the pre-World War I reaction to him set the pattern of response to his later music and to musical modernism for most of the rest of the century. The particular cast he gave to musical modernism in response to the cultural politics of Vienna at the turn of the century had far-reaching biographical, aesthetic, and rhetorical consequences.

Mahler's music was dismissed as crude, bloated, and pretentious. Strauss, accused of theatrical vulgarity, was facile and perhaps too gifted, eager to shock the public with lavish surface effects. Mahler and Strauss seemed partly decadent and ultimately banal.^[6] Their faults derived from their striking surface accessibility; there seemed little new that could not be connected back to Wagner. Likewise, the criticism of new works by Pfitzner, Zemlinsky, and Bartók in 1904 and 1905 seemed not to inspire the outrage expressed at Schoenberg.^[7]

How and why did Schoenberg succeed in communicating an "arrogant" (as the Viennese critic Robert Hirschfeld described him in his 1905 review of Pelleas ) critique of contemporary musical values and cultural life? His staunchest defenders in pre-World War I Vienna, including Gustav Mahler, Karl Kraus, and David Josef Bach, recognized that Schoenberg stood for something that transcended the aesthetic debate about music in the 1890s surrounding Mahler and Strauss.^[8] If one can rely on Alma Mahler (who was a devoted lifelong friend of Schoenberg's), Mahler's public defense of Schoenberg was based more on his conviction that it was imperative to uphold the principle of a young generation's right to chart new paths than on any sympathy toward the music itself. Schoenberg's work was a welcome ally in a struggle against philistine audiences and critics who, in the name of cultured taste, resisted and denigrated the new. His appearance reconfigured the radicalism of the the music of Mahler and Strauss, which appeared, by contrast, benign.^[9]

Schoenberg's revolution seemed to exceed the proper boundaries of any composer's search for musical originality. In 1909 Hans Liebstöckl, the critic of the Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, accused Schoenberg of requiring one to "deposit one's whole personality in the cloakroom." Schoenberg sought Karl Kraus's aid in 1908 in taking up cudgels against Ludwig Kar-

path, a Viennese critic for whom Kraus (for other reasons) had nothing but contempt. Kraus freely admitted that he had limited interest and expertise in matters musical (with the exception of a passion for Offenbach). He sensed that in Schoenberg's aesthetic ambitions lay an assault similar to his own on an underlying nexus of corrupt social and cultural habits and alliances in Vienna.^[10]

Schoenberg challenged Karpath to a public duel in the form of a contest about who was more competent in harmony and counterpoint. Karpath had written a scathing dismissal of the Second Quartet, to which Schoenberg sought to respond. Karpath alleged that "for the first time in [his] twenty years as a critic" he felt compelled to shout "Stop" at a concert. The critic became the public defender for the majority of the audience. The fact was, according to Karpath, that what Schoenberg had written was not a work of musical art. To prove it Karpath argued from authority — his knowledge of the standard "musical disciplines" of harmony, formal analysis, and the like.

Wagner helped invent the rhetoric of how the truly revolutionary artist would find himself at odds with an ignorant and corrupt press and its adherents — the audience of regular haute bourgeois urban concertgoers and newspaper readers. These critical fulminations, tinged with an anti-Semitism that cast the assimilated Jew as the archetype of the philistine journalist and culture monger, were disingenuous, however. As Schoenberg observed, Wagner knew just how, through his music, to win over the audience of his own time.^[11] Wagner succeeded in his explicit ambition to become the most lionized and popular composer of his age, particularly within social strata he relished castigating. He exploited the limited powers of musical discernment characteristic of late-nineteenth-century audiences. At first hearing, rapid accessibility to the expressiveness, defined in extramusical terms, in Wagner's works generated a welcome audience recognition of novelty, danger, decadence, and modernity.

Although Wagner's most ardent admirers came from generations younger than his own, and Wagnerism in France and in German-speaking Europe became a battle cry against reigning conservative tastes, by the mid-1870s the struggle had been largely won. Wagner returned to Vienna to conduct in triumph in 1875, one year after Schoenberg's birth. His supporters then included key members of an older, established Viennese social, cultural, and political elite — Johann Herbeck and Josef Standhartner, for example — as well as such enthusiastic younger adherents as Hugo Wolf, Guido Adler, and Gustav Mahler. In the Vienna of Schoenberg's youth, Wagner had become in rhetoric and music an inspiration to the young as well as an object of enthusiasm among the affluent and well-established citizenry that patronized music. After 1875 his disciple Hans Richter dominated Vienna's concert life. Despite a lingering anti-Wagnerian conservatism in the faculty and curriculum of the Vienna Conservatory, all the students of the late

1870s and the 1880s knew of Anton Bruckner's devotion to the Bayreuth master.

In contrast to Wagner, Schoenberg's music and the rhetorical strategy employed in its defense (designed largely by Schoenberg himself) never achieved wide acceptance. Most apparent in this failure to replicate the Wagnerian pattern was the inability to win the audience over by offering the middle-class concertgoer and amateur musician that alluring Wagnerian combination of becoming emotionally mesmerized by a work of art and at the same time feeling flattered that one was flirting safely with radicalism and novelty. At first only Verklärte Nacht became part of the repertoire (a fact that annoyed the sixty-year-old Schoenberg during his first years in America). Franz Schreker's success with the 1913 premiere of Gurrelieder in Vienna came too late to change the dynamics between Schoenberg and the public. Wagner's conquest of the musical world can be compared with Franz Joseph Haydn's triumph with the public in London in the 1790s.^[12] Despite Wagner's self-serving rhetoric about being a revolutionary, he, like Haydn, was in the business of winning the public over.^[13]

Although Schoenberg rather liked being seen as challenging norms and practices, he was ambivalent about how defensive and stubborn the audience had become. He blamed performers rather than listeners and toward the end of his life hoped to achieve widespread recognition. But from the beginning, in the face of controversy, his assertion of artistic integrity assumed a nearly puritanical facade of ethical superiority. Schoenberg's envy of Stravinsky, Ravel, Respighi, and Bartók took the form of high-minded moralizing about aesthetic concessions and superficialities.^[14]

The critics who ridiculed and dismissed the young Schoenberg, unlike their historical counterparts who attacked Wagner when he first came on the scene, were never betrayed by their readers' changing tastes. In terms of Karl Mannheim's sociology of culture, musical modernism in the tradition of Schoenberg failed to enter and become part of the "objective culture." In the twentieth century the hostile critic has remained the spokesperson of the audience. Listeners continue to hear, particularly in the mature Schoenberg, an attack directed at themselves that offers little possibility of an honorable capitulation. As Schoenberg's response to Karpath revealed, in the music itself lay the allegation that "those savage potentates who wear only a cravat and a top hat" were unequal to the task of understanding the very tradition of music from Bach, Wagner, and Brahms that they so cherished. In 1925 Schoenberg wrote, "[L]isteners must have ears, and ears to detect the difference between music and shibboleths."^[15]

Among Schoenberg's early Viennese advocates, particularly those with socialist leanings, the implicitly contemptuous attitude toward the audience was troublesome. David Josef Bach warned the small cadre of Schoenberg enthusiasts that their hostility betrayed an unattractive sense of superiority

at odds with the hope that radical change through art might advance the larger struggle for a more just and egalitarian world.^[16] Bach was perhaps the first to notice — as Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill later did — an inherent contradiction between the claims of twentieth-century musical modernism and the possible role of musical art in societal reform directed at bettering the lot of the working classes through political and economic emancipation.

Schoenberg the polemicist learned from Wagner. Like Wagner, he wrote about music extensively in a manner that underscored new music's aura of cultural critique.^[17] Like Wagner, he cultivated disciples and adherents. Despite the admirably eclectic programming of contemporary music sponsored by the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen in Vienna and Prague after World War I, Schoenberg the teacher and mentor helped create a geography of the good and the bad in which the boundaries remained unmistakable. The Verein was not Bayreuth, but both initiatives share the conviction that an alternative to the everyday commerce of culture was essential for the proper presentation of one's own work.

From the generation of Egon Wellesz, Willi Reich, and Theodor W. Adorno to that of René Leibowitz, Pierre Boulez, Glenn Gould, and Milton Babbitt a nearly canonic literature of justification has come into being. Schoenberg's followers, like Wagner's, did little to hide their contempt for those who did not share their enthusiasms. Just as Wagner helped alter the way future generations would understand the place in music history occupied by past masters such as Beethoven and Mendelssohn, Schoenberg defined the terms by which the past should be interpreted. Although Schoenberg the writer shaped the way the narrative of the history of music in the twentieth century has come to be understood, the plausibility of his explanatory paradigm of progressive and regressive modernism in music has been placed into doubt among scholars and musicians, in part by the failure of modernist music inspired by him to succeed with audiences.

The pre-World War I controversy surrounding Schoenberg was rooted in the fear that he would become the future. By the end of the twentieth century he seems more like Kokoschka's conception of him as the last but unacknowledged exponent of a dying tradition. Postmodernism has helped to devastate the already thin popularity Schoenberg's music had achieved by midcentury. Only the more accessible early works still come around. And the limited success of later works (for example, the String Trio) derives from their being heard as creations of late-Romantic musical rhetoric.

Dedicated advocacy by the American and Western European academic world has sustained Schoenberg's succès d'estime.^[18] Wagner fanatics still exist in significant numbers. Wagner societies sell Valkyrie helmets, T-shirts, and mementos at meetings attended by ordinary concertgoers and record collectors. Wagner's capacity to enthrall new audiences who have no idea of the historical Wagner continues unabated. The cultural and political re-

form project whose mantle of leadership Schoenberg assumed in the fin de siècle remains unrealized. At the end of his life, Schoenberg dreamed that perhaps in the new state of Israel the chances might be better than in Europe or America for a modernism based on the restoration of a genuine musical culture derived from a preindustrial cultural heritage.^[19]

II

Three factors specific to Vienna in the years 1874-1901 (after which Schoenberg moved briefly to Berlin) decisively influenced Schoenberg's evolution. First, by comparison to contemporary Viennese musicians, Schoenberg's status was that of an outsider. He was an autodidact, and he was exceptional in that he was not extremely proficient at any instrument. He was also an assimilated Jew from the lower middle classes, without a university education. Second, there was a rift within the Viennese community of avowedly antiestablishment writers, painters, architects, and composers. By 1901 two loosely defined camps were visible, each with a different conception of the modern. Despite individual friendships between both camps, Schoenberg entered the rift clearly on one side. Third, there was a widespread public debate in fin de siècle Vienna regarding the quality of musical life, culture, and education in a city that had come to regard its status as the world capital of music as axiomatic and indisputable.^[20] The popular musical and theatrical culture in fin de siècle Vienna was under attack as cheap and debased. Schoenberg's reaction against the influences of late Romanticism was deepened by his exposure to Vienna's popular commercial musical culture. The Viennese ideology of modernism with which he associated himself possessed a nostalgia for the role of culture and art in the pre-1848 world, including its popular art forms.

Schoenberg's autodidactic process of learning music can be compared usefully to the early career of Robert Schumann. Schoenberg's oft-repeated tribute to the influence of Richard Dehmel on his music is reminiscent of Schumann's remark that he learned more about counterpoint from Jean Paul than from anyone else.^[21] The significance of this mediation of the musical through the literary in Schoenberg's case is twofold. First, Schoenberg developed his compositional craft primarily through the writing of songs. In contrast to the later ideology expressed in the preface to Pierrot and the 1912 essay for Der Blaue Reiter, at the start of his compositional career words as carriers of meaning were keys to the use of time through music and therefore musical form. Ordinary language as the medium for the narration of emotional states remained significant for Schoenberg as late as 1904-1905. Although according to Frisch "the real importance" of the String Quartet, op. 7, lies in Schoenberg's innovative adaptation of the "ab-

solute instrumental tradition" of composition, the "secret" extramusical program may be as important in understanding the structure of the work.

Frisch observes that in the Second Quartet, with its inclusion of voice and text, "thematic transformation" — that is, a technique of "absolute" instrumental composition — is now "put into the service of a programmatic statement."^[22] Even according to this view, the early Schoenberg emanates from an engagement with the relationship between language and music in which the impetus, in part because of Schoenberg's training, came first from language. The extent to which music, biographically speaking, was a secondary medium whose command came later to Schoenberg (in terms of comparative biography) than to other composers may explain his later obsession with the autonomy of musical elements. Yet Schoenberg's lifelong adherence to structural and aesthetic criteria — as in his use of the dicotomy implied by the terms style and idea — derived from the intense Viennese modernist engagement with the nature of language and its relationship to thought. In Schoenberg's case, as in that of the early Schumann, the role of thinking about language generated musical innovation.^[23] The initial subordination of the musical to the linguistic stands in contrast to the ideology characteristic of Brahms's early development or the training of a conservatory student like Zemlinsky.

Dehmel exercised an influence on Schoenberg's German-speaking generation not unlike that of Oscar Wilde in the English-speaking world. A key difference was that the medium of Dehmel's influence in the 1890s was lyric poetry. He believed that his philosophical views — on sexuality, the power of nature, and the primacy of individuality and freedom as means to social justice — and his mystical belief in a metaphysical dialectic that reconciled apparent contradictions (for example, male-female, subjectivity-objectivity) were reflected formally in the poetic work. As Dehmel wrote to Gustav Kühl in 1897, art functions indirectly as a moral instrument through its form. Aesthetic form realizes the essential underlying unity of experience that human beings are otherwise blocked from encountering.

According to Dehmel, the overarching structure of his poem Verklärte Nacht interconnects each unit so that "under the influence of a mood of nature, a momentary spiritual expression of both male and female" can be felt as one reads and contemplates the impression of the whole. The constituent elements and the larger shape are integrated not by the argument but by the structural transformation of ordinary word meaning and grammar that poetry generates. The "psychology of poetic creativity" leads to the use of the aesthetic, in formal terms, to achieve a sense of higher human truth and unity than ordinary speech allows. A reconciliation between individuality and the universal is thus realized.

Dehmel's significance to Schoenberg bridged the first two phases of the

composer's early development — the neo-Brahmsian period and the more Wagnerian phase. If Dehmel's ambitions regarding the use of art to change the self-image of the individual vis-à-vis life were reminiscent of those of the Nietzsche of Zarathustra, the intensity of Dehmel's engagement with love, sexuality, and gender was Wagnerian. But his notions of an organic unity of form derived from the unique powers of the poetic were similar to Brahms's view on the autonomy and structural integrity of aesthetic forms in music.^[24]

Dehmel believed that, much like the great composers of the past, he had to challenge the reigning standards of what constituted acceptable poetic language and subject matter. Modernity and innovation were essential. His influence on the young Schoenberg, therefore, can be construed as setting an example for the necessity of communicating meaning, as in op. 7, "secretly" through novel musical procedures, just as he had sought to do in his own poetry. The impulse was Wagnerian, but the strategy Brahmsian. Dehmel's achievement justified the link between the obligation to extend the boundaries of what was regarded as acceptably musical (for example, norms of formal continuity and harmonic practice) and the task of transcending through art the limitations of received ethical norms and a rigid epistemology.^[25] In Schoenberg's view Dehmel seemed ideally suited to writing Die Jakobsleiter. He wrote, "[T]he mode of speech, the mode of thought, the mode of expression should be that of modern man; the problems treated should be those that harass us."^[26]

At the same time Schoenberg's particular path to composition made him defensive and skeptical. Deprived of the institutional validation expected of an aspiring Viennese professional musician, Schoenberg, unlike Dehmel, sought to reconcile the modern with counterintuitive virtuosity in terms of rigor and technique. The assertion that higher standards in the realm of harmony, counterpoint, and compositional practice in the conventional sense were audible in the modern was also a strategy by which to deflect criticism. Schoenberg was vulnerable where Mahler and Zemlinsky were not. Both were prize-winning graduates of the Vienna Conservatory and therefore unlikely candidates for the charge of fakery or ineptitude.

Schoenberg's status as a Jew in Vienna vis-à-vis the career of musician and composer was unexceptional and did not distinguish him from other Jews such as Karl Kraus, Otto Weininger, and Mahler in terms of the complex mix of marginality, envy, and discrimination that affected Jews in fin de siècle Vienna.^[27] Nevertheless, being Jewish was a factor for those with artistic ambitions. As Dehmel's own fleeting anti-Semitism demonstrated, Wagner had succeeded in popularizing the idea that Jews were incapable of true creativity.^[28] Weininger's views on the creative impotence of the Jew were well known to Schoenberg, as was Kraus's special form of contempt for the Jewish elites of Vienna.

In the Viennese worlds of music and painting with which Schoenberg was most closely allied, the two most admirable individuals of Jewish origin were Mahler and Zemlinsky. Nearly half of the audience and the majority of the critics in Vienna were Jews.^[29] And yet at the fin de siècle Schoenberg, the Jewish modernist, came under attack not primarily from ultraconservative Gentile camps but from within the ranks of educated, acculturated Viennese Jews for whom participation in the city's musical culture was a crucial dimension of their self-image as assimilated, legitimate Viennese. Schoenberg's pre-World War I affinity to Karl Kraus's vicious denunciation of artists of Jewish origin and the Jewish public for music and theater in Vienna shows the disfigurement created by Viennese anti-Semitism; it was deflected onto the Jews themselves. By 1933 Schoenberg had freed himself of this intraethnic dynamic.^[30] Kraus never did.

By 1901 the remarkable, complex, and intertwined amalgam of artists and writers that dominated cultural life in Vienna had developed into two distinct focal points. One was oriented around Gustav Klimt and Arthur Schnitzler. The second was grouped around Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos. Clearly many key figures in Vienna (such as Otto Wagner, Sigmund Freud, Viktor Adler, Theodor Herzl, and members of the university faculties in philosophy and economics) were independent of these two groups or maintained peripheral and sometimes overlapping ties. But the distinctions between the two main groupings defined the debate about modernism and the role of art.

Klimt and Schnitzler, despite controversies surrounding their work, were visible successes and the objects of widespread adulation and patronage. The 1897 Secession building, designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich, was dedicated by Emperor Franz Joseph II. Its honorary head was the grand old man of Austrian scene painting, Rudolf von Alt. Schnitzler was triumphant in the arena of Vienna's main stage, the Burgtheater. Klimt and Schnitzler's nearest counterpart in music was Gustav Mahler, whose accession in 1897 to the leadership of the Imperial Opera immediately made him a lionized personality. Despite all the intrigues and criticisms leveled at him during his ten-year reign at the opera, his achievements and talents never lacked for recognition in the city. For Klimt, Schnitzler, and Mahler controversy and spectacular success went hand in hand.

This achievement helped arouse the suspicions of initially sympathetic contemporaries. Kraus and Loos posed the question: For all the claims made on behalf of the heralded new painters, composers, and writers that they represented a new modern sensibility and a new age — particularly in the critical praise lavished by Ludwig Hevesi and Hermann Bahr — was

there anything fundamentally new or worthwhile in the Secession and the Young Vienna writers movement? Were these new artists and writers (Hofmannsthal, for example) more than mere aesthetes who reveled in the shock value of candor on matters psychological and sexual? Did they just exploit the sensual and decorative surface of art without getting at the ethical and epistemological essence of an older generation's corrupt taste?

If the enemies of the modern were historicism and late-Romantic sentimental realism, the new in Klimt's and Mahler's hands seemed at best a superficial, if not decadent, response. Kraus, and later Schoenberg, developed a nearly paranoid suspicion of a conspiracy linking the commerce of art (including patronage and the politics of arts institutions), the philistine audience, the press, and the self-styled modern artist. Kraus was perpetually alert to such alliances in Vienna, especially within its self-appointed avantgarde.

The group around Kraus — the second axis in Viennese fin de siècle culture — included Peter Altenberg and eventually the expressionist painters. At stake for this group was a belief in art as a profound instrument of ethical and moral transformation. Kraus admired Frank Wedekind rather than Schnitzler, Else Lasker-Schüler rather than Hofmannsthal. Wedekind challenged the sensibilities of conventional morality in the service of ethical truth, not mere psychological perception, entertainment, or titillation. This second group sought to revive pre-1848 Viennese satirical traditions, particularly the work of Johann Nestroy and Friedrich Kürnberger. The advocates of the Klimt-Schnitzler axis wrote criticism for the daily newspapers of Vienna. The voice of the second group was Karl Kraus's magazine, Die Fackel, and, briefly, Loos's publication Das Andere. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Elias Canetti would be influenced by Kraus and Loos, as were Schoenberg and Berg.

Schoenberg's attraction to this group stemmed not only from a sense of his own exclusion from the mainstream of Viennese cultural institutions and his marginal position vis-à-vis the city's dominant social circles. Kraus's acerbic moralism and sarcasm fit his personality. Even more to the point was his intense and puritanical attitude toward the use of language. It was from Kraus that Schoenberg developed the fundamental distinction between idea and style, or, in Loos's vocabulary, between structure and ornament.

Modernism, as argued by the circle around Kraus, needed to be a critique of journalism, modern popular culture, and fashion. Most fin de siècle modernism appeared to pander to a debased sense of art and reveled in a facile bohemianism designed to enhance the journalistic fame associated with the making of new art. In contrast, Kraus and his followers argued that the exemplary vehicle for art — language — was also the instrument of truth telling. Inherent in language — and therefore in music and the ele-

ments of visual art — were sacred normative verities that went beyond the use of language evident in ordinary realist and naturalist strategies.^[31] Schoenberg's conception of the essential character of the materials of music — as autonomous elements with immanent structural possibilities but also with an inherent ethical resistance to abuse and misuse — and his own views on the history of music owe much to the example of Kraus. Adherence to limited notions of syntax, grammar, and narration in music suppressed the intrinsic possibilities of musical art.

Conventional boundaries between the new and the old were therefore redrawn. In Kraus's canon, Offenbach and Wagner were praised but Heine disparaged. Nestroy and Wilde were idealized but not Hofmannsthal and Stefan George. The emergence of these two groups at the fin de siècle made for strange alliances. Some conservative critics such as Robert Hirschfeld were praised by Kraus and his group, even at the expense of Mahler.

Kraus's view of the task of modern art led him and his group to reassert classicism as a possible model. The achievements of the pre-1848 world in theater, literature, architecture, design, and music seemed immune from the corruptions of commerce and mass society. They exceeded the boundaries of bourgeois realism and representation. Kraus went beyond the motto of the Secession ("To each age its art, to art its freedom"). He sought to merge a normative aesthetic philosophy with a teleology. No doubt the present day demanded something more than a rehash of the past. For Loos and Schoenberg, technological progress and economic and social change rendered aesthetic nostalgia or the use of art to camouflage historical change repugnant. However, in the assertion of the modern, ethical and aesthetic truth took precedence over convention and contemporaneity.

Not only did the classical masters appear exemplary, but so too did Brahms. Despite Schoenberg's appropriation of Wagnerian musical innovations and his acceptance of a Wagnerian historical narrative in which Wagnerian practice played a decisive role toward the emancipation of the dissonance and the normalization of remote harmonic relationships, it was the classical notion of motivic variations and transformations in musical form that held the most promise. Schoenberg's sharp reaction against the neoclassicism of the 1920s stemmed not so much from the impulse to look at the eighteenth century for models as from the neoclassicists' superficial conception of what could be learned from the eighteenth century. In his view, Stravinsky and his emulators merely exploited the evident decorative symmetries of the past.^[32]

What made the application of Karl Kraus's strategy within the arena of

music particularly apt was the fact that a public debate regarding the deteriorating state of musical culture in Vienna was already under way by the early 1890s. The rhetoric of cultural decline had become quite familiar. The extension of general literacy and the concomitant spread of music education, propelled in part by the wide distribution of pianos and piano instruction in Vienna after 1848, carried with them the doubt that this democratization of culture was compatible with the sustaining of late-eighteenth-century standards.

Part of the special allure of concert music for the late-nineteenth-century Viennese population was its historical association with eighteenth-century aristocratic habits. By the late nineteenth century the population of Vienna was composed mostly of individuals not born in the city. Given Vienna's sense of itself as a city of music, the acquisition of musical culture was particularly useful to newcomers in the psychological process of feeling at home and part of the city. The intense social pressure for music education fueled the suspicion that true connoisseurship was not compatible with efforts to make music education more accessible. By the mid-1880s the simplification of piano instruction, the proliferation of explanatory literature about music, and a popular music journalism available to the growing ranks of eager consumers of culture appeared to many observers as dangerous developments.^[33]

Heinrich Schenker, who was six years older than Schoenberg but who arrived in Vienna from Galicia only in the mid 1880s, began to write criticism in Vienna in the early 1890s.^[34] There was an uncanny correspondence between his diagnosis of the Viennese musical scene and the views of the young Schoenberg. Schenker's basic argument was that music presented a particular challenge to the audience consistent with its character. Unlike the other arts, music — as represented by the folk song, the simplest and most "natural" of creations and the "easiest" (in terms of the instrumental technique required to play it) — was ultimately the most difficult to grasp. The "artistry" of a great tune, for example, represented an almost metaphysical mystery. It was not comparable to the simple sentence or the clear image. Although poetry shared with music a nonconventional logic, as in other visual and linguistic arts there was a basic level of comprehension that almost everyone could attain. The dimension that artistic creation added to language was essentially transformative and supplemental — from the simple to the complex.

This was not the case in music. In fact, the influence of Wagner had seriously undermined the recognition of the essence of music. The challenge of modernism was to reverse the efforts of the late Romantics in music, who subordinated musical sound to the expectations it raised derivative of the other arts. The unique essence of music, embedded in the simple, was obliterated.^[35]

As in mathematics, the magic of music stemmed from the unique flexibility of its elements. The independent meaning of variables was fundamentally nonreferential. Musical significance derived from combinations of these elements with one another. Furthermore, as elements worked together in individual circumstances, they became adapted, in an unstable, highly individualized manner, to being "filled up with emotions." Upon each hearing, with each individual, there was the potential for the attachment of changing emotional and extramusical meaning.^[36] Such extramusical meanings were crucial to music, but they were not fixed or illustrative. If they emanated from formal musical strategies, they could be protean and expansive beyond the range of words and images.

For this reason the conventions of late-nineteenth-century program music were fundamentally in error. Like Schoenberg, Schenker came to regard the creation of musical form through the imitation of poetic meaning, visual imagery, and linguistic narrative as an inappropriate procedure for modern music. As a model for the sequence, character, and duration of events, the extramusical defined in terms of language and the pictorial was fundamentally at odds with the nature of music. Schenker argued that in contrast to Wagner, the great classical masters — from Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to Brahms — created musically coherent works that possessed an infinitely differentiated and individual opportunity for the ascription of emotional meaning. Therefore a certain kind of active and not passive listening was required so that the power of music could be unlocked in a personally meaningful manner by the lay individual.

Schenker recognized that historically there had been a constant struggle between the word and musical sound. Because all laypersons had access to meaning through images and words in painting, poetry, and prose, it was only natural that with the expansion of the audience in the late nineteenth century, words and images became the accepted route to musical appreciation. Not only did composers begin to subordinate sound to word, but the audience sought to understand all music as if it were little more than translations into sound. Even performers shaped renditions of historical repertoire as if the music had been organized around an extramusical narrative — a secret linguistic and visual program.

This procedure actually blocked the audience's ability to listen actively, since if true musical appreciation were cultivated each individual would not be reduced to passively recognizing a program associated with a piece of music but would be enabled to listen so that the temporal experience of music could be profoundly personalized to fit the moment and the hearer's imagination. Any translation of sound into word would bear the stamp of the individual. What, then, was required for the possession of skills adequate to an "active appreciation"? A lay appreciation of music analogous

to the understanding of the principles of mathematics was viewed as a possible and desirable starting point.^[37]

Schenker realized that the contemporary public applied skills of ordinary literacy and culture, mediated through words and pictures, onto music. Since the contemporary audience consisted of passive spectators, its judgment was flawed. Schenker wrote scathingly of music teachers and the time wasted teaching myriads of middle-class people instrumental techniques — the mechanical ability to reproduce music themselves — without ever increasing their understanding of the logic of music. What was required in contemporary musical culture was the training of lay, "self-activated listeners" who no longer would be dependent on getting only the "spirit" — extramusically understood — of the musical experience.^[38]

The crucial point of comparison between Schenker and the young Schoenberg was their shared conviction that music, although independent of words, operated by laws that were analogous to those of linguistic grammar. Structural elements such as the refrain, for example, had both linguistic and musical functions that were not identical, although overlapping. The divergence between the two men rested on their assumptions about the possible future range of evolution for musical grammar, and not on the principle that music required the use of formal structures adequate to its autonomous character. For Schoenberg, musical grammar had both a teleology and an evolutionary history. For Schenker its nature was fixed. But for both men the pinnacle of recognition of the unique character of music and the high point in its realization as art had been the classical era.^[39]

Regardless of their fundamental differences with respect to the possibilities presented to the composer in modern times, their views on the inadequacies of the Viennese listening public were nearly identical. Since fin de siècle Viennese concertgoers were dependent on routinized extramusical associations, as Schenker observed in 1894, an "unmusical criticism" reigned. An "immorality" dominated musical life. Commercial social utility and advancement had become the dominant factors motivating musical life, not a love or appreciation of musical art. Both men shared a particular contempt for performance practices that obscured musical structure, even though Schoenberg and Webern, unlike Schenker, retained an affection for a rhythmically flexible, Romantic performance approach to the classical repertoire.^[40]

In a trenchant 1894 essay entitled "Hearing in Music" Schenker sought to find in the modern world a way to encourage the transformation of the spontaneous, naive response to music into a "conscious, active" experience for the layperson in which the totality of a work, as well as its constituent material elements, could be enjoyed. A new kind of comparative science of music was required. The elements that needed transmittal were the princi-

ples of polyphony, harmony, and "organic" structure. Once a musical apperception was cultivated, ordinary language could help active appreciation, but music appreciation would no longer be tied to some language-based, cliché-ridden scheme of musical meaning.

Schenker identified the need for a new kind of musical upbringing (Erziehung ). Weaning listeners from descriptive and programmatic narratives could reveal to them "an entire metaphysical" realm hidden in music. The simple formulas of music teachers were at fault. The desire on the part of amateurs to use music to express individuality was thwarted by a mechanical definition of technique that fostered a mindless dexterity.

In order to match the soul of the listener with the secrets of the work of art, a cleansing of the historical surface of the classical tradition had to be achieved. Teaching manuals and printed editions of the classical repertoire that used an overlay of interpretive and expressive commentary masking the essence of even the simplest lullaby, robbing it of its vitality and many-sided adaptability to each individual, had to be abandoned.^[41] Likewise, Schenker was critical of local performance practice. In contrast to the established critics of Vienna, he was not an unqualified admirer of Hans Richter.^[42] He found Wagner's influence on the performance of the classical repertoire to be deleterious, for it fostered the imposition of extramusical programs. In orchestral concerts there was a new emphasis on sound effects and instrumental color as opposed to musical structure.

Hans von Bülow was more to Schenker's liking. However, Schenker realized that the public of the future, particularly in orchestral concerts, would become even more dependent on the virtuoso conductor, whose qualities would be judged not by musical results perceptible aurally but by visual impressions. Although a well-rehearsed orchestra needed a minimum of gestures from the conductor, the audience was increasingly tied to the conductor's physical realization of the line of the music and its salient events. The conductor's virtuosity constituted a visual compensation for the inadequacies of listening. The music associated with the Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian trends exemplified by Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler fit the need to reduce the musical to effect an illustration. As Schenker wrote in 1897, the death of Brahms represented a staggering loss. Brahms was the last master of the truly musical.^[43]

Bruckner, in contrast, was the symphonist of effects, despite a false reputation as a master of counterpoint. His popularity was based on his sonorities. Only Bruckner scherzos were musically original. Despite the extensive Mozart celebrations of 1891 and the perception during the 1890s of an overt "Mozart renaissance," a return to the real essence of Mozart had yet to materialize. Too much of the Mozart revival of the 1890s was cast in the spirit of Wagner and designed to demonstrate that Mozart prefigured Wagnerian aesthetics, when in fact Mozart represented its antithesis.

Schenker, like Schoenberg, sought to fashion a post-Romantic credo. Both men, coming of age in the late nineteenth century in Vienna, confronted what they regarded as the corruption of musical culture in their own time. The objective of a new aesthetic, therefore — of a break with the past — was to find a way out of the legacy of Wagnerism, not only in compositional practice but also in music education and the dynamics of public musical life. Although the conclusions they drew were different, Brahms emerged as the pivotal figure for them both.

From the perspective of the late twentieth century, the critique on the part of a younger generation of the musical culture of fin de siècle Vienna set the stage for a modern movement in both composition and music scholarship that explicitly sought to delegitimate the social and cultural consequences of the popularization of concert music during the late nineteenth century. The contempt for the audience and critics mirrored, for Schoenberg and Schenker, a post-Nietzschean reformist radicalism exhibited by Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos. Not only art but culture at large, including the institutions, political arrangements, laws, and mores of the late nineteenth century, were at stake. In the 1920s and 1930s this fin de siècle merger of musical modernism and an agenda of societal reform assumed a compelling plausibility in the struggle against Fascism.

Schenker died in Europe in 1935. Schoenberg immigrated to America. Both men exerted a dramatic and transformative influence on musical composition and scholarship in America. The allure of their approaches to several generations of American musicians and scholars may be explained, in part, by the resonance felt vis-à-vis America to the critique of late-nineteenth-century culture and society implicit in their work.

Our distance from the horrors of the European midcentury and more than a decade of neoconservatism in American politics may have weakened our appreciation of the cultural critique located in Schoenberg's aesthetic evolution at the turn of the century. At the same time it is unlikely that the insights about musical culture, listening, and the audience that Schoenberg and Schenker developed along parallel lines before World War I have become entirely irrelevant. We might be well advised to locate this critique of modernity in Schoenberg's music itself in new ways — much as Schenker argued ought to be done when listening to any great music. After all, at stake in the music of Arnold Schoenberg, from the start of his career, was more than just music.