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]