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.