CONNECTIONS

Eleven
Schoenberg and the Canon:
An Evolving Heritage

Christopher Hailey

The current debate swirling around the literary canon is notable less for its novelty than for its self-consciousness. Every age wrangles over values and priorities, but seldom have the parameters of discourse been so studded with the brittle shards of contending ideologies. The forces of feminism and multiculturalism in the academy, the neuroses of political correctness in the society at large, the collapse of socialism, crises of late capitalism, and the postmodernist disintegration of metanarratives of progress and enlightenment are all signs of cultural adjustment to emerging global political and economic realities. In the United States shifting immigration and demographic patterns, economic dislocations, and the politics of affirmative action have heightened awareness of ethnic, racial, linguistic, gender, sexual, religious, and class differences and challenged long-standing assumptions about shared cultural values. As a repository of such values, literary canons, whether defined by reading lists, anthologies, or publishing projects such as the University of Chicago's Great Books series, are under scrutiny as to their makeup, their uses, the power structures they supposedly reflect, affirm, and perpetuate, and the diverse interests, backgrounds, and perceptions they demonstrably fail to represent.^[1] Barbara Herrnstein Smith has pointed out that texts that endure are usually "those that appear to reflect and reinforce establishment ideologies,"^[2] or, as Charles Altieri has paraphrased Smith's argument, those that speak to "nostalgia, conservative political pressures, stock rhetorical needs, and the inertia of established power."^[3] In this spirit ideological challenges, from Marxism to feminism, have sought to demonstrate the relationship between canonicity and larger structures of oppression or coercion. This crisis has triggered responses ranging from the anxious hand-wringing of neoconservatives and political demagogues manning (literally) the ramparts of fortress culture against

assault from the unwashed multitudes, to the objections of a committed rationalist such as Jürgen Habermas, who has identified a "legitimation crisis" that threatens to relativize values and criteria and derail the "incomplete project of Modernity."^[4] Although it is appealing to regard the canon as a self-adjusting image of societal consensus, there is an increasing understanding that any relevant — that is, practically applicable — canon will have to become a heteronomous construct subject to conscious modification and expansion.^[5]

Such challenges to the legitimacy of the canon and the assumptions that undergird it must necessarily affect our understanding of Arnold Schoenberg, for whom a musical canon was axiomatic.^[6] Few composers have been so shaped by their identification with a canon — which for Schoenberg served as both his own artistic frame of reference and the source of those criteria by which he insisted that others judge the meaning and value of his works. His ideal was a music of organic process whose impetus and justification were the fulfillment of its own self-defined and historically grounded needs. Indeed, in making his modernist style the consequence of history, he aimed the canon in his direction. The result was an aesthetic of limited context, in which a premium was placed on the integrity of organic relatedness both within a work and between works in a historical continuum. In a real sense, then, Schoenberg's musical persona was a response to and a self-conscious fulfillment of a century of musical-canon formation that had resulted from a combination of aesthetic advocacy and the changing material conditions of musical practice.^[7] His experience is paradigmatic for understanding the relationship between twentieth-century canonic ideology and the rise and crisis of modernism.

It is readily apparent from the works that Schoenberg performed, taught, analyzed, and wrote about that his active canon — those works upon which he continually drew and from which he learned as a composer — was relatively limited, indeed much more limited, for instance, than the range of his literary interests and influences. In his 1931 essay "National Music," Schoenberg cited Bach and Mozart as his principal teachers, and Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner as secondary influences. Arrayed around these core figures Schoenberg set Schubert, Mahler, Strauss, and Reger, to whom one might also add Haydn, Schumann, and Wolf. A handful of others, such as Liszt, Berlioz, C.P.E. Bach, and Handel, appear only on the periphery. In all it is a list that is almost wholly German and restricted to two hundred years of music history. This is of course not to suggest that Schoenberg was ignorant of other music, but it does delimit a relatively closed sphere of productive relevance.

It is nonetheless important to recognize Schoenberg's encounters and involvement with a broader spectrum of musical styles — one end of which is represented by his firsthand familiarity with Viennese operetta and his cabaret experiences in Berlin, the other by the programs of the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen — which show a remarkable catholicity of interests if not tastes. After his move to Berlin in 1926 Schoenberg, now remarried to a woman many years his junior and engaged in a far more active social life, was exposed to a still wider range of musical impulses through concerts, theater, radio, and film. Moreover, his essays from the twenties and early thirties document his awareness of contemporary explorations of non-Western and early music.^[8] In the United States, and more specifically in Los Angeles, Schoenberg was drawn into domains of popular culture he had until then witnessed only from afar. As a private tutor to studio musicians, a social guest sought after by celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, George Gershwin, and Harpo Marx, and a member of an émigré community largely co-opted by the entertainment industry, Schoenberg found himself in an environment in which many of his established hierarchies were inverted.

These experiences brought him into contact with ever more diverse audiences, students, social circles, and cultural references, in a world ever more saturated with technology and disparate information sources, and these elements were not without influence upon his ideas of canonicity. Through his letters and essays one can follow the transformation of a relatively stable hierarchy of high and low art in Vienna into a tentative acknowledgment of wider pluralities in Berlin and into, in America, an attempt, however cursory, to posit a cultural continuum extending from Maeterlinck to Mickey Mouse, from Tolstoy to the Marx Brothers.^[9]

These observations suggest that while over the course of his career Schoenberg's core musical canon remained relatively stable, the instrumentality of that canon changed. The influences were of course many, and included cultural, psychological, professional, political, geographic, and temporal factors, among others. But it is possible to isolate three distinct phases relating to Schoenberg's experiences in, respectively, Vienna, Berlin, and Los Angeles — three settings in which the concept "canon" shifted from a record of historical cultural identity to a tool of cultural politics to, finally, a project of cultural enlightenment.

Karl Kraus once observed, "The streets of Vienna are paved with culture; the streets of other cities with asphalt."^[10] Schoenberg's Vienna was comparatively small physically, and highly centralized. The media of her cultural identity — art, literature, and above all theater and music — were cultivated

with an intensity scarcely known elsewhere. For Viennese musicians the weight of history was particularly heavy, for they lived in the city where many of the central figures of the canonic repertory had made their home. This gave Vienna's musical life its vibrancy but also encouraged a degree of complacency that by the turn of the century threatened to ossify a rich legacy into sterile academism and unthinking tradition. If there was a musical "crisis of language" corresponding to Hofmannsthal's search for literary integrity and authenticity, then it was in large part brought on by the appalling experience of a rich syntactical inheritance being bled dry of meaning. Mahler recognized as much with regard to performance practice. His famous dictum "Tradition ist Schlamperei" was less an injunction against tradition than against Schlamperei, and he did much to rescue hallowed performance traditions by elevating them to a level of conscious articulation.

Similarly, a generation of composers and theorists — Schoenberg most radically among them — sought to rescue the techniques of the classical tradition from the stale formulae of the academy. The remarkable number of gifted teachers emerging from the generation of the 1870s and 1880s (including Schoenberg and his circle, as well as Hauer, Marx, Schenker, Schmidt, Schreker, Weigl, and Zemlinsky) shared a devotion to a legacy of craft and the conviction that the complete assimilation of that craft could serve as a basis for aesthetic judgment, the mastery of its grammar as the means to original, individual expression. These self-appointed inheritors of the legacy became its protectors as well. They were an extraordinary collection of composers, performers, and theorists whose commitment to the continuing value of a shared canon of classical works and techniques made Vienna a rich resonating chamber for its own cultural history. Their works represent a revitalized dialogue with that legacy and a process of self-discovery within that culture, creating the kind of dense tangle of associations within and between works of the larger canon that Kraus would have appreciated. For Schoenberg and others, the crisis of integrity and authenticity was resolved in favor of creative individuality achieved through the mastery of craft.^[11] Not surprisingly, Schoenberg's canonical priorities reflect the cultural practices of turn-of-the-century Vienna.

Although Vienna was a point of geographic intersection, with a significant representation of Italian and French opera, and Slavic and Scandinavian music, Schoenberg's canon (at least through Brahms) is the sanctioned pantheon of the Vienna Conservatory and as such differs little from the preferences of his more conservative contemporaries.^[12] The fact that Schoenberg and so many of his contemporaries were drawn to teaching, and taught primarily through examination and analysis of this limited canon, reinforced the canon's normative, disciplinary value as a criterion for critical judgment. More important, mastering the canon and its language as craft was an act of creative imagination, actively knitting past with

present into a cohesive whole. It was both a linear legacy and a pedigree. In this sense the canon in Vienna was self-defining and self-legitimizing.

The idea of the canon as a means of individual definition and expression within a historical continuum continued to resonate in Schoenberg's thinking at a time when he was becoming increasingly aware of the canon as an agent of self-definition within a political context. It is not surprising that during the First World War Schoenberg identified his canon with the larger cause of the German nation, but it was in fact a rhetorical stance he would maintain throughout his remaining years in Europe, though with shifting emphases. There is a world of difference between writing in 1919 of the need to "ensure the German nation's superiority in the field of music"^[13] and the 1931 essay "National Music," in which Schoenberg defends his own music, "produced on German soil, without foreign influences," as "a living example of an art able most effectively to oppose Latin and Slav hopes of hegemony."^[14] Between those two essays are the incidents in Mattsee, the assault upon Schoenberg's "bolshevist modernism" by cultural conservatives, and Schoenberg's own embattled position as a political appointee in a highly politicized German capital.^[15] From an unabashed identification with a national cause to an appeal to hallowed tradition as a credential, Schoenberg had come to recognize the canon as an instrument of cultural politics.

Beyond that, now removed from the safe cocoon of Vienna, Schoenberg found his sacrosanct canon under attack from within, by a younger generation lured away from Mozart and Beethoven, Wagner and Brahms, by American jazz, Russian primitivism, French ésprit, Italian soul, experimental technology, and a feverish succession of fashions and fads from Neue Sachlichkeit to Gebrauchsmusik, Spielmusik, and neoclassicism. For a time, 1922 to 1930 by his own account, Schoenberg lost his influence over youth and, like other leading figures — Busoni and Schreker among them — was bewildered and dismayed by his students' craving for novelty.^[16] In this context an appeal to the hallowed repertory was an appeal for stability — an appeal that befitted his position as a professor of the august Prussian Academy of the Arts. It was also an appeal with more than a hint of his own conservative agenda, which by 1930 had become a balancing act between artistic responsibility and the appearance of political opportunism.

Schoenberg's emigration to the United States offered release from the anguished tangle that cultural identity in Germany had become, but at a price. In America, Europe's highly structured supports for cultural identity and authority were lacking. Schoenberg, now more object than subject, was

a representative of an "old world" European culture. His writing is more patient, pragmatic, and cautiously articulated; his vision of the canon, more tolerant and inclusive, takes on a supranational cast that advertises itself as vaguely European, or simply "Western."^[17] Both feted and marginalized, Schoenberg submitted to his own commodification as the "learned professor," though not without irony, as when he once tellingly likened his public persona to a statue on a pedestal.^[18]

In the United States Schoenberg's students lacked the preparation and breadth of experience he could have expected in Europe. Their knowledge of music literature, he wrote in 1938, "offers the aspects of a Swiss cheese."^[19] In the absence of a context, the canon could no longer serve as an anchor of identity as it had in Vienna, or as an article of political and aesthetic confession as in Berlin, but was instead marketed like a medicinal balm for which Schoenberg, the distinguished physician, offered testimonial. Schoenberg had become the kindly missionary patiently instructing the natives in higher truths.

But Schoenberg's canon was not simply competing against ignorance and an omnipresent popular culture; it was also challenged by a specifically American art music consciously seeking to free itself of its European — that is, German — heritage. Many of the colleagues and music students from whom Schoenberg most needed support were themselves torn between their search for indigenous roots and those alternative influences — most particularly from France, Stravinsky, and neoclassicism — that might assist them in that quest. The result was that Schoenberg's canon was further relativized by the presence of several contending canons.^[20]

It is to his credit that Schoenberg recognized the necessity of this process, and recognized also the complexity of America's cultural growing pains.^[21] He could even rationalize the marginalization of his music, for by this time he felt sufficiently secure of his own place in the canon to await the judgment of history.^[22] At the same time he had become a modernist icon, more written about than performed, more cited than sighted. This is the point at which certain aspects of Schoenberg's attitude toward the canon become pertinent to his identity as a modernist.

During the late 1930s the art critic Clement Greenberg began to formulate a view of modernism as a process by which each medium discovered its own inherent forms and techniques. "It is by virtue of its medium," he wrote in 1940, "that each art is unique and strictly itself."^[23] In eliminating effects borrowed from other media and other arts, Greenberg argued, "each art would be rendered `pure,' and in its `purity' find the guarantee

of its standards of quality as well as of its independence."^[24] This formalist preoccupation with medium-specific autonomy is explicitly present in literary and artistic modernism and is arguably a key element running through musical modernism from expressionism to Neue Sachlichkeit and neoclassicism.^[25] It also came to be associated — at least as a subtext — with central tenets in Schoenberg's modernism. In such a quest the canon fulfilled a crucial role as means of assuring autonomy, for by crystallizing and applying to one's own work those "timeless" techniques that give the canon its coherence and integrity, one could assure both purity of lineage and resistance to temporal influences. What is more, I do not doubt that for a composer like Schoenberg, subject to a succession of cultural and geographic dislocations, the canon was a valuable guarantor of continuity and moral identity.

Concomitant with Schoenberg's quest for continuity and identity was the need to posit an ideal audience, an audience steeped in his canon and defined in his terms. In his compositions, performance coaching, analyses, and insistence upon structural listening Schoenberg created a canon viewed from a modernist's perspective, the artwork as a chiseled entity of self-referential perfection.^[26] This, more than the leap — or slither — into atonality, more than the development of the twelve-tone system, has been, I would maintain, the most influential legacy of Schoenberg's teaching.^[27] The result is not merely an idealized canon but also an idealized audience, an audience that took shape in Schoenberg's Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen, whose members were to be that model community, conversant with the canon and the lessons it taught. Performance was realization and listening a contemplative immersion. Strict injunctions against any public display of favor or disfavor, and the exclusion of critics, were intended to purge Verein performances of the theatrical impurities of normal concert life.^[28] But the very nature of performance encourages interpretive interplay, challenges autonomy, and undermines intentionality and control; any performance, no matter how carefully prepared and faithfully executed, no matter how intelligently and respectfully heard, creates a dialogue in which all sides set terms. Such a dialogue, ever changing, is the currency of contemporary relevance.

Schoenberg is in need of contemporary relevance, but it will not come on his terms. The price of taking Schoenberg into the musical canon, of accepting him as a modernist icon, has been to accept his definition of the canon and his place within it. That price is too high. His works, both as historical artifacts and as a part of living experience, can come alive to us

only through unfettered dialogue, and a first step toward that dialogue is restoring Schoenberg to his time through a process of historical contextualization.^[29]

The effect of Schoenberg's attempt — or our perception of his attempt — to associate his work with timeless canonic principles has been to rob it of its temporality.^[30] This has not only tended to remove his music from what Steven Connor has called the "dust and heat of history" but also sped the process by which it has become an inert artifact of the past, more readily subject, as Connor observes, to being commodified and "museumized" by cultural institutions and the academy.^[31] This ossification into monumentality has been accompanied by the flattened historical perspective of post-modernist theories, resulting in what Connor has called a "furious polyphony of decontextualized voices."^[32] This is a trend to which Schoenberg's articulate self, for all its insistence upon historical origin, offers scant resistance. And yet it is precisely Schoenberg's articulate self, with his embrace of performance and pedagogy, that undermines his own quest for autonomy and open perspectives for revitalizing his creative legacy.

The interest in reader response and reception history that has helped revolutionize literary theory over the past quarter century is not a mere academic fad but a reflection of the way in which literature, art, and history itself have been called to account by the increasing self- and "other"-consciousness of our culture. Lay and professional audiences have begun to set terms of engagement that reflect an increasingly pluralistic cultural environment and a heightened awareness of the contingencies of individual perspectives. This array of contending perspectives has stimulated the search for critical categories that are more all-encompassing and that address perspectives such as those of gender, race, and class.

These same processes have been operative in transforming musical culture and have at long last begun to be reflected in musical criticism and scholarship.^[33] Theoretical discourse, for instance, long dominated by a bias toward pitch and harmony (which assured a central position for works reflecting the development and dissolution of tonality and the structural and thematic means of tonal articulation), has recently begun to accommodate a range of music (including areas of new music as well as popular and non-Western styles) governed by other organizational principles such as timbre and rhythm. What is more, extramusical parameters such as the significance of popularity, gender identification, and psychological response have become sanctioned areas of inquiry. This has not only opened new repertories to critical scrutiny but also created an arena in which disparate works and repertories, from plainchant to punk rock, can be discussed within a single framework.

To abandon a narrowly defined set of critical criteria is to undermine the authority of any single canon as well as of individual works or bodies of

works that derived their authority from their consonance — or defiance — of its principles. The authority of Schoenberg's works (and as a man and artist, authority was one of the central categories of his life) derives from both their consonance with and defiance of his chosen canon. The question thus arises: How central is the maintenance of that authority for assigning quality, value, or relevance to Schoenberg's work? That question can best be answered by asking whether, within the shifting categories of contemporary evaluation, Schoenberg's works can continue to engage and reward our interest.

At this point it is well to remember that Schoenberg's canon was in part a construct of personal choices; his understanding of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms was selective and self-serving. Our own no less selective and self-serving ideas of canonicity (or even multi-canonicity) are a reflection of the processes by which we adjust ourselves to transformations in our own culture and find a means to assign value and meaning. The eclectic quality of our culture has fostered interdisciplinary dialogue, cross-cultural exchange, and a hermeneutics of heteronomy. Under such circumstances the autonomy of Schoenberg's music, its integrity on its own terms, becomes but one evaluative factor among many. Of greater significance is its contextual richness.

Schoenberg was passionately engaged with his times — in his activities, in his writings, and most importantly in his works. It is evident that his artistic temperament was shaped by a range of influences in literature, theology, art, and philosophy, as well as by music far outside his admitted canon. And one can follow his shifting preoccupations through the various stages of his career and in a series of influential and provocative works, most of which lay outside the traditional canonical formal categories.^[34] Moreover, an extraordinary number of Schoenberg's works are datable by the very nature of their genre, form, content, musical language, and style. The gargantuan dimensions of Gurrelieder could scarcely have been conceived in 1920 any more than the moral and theatrical austerity of Moses und Aron belongs to a prewar mentality. Pierrot lunaire, Von heute auf morgen, the Satires for chorus, the Serenade, op. 24, and the Piano Suite, op. 25, the Suite for String Orchestra, A Survivor from Warsaw, and the Ode to Napoleon are just a few of the works linked to specific contexts deriving from Schoenberg's intense and ever broadening discourse with his time.^[35] The intensity of this discourse also accounts for the large number of fragments and torsos whose concerns and musical means had outlived their moment of inspiration.^[36]

There is a sense in which Schoenberg's oeuvre is refreshingly dated, and no more so than in his insistent appeal to historical truths.^[37] And yet it is what Schoenberg made of that canonic inheritance within concrete cultural and political conditions that lends him and his works new relevance. Contextualizing Schoenberg, reintegrating his work into the historical and tem-

poral flow of his time, has the double benefit of rescuing him from his defenders as well as creating a richer, more complex figure capable of resisting both facile commodification and reactionary deconstruction. Thus even if the authority of Schoenberg's canon can never be restored, even if the very idea of canonicity is undermined, one can create a context that allows Schoenberg and his works to resonate across a wider network of associations. It is part of what Steven Connor calls the "struggle between a modernist restricted field, with its stress on individuality, purity and essence, and the postmodernist expanded field, with its embrace of the contingent conditions."^[38] The contingent conditions in Schoenberg's work are what create its most valuable and instructive tensions. We must be willing to separate Schoenberg's articulate vision of himself and his canon from his works and allow the historical connectedness of both to inform our vision of the whole. We must free his canon from being a preserve of timeless truth to becoming a theater of present possibilities. To delimit Schoenberg is not to abandon him but to welcome him into the productive discourse of our time.

Twelve
Schoenberg's Concept of Art in Twentieth-Century Music History

Hermann Danuser
Translated by Gareth Cox

When considering Schoenberg's concept of art, his Kunstbegriff, it is necessary to supplement his terminological and authorial concept of art — insofar as this essential aspect of the concept can be deduced from his writings and statements — with that other aspect that is revealed by his actual musical oeuvre. It is in this dual sense, in which the explicit poetics (the way Schoenberg the artist perceived himself, his Selbstverständnis ) are considered together with the implicit poetics of what can be deduced from his music, that I intend to examine Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff. In doing so the contradictions that are rooted in the specific nature of Schoenberg's artistic development will be deliberately disregarded to allow us a clearer view of the unchanging principles behind his idea, or conception, of art. After a very brief, general outline of his Kunstbegriff I intend to consider the extent to which its specific characteristics contrast with those in the music history of the nineteenth century and with the contemporary context of the first half of the twentieth;^[1] in conclusion I will outline some aspects of the historical influence of Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff in the latter half of the twentieth century.

I

Although "New Music," as both an idea and a catchword, is now outdated, the term had a formative influence on Schoenberg's understanding of art. He was outspoken in setting emphatic requirements: "Art means: New Art "; and earlier he declared: "Music insofar as it has to do with art, must always be new! Because only something new, something previously unexpressed is worth saying in art."^[2] This demand for newness in art has of course nothing to do with innovation at any price. For Schoenberg, novelty in itself was

neither an asset nor a liability; rather, he was concerned with the reasons for art being new. What he prescribed so emphatically for composers — the idea of New Music — he rejected with vehemence the moment he saw it reduced to a catchword by critics and historians. There is hardly a composer in the history of the twentieth century who combined, indeed merged, tradition and innovation more radically than Schoenberg. It was with good reason that in his dedicatory 1934 article "Der dialektische Komponist" Theodor W. Adorno quoted Stefan George's dictum "Höchste Strenge ist zugleich höchste Freiheit" (the greatest stringency is at the same time the greatest freedom),^[3] for this most productive paradox pervades Schoenberg's music. The dialectic that characterizes Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff was recognized and captured early on in such article and book titles as Hanns Eisler's "Arnold Schönberg, der musikalische Reaktionär"^[4] and Willi Reich's Arnold Schönberg oder Der konservative Revolutionär.^[5] The fact that Schoenberg was so persistently conscious of tradition prevented him from taking a "modern" position akin to that artistic modernism that since Baudelaire has associated itself with randomness, with the everyday and commonplace, but also with "épater le bourgeois. "^[6]

The poles of tradition and innovation are not the only ones that define the dialectics of Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff. Another formulation — to draw on Schoenberg's own words about compositional process — is defined by the concepts "heart" and "brain" in music; this configuration implies that even the categories of rationality and intuition (or inspiration) in Schoenberg's musical poetics are governed by a singular dialectic. This dialectic is particularly applicable where reception history has created an impression of one-sidedness — namely, in the period of free atonal expressionism (suspiciously irrational) in which Schoenberg's sense of form, governed solely by the rational basis of traditional musical expression and its syntactic mechanisms, was summed up in his declaration "Ich entscheide beim Komponieren einzig und allein durch das Gefühl, durch das Formgefühl " (in composing I make decisions only according to feeling, according to the feeling for form).^[7] Conversely, though, the dialectic is also reflected in the twelve-tone period (suspiciously rational) in which Schoenberg, while admittedly employing a technique of greater rationality as regards the selection of pitch classes, composed as before so far as the art of developing variation was concerned — composed "as before," with the old rationality of spontaneous fantasy, without any hint of constructivism for its own sake.

But what of Schoenberg's dialectical/dynamic Kunstbegriff in his own compositional development from work to work? If we presuppose a very individual synthesis in Schoenberg of the tradition of German art music from Bach to Wagner/Brahms and Mahler/Strauss, on the basis of which he was able to create his new art, then the question follows whether we can assume if not a teleological then at least a problem-historical compositional

progress. Certainly the main lines of development can be recognized, even sometimes a progression from work to work, but it would be an oversimplification to say that the succession of works in Schoenberg's oeuvre follows a model where, in seamless continuity, a musical problem is established in one work and solved in the succeeding one. Such a view would pervert the concept of a history of musical problems, a history that certainly cannot disregard the paradigm Schoenberg. Rather we should, in this respect, take as our point of departure the idea of a dialectical form of art production, one that favors the unorthodox and in which the rationally deducible is found alongside the unexpected, and recourse to compositional and genre tradition alongside bold inroads into new musical and music-historical territory.

II

In what way, then, does Schoenberg's dynamic concept of tradition differ from corresponding nineteenth-century concepts — in particular, from those of Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner, from whose works he drew central creative stimuli? Schoenberg evaded the well-established dichotomy of the second half of the nineteenth century — between instrumental music in Brahms's line of development and music theater in Wagner's — and, by boldly breaking through the entrenched mechanism of the "art text" (Kunsttext ) at the end of the century, transcended the dichotomy. He composed both and thereby manifested in his range of genres the same force of synthesis that can be seen in his compositional technique, where he adapted Brahmsian as well as Wagnerian means.

What appears new is that he relinquished any compositional-historical continuity of genre in his work. Although Wagner had drastically modified the category of genre, he did nonetheless remain true to music theater, and — despite what he said to the contrary — it in no way rendered the other areas of creativity superfluous. The only — partial — exceptions to this rule of transcending genres in Schoenberg's oeuvre that might be considered are the string quartets and, with respect to his early works, the lied. But the fact that the first quartet has a single-movement form and the second an integrated voice part shows just how loose the traditional concept of genre had become. In fact, both dodecaphonic quartets are closer to the traditional genre — also a sign of dialectical composition — just as general classical features reasserted themselves in the early dodecaphonic period.^[8]

New traits also emerge in Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff with respect to its pragmatic realization. Ever since Mozart, and particularly Beethoven, had paved the way for the idea of original composition as an indication of artistic autonomy — analogous to the bourgeois emancipation of the subject — a more or less "aesthetic detachment" (in the words of Hans Robert

Jauss) between a new work and what was expected of it by the audience became part of successful composing.^[9] Whereas Brahms worked within the traditional genres and relied upon their institutional contexts, Wagner created an appropriate institution for himself in Bayreuth, whereby this unique project also found its fulfillment in a single genre. With Schoenberg, however, the paradox was that while in terms of aesthetic reception he relied mainly on his oeuvre's connectedness to tradition (he was tireless in associating his works with the tradition of great German music),^[10] the reality of the aesthetic reception was characterized by a nearly insurmountable rupture with the public, who were, apart from the early works, aware only of the innovative and not the traditional features in his music. Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff, then, compared with that of the nineteenth century, is revealed as one that, though conceived traditionally by the composer, functioned in the pragmatic sphere in a more innovative fashion with concomitant institutional consequences (evident particularly in Schoenberg's Viennese Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen). However, Schoenberg's works are so diverse and follow such individual designs that here, too, one can hardly speak of uniform consequences.

Is the entwinement of aesthetics and ethics in Schoenberg new, or was it already anticipated in Beethoven or Brahms? It was precisely in this respect that Gustav Mahler proved so important a model for Schoenberg, perhaps even more important than in any direct compositional sense. Implied entwinement of aesthetics and ethics culminated in Schoenberg in a rigorous artistic morality that is unparalleled. It is because of this concept — artistic morality — that Schoenberg gained such pathbreaking importance, not only as a composer but also as a teacher and a thinker. Concrete instruction and imparting rules of composition were far less important than the realization that only an extraordinary compositional problem was worthy of a truly artistic effort. Therefore it was more important to him to solve incorruptibly the unorthodox problem and thus exert lasting influence through the example of his moral artistic position than to offer illusory means for solutions that in reality failed. Perhaps it is for this reason that Schoenberg is the only truly great composer of recent music history who taught with passion and corresponding success and exerted such formative influence;^[11] the Festschriften and compositions dedicated to him by his pupils testify to this.

III

In the context of twentieth-century music history, depending on the operative phase, it has been alternately either the innovative or the conservative features of the Schoenbergian Kunstbegriff that were manifest. All in all it is unprecedented with what consistency and innovative richness Schoen-

berg salvaged the concept (as derived from Schopenhauer's metaphysics) of an absolute musical art well into the twentieth century, all the more remarkable for the period after World War I, when new paradigms were established and the prewar era was considered a bygone world.

It would be well to outline here, very briefly, the various stages of Schoenberg's development. In his youth, and indeed during his whole life, Schoenberg was for the most part an autodidact. In his 1949 English-language essay "My Evolution" he names three people who played an important role in his artistic development: Oscar Adler, David Bach, and Alexander Zemlinsky.^[12] There is unquestionably a connection between Schoenberg's unacademic side, his awareness that only original solutions endure, and this nonscholastic education. It helped him attain greater independence in his musical thinking and allowed him to develop his Kunstbegriff in so original a way.

As of 1899, the date of the string sextet Verklärte Nacht, op. 4, and in what is generally referred to as the first and second main periods — those of the tonal early works and subsequent free expressionistic atonality — work succeeded work in an intense, vigorous development of his musical thinking. In the context of musical modernism (in the sense in which that turn-of-the-century period is best understood),^[13] there were overlapping, epochspecific traits — for instance, the trend toward programmatic subjects, toward the transcendence of genre, toward the monumental song — but already here Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff developed more radically and more dynamically than that of any of his European colleagues. The dynamics of the development charted by this series of works, written one after another in an incredibly short period of time, were historically unprecedented. Schoenberg recalled this burst of creative energy when he admitted at the 1910 Vienna premiere of the George-Lieder, op. 15, that in this work he had succeeded for the first time in realizing a new ideal of expression that he had had in mind for years. The heading "Schoenberg and Progress" for the chapter on Schoenberg in Adorno's Philosophy of New Music was absolutely justified. Strauss, Mahler, Reger, Debussy — all the leading contemporary composers — being children of their own time, were in one way or another committed to the idea of progress, but none realized it as radically in his work as did Schoenberg when around 1910 he ventured into totally new territory with his expressionistic art.

In the twenties Schoenberg embarked on a new stage of his work, and of music history, with his method of composition with twelve tones related only to one another. At this time his Kunstbegriff, without any involvement on his part, became subject to the dichotomous misunderstanding that it was on the one hand "brain music," the dead monster of a musical engineer who tries to compensate for his lack of artistic inspiration with mathematical calculations, and on the other "heart music," the Romantic echoes of

an outmoded composer whose legacy no longer represented a truly contemporary musical art. The first of these two polemical arguments against Schoenberg — which taken together serve to illuminate the composer's complexity — stemmed from the position of a preserved post-Romantic traditionalism (for example, that of Pfitzner); the second, from an alienating neoclassicism (for example, that of Stravinsky). Nonetheless, despite such attacks it was precisely at this time that Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff asserted itself in its complete individuality. Yet its author saw himself as an unappreciated artist. Having at the end of 1925 attained the pinnacle of public recognition with his position as the director of a master class in composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, he was forced to acknowledge that a younger generation of composers, seeing the times in a new way and with their concept of "mittlere Musik,"^[14] had already passed him over and that it was they who were at the focal point of the music world's attention, an interest that could not be ascribed to mere fashion.

It is not easy to assess the extent to which Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff changed during the last two decades of his life in the United States, after his exile from National Socialist Germany. On the one hand "committed works" take on greater significance as a result of Schoenberg's declaration that he would make the political struggle for Judaism his main mission. On the other hand his Kunstbegriff changed hardly at all, since his commitment was a fermentation more of autonomous than of functional art, and his occasional works, unlike those of composers of "mittlere Musik," remained, as in the nineteenth century, separate from his proclaimed Kunstbegriff. In no sense did Schoenberg conform to popular contemporary taste in the thirties and forties;^[15] his artistic personality was too fixed to have allowed the pressure of external circumstances substantially to change his Kunstbegriff. During those two decades he gives the impression of an antediluvian boulder resistant to any softening toward a musical populism with an eye on the tastes of the broader public. Schoenberg knew that that isolated him, but because of his unshakable belief in himself and his idea of art he also foresaw that the future would belong to him.

IV

Naturally the question of Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff in twentieth-century music history addresses not only its specific qualities in comparison with other Kunstbegriffe but also its historical influence. Schoenberg's singularity and the predominance of his personal and artistic physiognomy became apparent in the fact that in Europe in the second half of the century, at the expense of the scholastic tradition, he was considered less important than his principal pupils, Webern and Berg. Reception is also always deformation. Those two main factors "heart" and "brain" — that is, intuition and

rationality — which were dialectically intertwined in Schoenberg (and in both his pupils), in the course of reception history became sundered and fixed in separate strands of reception. On the one hand there developed that branch of Schoenberg reception that followed from the (suspected) constructivism of his twelve-tone technique and from which, with the expansion of his idea of the row in all dimensions (or parameters) of the texture, an integrated serial music emerged; because of the connection with Anton Webern this can be seen only as indirect reception. The Schoenberg patricide (committed by Boulez) from a historical distance — the dictum "Schoenberg est mort" is an artistic program, not a statement of fact — and the crowning of his pupil Webern in his place were presented in such a way that indirectly Schoenberg remained historically influential, though in a doubly deformed way as a result of aesthetic expression diminished by the reception of serialism (and the "brain" dimension made absolute, as it were). On the other hand the composers who, having grown up still within the populist aesthetic, feared the "constructivist ideology" and strove to reconcile the serial technique with tonality and expression attached themselves not to late Schoenberg but to Alban Berg, whose constructive profundity was not widely recognized; here too, where the "heart" was the focal point of attention, Schoenberg proved after 1950 to be, for the time being, of only indirect relevance. Likewise Adorno's emphasis on the "freely" atonal, expressionistic — as opposed to the dodecaphonic — Schoenberg (developed in his 1961 essay "Vers une musique informelle,"^[16] which succeeded his criticism of serial technique in the Philosophy of New Music ) was not to have reception-historical effect until later.

Schoenberg's dialectical Kunstbegriff, which the exponents of a serially organized music had criticized insofar as its constructive and expressive dimensions were considered inadequate and a relic of the aesthetic expression of an antiquated, bygone era, gained new relevance after the breakdown of the idea of the avant-garde in the 1970s. Here Schoenberg's own skepticism about "modernism" (not to mention the avant-garde), whose "fashionable" character he rejected and surmounted through rigorous connectedness with tradition, proved to be well-founded. So, at least in Germany, an authentic Schoenberg succeeded in gaining new credence after Adorno's Schoenberg — that is, the Schoenberg defined in Philosophy of New Music — had been buried. It was suddenly recognized that Schoenberg's artistic morality accords the individual a significance over and above philosophical-historical frameworks and beyond an avant-garde Kanon des Verbotenen (canon of the forbidden); his artistic morality corresponded exactly with the intentions of a younger generation who were growing weary of the obligation imposed on them by avant-garde progress. And so Schoenberg, and especially the expressionistic Schoenberg who so unreservedly followed his singular need to express himself, became a model for Wolfgang Rihm

and his contemporaries. It was not that these younger composers wanted only to tend the "heart"; rather, they did not, and indeed do not, want the dictates of the "heart" to be any longer regimented by a procedural "brain" mechanism.

If Schoenberg's concept of art is measured against his perception and understanding of himself, it must be declared a "failure." The German music tradition that Schoenberg aspired to perpetuate for a further hundred years no longer exists; national ties, in the nineteenth-century sense in which Schoenberg still perceived them, have become irrelevant. But beyond his authorial intention we can discern the continuing relevance of certain elements of Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff that manifest themselves in a number of different ways. Indeed, the very fact that in our times we cannot share his absolute view of art in the sense of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche means that his Kunstbegriff, having acquired that special dignity of something from the past, has now also attained a sentimentally refracted contemporary relevance.

Thirteen
Schoenberg and Present-Day Theory and Practice

Jonathan Dunsby

In 1971 Allen Forte wrote the following:

The scope and variety of contemporary musico-theoretical investigations, especially in the U.S. beginning in the 1950s, is remarkable. . . . There seems to be ample evidence that musical theory in the twentieth century is once again what it has occasionally been in the past: a vital intellectual component of music.^[1]

These words were partly a tribute to Arnold Schoenberg, who is mentioned in Forte's article "Theory" (from which this quote is taken) essentially for the notions of extended tonality that evolved between the 1911 and 1922 editions of the Harmonielehre.

One must doubt whether Forte had much inkling even as late as 1971 — bearing in mind the composers who were then in vogue — that the end of our century would see a surge of artistic evolution that now has its very firmly established name borrowed from wider trends in Western society that became (fatally for "modernism") conspicuous in the 1980s — namely, "postmodernism." There does not appear to be significant commentary from the late 1960s that predicts the household names of the next wave of composition, though the likes of John Adams, Arvo Pärt, and Toru Takemitsu were alive and musically kicking at the time.^[2] Now, so soon afterward, even that ongoing — and, as it were, institutional — European masterpiece Répons, by Pierre Boulez, has a new, sensuous, repetitive, multivalent quality to stamp it as a work of the 1990s and beyond. In Boulez the new way — in Schoenberg's wake but not in his manner — seems to have shed its skin in yielding to an even newer way. So it is hardly to Allen Forte's discredit that he could not foresee the concomitant swing toward the present-day antiformalist character of much that is on offer in the name of new music theory.

Of course, one may make too much of this new Zeitgeist as an orderly, interlinked phenomenon of the creative and the contemplative. The very plurality of postmodernism suggests that Zeitgeist is itself a formalist, if last-century Hegelian, notion that perhaps should be allowed to die quietly beside other old modernisms adopted in the twentieth century. Nowadays fashionable creativity and fashionable commentary do not necessarily go hand in hand, but this does not necessarily imply any conflict. After all, such distinguished West Coast antiformalist writers as Kerman and Taruskin do pay more attention publicly to old music than to new, as we find of those more recent darlings of the music-academic press, Abbate and Kramer, and the ascendant Korsyn. In this curious scenario antiformalism and anticontemporaneity seem to go in tandem. Such writers as Joseph Straus talk about remaking the past.^[3] One gets the feeling that that is where they would really like to live.

It is tempting to declare that modern music theory, of the kind Schoenberg would recognize, not only saw its beginnings in the thinking he himself conducted in Vienna and Berlin many decades ago but is now drawing to its close in America and, given our transcultural age, elsewhere too. We can now begin to discern the true curve of the arch that is twentieth-century music theory — or, as some nostalgic historians of music might say, we can now begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. As a result it is possible to get a sense of how deep and enduring was the view of music that Schoenberg, above all, put on the agenda. That "above all," of course, needs some gloss, and it seems to me that there are both an easy way and a hard way to provide it.

The easy way is to examine the development of theorizing about dodecaphonic and what have come to be called "serial" forms of composition in general. Despite the excellent contribution made by other theorists in the early years of musical modernism, it was Schoenberg who provided the golden key. Forte has put this succinctly. "Schoenberg's brief consideration of new atonal harmonies," he wrote, "inspired others to examine systematically the resources of the twelve-tone method. . . . This in turn led to projections of other systems and resources."^[4] From this line of development were to emerge the great trends of postwar American activity, in the work of what is usually termed the "Princeton axis," and in the dissemination and elaboration of pitch-class set theory. This well-known and oft-told story is a transatlantic matter. It may well be that Die Reihe, for instance, which grew out of the postwar Darmstadt ethos, put down a more focused historical marker than, say, the early Perspectives of New Music; certainly one must acknowledge the continuing, lively, creative theoretical developments of the European scene.

It has been a natural tendency for the prospective and proactive aspects of Schoenberg the composer-theorist to be praised at the expense of their

genealogy. What unlocked the "oft-told" story to which I just referred was Schoenberg's insistence that, putting it somewhat whimsically, consonance is a lower form of dissonance. There is such a hackneyed familiarity in the air whenever we are asked to contemplate emancipated dissonance that the historical leverage of the idea is forgotten. When Heinrich Schenker illustrates the lack of tonal prolongation in a Stravinsky excerpt, all we are being offered is an image of the end of music history, or of a future that never did arrive. When Schoenberg illustrates how Mozart's dissonance can be understood only in terms of the total chromatic, we are being offered a link from the past to a future that did arrive and that did in this century yield many marvels of the human spirit. And thus we reach the center of my own view on these matters. There has been only one comprehensive theorist of our age — so far — who has regenerated the spirit of his European past into a progressive, contemporary resource. Not every composer of genius could have achieved this, or wanted to; on the other hand, only a real composer interested in theory could have achieved it.

This brings me to what I called the "hard way" of providing a gloss to the claims I have made for Schoenberg. For how is it that in many respects Schoenberg the theorist has been marginalized?

It often appears to be a matter of wheels within wheels, as is exemplified almost canonically in a little clash between Walter Frisch and Kofi Agawu, two of the most energetic and imaginative musical commentators in what might still be called the younger generation. Many readers will have sympathized with Frisch's difficulties in addressing his subject in Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation.^[5] It was not just a matter of high expectations, given that this was the book Schoenbergians had been longing for since 1932 and even before. Everyone assumed, too, that Frisch would be in the position of the quixotic homicide officer who has just the two clues: "A" (who is missing and presumed dead), developing variation; and "B" (who looks a bit guilty), Schoenberg. Agawu replies, though, that what Frisch has missed, and by implication what the Schoenbergians in this area have missed in general, is the very point on offer in the first place:

It is often said that Schoenberg formulated the notion of developing variation too vaguely and that he failed to provide demonstrations in extenso of how it works. . . . I would contest the extent to which Schoenberg's analyses are ambiguous; in fact . . . we need not look beyond his essay "Brahms the Progressive" in order to form a fairly clear idea of what developing variation means. The emphasis in Frisch's own analytical plot on an absence of "sustained illumination" in Schoenberg's own analysis only propagates a myth.^[6]

On the contrary, Agawu is arguing, Schoenberg's analytical work is relatively brief not because it lacks some ideal musico-critical lyricism but just because it is, at its best, systematic.^[7] I do not have the temerity to adjudicate

between these two positions.^[8] All the same it is intriguing, at the risk of being unfair to two subtle writers, to summarize them: on the one hand Schoenberg is frustrating but ultimately good because he does not formalize; on the other Schoenberg is constructive and good precisely because he does formalize or at least leads the way to it.

Is it too much to infer from all debates of this type that one of the reasons Schoenberg has been marginalized in music theory is because theorists have been unequal to the task of taking up his ideas during the era of formalism? Have the ideas been almost too advanced for music theory as a discipline? Considering current theory and practice in respect to "developing variation," it is pertinent to see how cleanly and helpfully Ethan Haimo has at last been able to stitch the concept into his new account of the evolution of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method, some sixty to seventy years after the event.^[9] Along with some of the best recent work in music theory, this indicates at least some continuing contemporaneity in Schoenberg's legacy, as we become able to see the things that were not to be seen before. Arnold Whittall formulated the matter in 1980:

From a perspective where the consequences of Schoenberg can be contemplated, the study of Schoenberg himself is becoming increasingly concerned with analysis and less with criticism. Only now, therefore, are the essential technical issues beginning to be adequately explored and expounded.^[10]

Here Whittall is contemplating the critical treatment of Schoenberg's own music, but again commentary folds into itself, and his comment applies perfectly well to the position of Schoenberg's theories. Once we have taken on board the idea of historical perspective, there remains the challenge of assimilating Schoenberg's thinking as a guide to analysis, explored thoroughly.

Although I have in fact already introduced him by name and in principle, in practice this is the point to come clean about Schenker. One cannot speak of Schoenberg as the "above all" in music theory without returning to Vienna and that other ascendant — but not, I believe, transcendent — theorist. It has been implied here that Schoenberg has been marginalized by large cultural forces, matters of time, place, intention — simply the contingencies of history that we historians struggle to comprehend. Yet the obsession of a large class of music theorists, myself included, with Schenkerian theory and practice is something identifiable and indeed obvious. The serpent is to some extent biting its tail. I have already indicated that notions of approaches to musical structure in terms of pitch-class set (and, one must certainly add, genera) would be unthinkable without Schoenberg's work as a composer-theorist, and there is a pungent scent of postmodernism in all the current research that combines pitch-class-set and neo-Schenkerian posttonal voice-leading theories, as there is in the idea of the trichordal

pitch genus. However, in the study of First Viennese music, Schenker's insights have proved so attractive — mainly, I would say, to those who are not primarily concerned with musical composition — that they have distracted the attention of a large community of potential students of Schoenberg's theories. Schoenbergians may take some grim satisfaction in knowing that this has happened to Schenker too, who has been marginalized in the German-speaking world by yet other cultural forces.

If there is any justice and balance in twentieth-century life, some confirmation of this might be found in the theoretical marginalization of Schoenberg the composer, who insisted that it does not matter how a piece of music is made. If it does not matter, why did Schoenberg spend so much time trying to discover how pieces of music by other composers were made, and explaining this to his many students? The answer, for sure, is that Schoenberg could theorize only as a composer and yet could not theorize about his current practice: theory had to be a notch behind what he was actually creating, as has often been stated.^[11] The years of rapid atonal evolution, approximately 1907 to 1912, could easily spawn Schoenberg's theoretical magnum opus, the 1911 Harmonielehre. After that it was very much slower work compositionally. I feel that to his dying day Schoenberg was preoccupied with a compositional breakthrough he had made in his forties, about which he had little to say because it required more than a lifetime's quiet reflection. Here I would wish to supplement Reinhold Brinkmann's portrayal of the politico-religious projects dating from Schoenberg's middle age. It was overall surely a philosophic -politico-religious project; to society and to the spirit we have to add the intellect, even if Schoenberg's intellect was less overtly at work in the second part of his life.

Although Schoenberg has been marginalized as a theorist, insofar as institutionalized theorizing is concerned, in books, journals, and debates, his pedagogical importance is well-nigh universally recognized, at the highest level through study of the Harmonielehre, and in common practice through the American textbooks. This is not the occasion to discuss those volumes, but they are the obvious signs of a core of thinking through which Schoenberg intended to pass on more than simple descriptions. Description is the best result of most theory, in the hands of those who really want to discover how a composer managed to work. The contemplative armchair theorist is in awe of creativity and cultivates an intellectual, quasi-scientific detachment. Even the brilliant Schenker, a very failed composer but by all accounts a superb performer, has the demeanor of the detective — of the fascinated operative whose whole claim on our attention nevertheless depends on acts committed by others. In the past, minds such as those of Johann Fux, Heinrich Koch, and Paul Hindemith have also been oriented in this way, while attempting to pass on a degree of compositional know-how. Such theorists in this intermediate group are less in awe of compositional prac-

tice and do not have an idealistic — one might almost say European — view of what it means to be a composer.

Among first-order theorists, Rameau provides the atavism, an unusual Franco-Austrian embrace. His task may have been a little easier than Schoenberg's because he was part of the march of Enlightenment thinking — not, as inevitably the case more recently, one of many lone voices speaking different tongues. Rameau, who managed to forge a new musical language while theorizing about it enduringly, is the paradigm of the composer-theorist in the modern sense: he left indelible creative and intellectual acts to future generations. It is not I who posit this well-established paradigm, and it is for the reader to decide whether the coincidence of art and reflection at a transcendent level is a good and useful thing. If it is, we must accord to Schoenberg an importance in twentieth-century culture that goes beyond what one must thus dare to call a mere appreciation of his compositions.

Heinrich Schenker, who has been an inescapable subtopic of this essay, provides us with a profound method for studying and discussing the many jewels of First Viennese music, and much more besides, from Scarlatti to Chopin. This method is of universal interest. Yet in the end Schoenberg has done something potentially more important: he has offered us the means of understanding a continuity between First and Second Viennese musics and, in a way, whatever else is to follow. This is probably what the composer, rather than the pure theorist, most needs, and is certainly what many composers of the mid to late twentieth century have demonstrably exploited creatively. For decades arcane commentary has been recycling a fixation with what is called Schoenberg's "historical self-justification." In perspective it is time to start discussing his theoretical comprehensiveness, to investigate this as a live issue. It has recently been reasserted in the telling words of Ian Bent: "[W]ith Schoenberg's powerfully suggestive concepts . . . the organic model, aesthetic, and technical array of tools that can be seen to have arisen in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were transmitted to the twentieth century."^[12] And I note with interest how in his very recent major article "Debussy's Significant Connections" Craig Ayrey brings Schoenberg squarely into a current music-theory heartland, noting that "the organicist metaphor in Schoenberg asserts a preference for metonymy,"^[13] confirming the impetus in the "old" thinking for the thinking of the poststructuralist future.

Returning to my opening theme, I stress the crucial element of postmodern pluralistic approaches as far as they concern not only music theory, but music history in its broadest sense. As various cultural historians are now expounding, we find in these new movements not some kind of deathly return to old values but a modernism that has taken a new turn, away from formalisms that require us to learn and to imitate, and toward a pluralist

approach that constrains us to ask questions and accept no easy answers. In arguing the case for musical prose, for developing variation, for the musical idea and the logic, technique, and art of its presentation, for the emancipated dissonance, indeed for the plenty of good music still to be written in C major — in all of this Schoenberg has been the greatest irritant to the orthodoxies, not just of theorists, but of musicology in general and the music making it merely reflects. We may question his formalist credentials but not his modernist ones, and this is what renders him such a central architect of present-day theory and practice. Any composer or musicologist, whether twenty or eighty years old, will see this. One has only to read Style and Idea.

Fourteen
Schoenberg the Contemporary:
A View from Behind

Reinhold Brinkmann

Let me begin outside the picture, as it were.^[1] The last book of the late Bruno Bettelheim, the famous psychiatrist, bears the title Freud's Vienna.^[2] From the title essay of this book, I cite the following passages:

It is not by chance that psychoanalysis was born in Vienna and came of age there. In Freud's time, the cultural atmosphere in Vienna encouraged a fascination with both mental illness and sexual problems in a way unique in the Western world — a fascination that extended throughout society. . . . The origins of this unique cultural preoccupation can be traced to the history of the city itself, but most especially to the concerns and attitudes foremost in the minds of Vienna's cultural elites just before and during the period in which Freud formed his revolutionary theories about our emotional life. . . .

With the appearance of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, psychoanalysis became established. This greatest of Freud's works is one of introspection; in it all interest is devoted to the innermost self of man, to the neglect of the external world, which pales in comparison to the fascination of this inner world. That this turn-of-the-century Viennese chef d'oeuvre was indeed the result of desperation at being unable to change the course of the external world and represented an effort to make up this deficiency by a single-minded interest in the dark underworld, is attested to by the motto which Freud put at the beginning: Virgil's line "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo " ("If I cannot move heaven, I will stir up the underworld"). This motto was a most succinct suggestion that turning inward toward the hidden aspects of the self was due to a despair that it was no longer within one's ability to alter the external world or stop its dissolution; that therefore the best one could do was to deny importance to the world at large by concentrating all interest on the dark aspects of the psyche.

Bettelheim's text may be reread as a statement on Schoenberg's new music with but a few changes of words in these passages — substituting "Schoen-

berg" for "Freud," "atonality" for "psychoanalysis," "Erwartung, " for example, for "The Interpretation of Dreams "; and introducing historically significant musical categories (such as "the emancipation of dissonance" or "the dissolution of the tonal system") instead of psychoanalytical terms. The underlying sociocultural analysis and the central idea of introspection as the primary figure of thought characterize the origin and the structure both of Freud's psychoanalytical theory and of Schoenberg's atonal compositions. Thus, with an identical social and historical accentuation, "Freud's Vienna" could also be named "Schoenberg's Vienna," just as philosophers rightly call it "Wittgenstein's Vienna" and art historians could claim it to be "Schiele's Vienna."

Schoenberg's foundation of the Viennese atonality as a new paradigm for a contemporary music, besides being embedded in a music-historical process, was indeed the reflection of a very specific and problematic historical, social, cultural, and psychical situation in Vienna around 1900. Schoenberg's music is at once a direct expression and reflecting mirror of this situation and, for some exceptional moments, its anticipation: it is at once a subject of this state of mind and its complex symbolic representation. And its most general principle seems to be the gesture that Bruno Bettelheim named "introspection" — the concentration on the "inner world," its exploration, reflection, and manifestation. Ernst Bloch would later characterize this principle as "der interne Weg " (the internal way) — "der interne Weg, auch Selbstbegegnung genannt, die Bereitung des inneren Worts, ohne die aller Blick nach aussen nichtig bleibt, und kein Magnet, keine Kraft, das innere Wort auch draussen anzuziehen, ihm zum Durchbruch aus dem Irrtum der Welt zu verhelfen. "^[3] Elsewhere I have related this thought to the gesture with which Schoenberg in an oft-quoted aphorism of 1910 characterizes the creative act.^[4] In this Fragment, to use a Romantic term, art is defined — and I paraphrase Schoenberg — as the "cry of despair uttered by those who experience at first hand the fate of mankind." Artists are seen as sensitive individuals "who hurl themselves in among the moving wheels, to understand how it all works." They open their eyes — they "open them wide" — "to tackle what must be tackled" so as to grasp the world and its mechanisms. But, most important, they "often close their eyes, in order to perceive things incommunicable by the senses, to envision within themselves the process that only seems to be in the world outside. The world revolves within — inside them: what bursts out is merely the echo — the work of art."^[5]

I am interested in what I have called the specific gesture, or figure of thought, contained in these three statements (by Bettelheim, Bloch, and, in particular, Schoenberg) and their three layers. The first layer betrays desperation about the "external world," an attempt to intervene, and the experience of one's inability to change its dissolution; in a second layer we find a turning inward, an introspection, and the stipulation that there

is an inner world that is intact — unhurt and intact in spite of everything, and therefore superior; and, finally, we have a third layer: the artistic outburst, the figure of the Durchbruch (breakthrough) — the work of art as the utopian message, confronting the "world" with truth — that is, spiritual truth. It seems to me not only that this figure of thought is Schoenberg's most fundamental aesthetic creed — a creed deeply rooted in European middle-class culture and nineteenth-century history — but that this intellectual gesture can serve as a metaphorical characterization of his life and work.

In parentheses, and briefly: The term Durchbruch is familiar as a representational category in musical criticism, in particular since Adorno's Mahler monograph; the term mediates art form with what Adorno called the Weltlauf, the course of the world.^[6] But it certainly goes back to nineteenth-century compositional strategies and was probably introduced into the critical vocabulary for music by Paul Bekker in his book on Mahler, dating from 1920.^[7] And it should be noted that both Ernst Bloch and Schoenberg himself use this energetic term to characterize the creative situation — Bloch in the sentence quoted above — the Durchbruch of the "inner word" to the world "outside" — and Schoenberg in his well-known statement of 1910 that with the George-Lieder he was "conscious of having broken through every restriction of a bygone aesthetic."^[8]

Schoenberg's quest for contemporaneity in his art can be concentrated first in the question of how to realize artistically the paradigmatic Durchbruch; this question governs his search for a pertinent musical language. His quest for contemporaneity can be concentrated second in the question of what — of, in other words, the goal of this strategy; this governs his search for meaning. To illustrate this vague general statement I will use three images from different periods of Schoenberg's life: a pictorial image for "Schoenberg's Vienna" (notice the genitivus possessivus! ), a linguistic image for "Schoenberg in Berlin," and a musical image for "Schoenberg in America." In my understanding of this life's work and its historical place, the first period sets the fundamentum. I will therefore devote considerably more time and space to Schoenberg's "project Vienna" than to "Berlin" or "America."

Schoenberg's Vienna

Shortly after World War I Darius Milhaud visited Schoenberg in his Mödling home. Decades later he still vividly recalled a visual impression:

We had coffee in a dining room, the walls of which were hung about with Schoenberg's paintings. Faces and eyes, eyes, eyes everywhere!"^[9]

This experience can be corroborated by a number of images: an amateur photo of a wall from the 1974 Schoenberg exhibition in the Vienna Secession displaying Schoenberg paintings; a photo of Schoenberg sitting in his Brentwood home in front of a wall hung with self-portraits;^[10] one of the self-portraits from 1910; and the Red Gaze, also from 1910.^[11] All of these paintings display Schoenberg's central pictorial idea: the human being's existence concentrated in open eyes — eyes of a specific intensity, direct, active, burning, confronting, questioning.^[12]

Iconologically these faces resemble and at the same time differ from Edvard Munch's famous Scream, with its expression — in lines and eyes — of defensiveness and angst.^[13] A particularly telling difference is that Schoenberg's portraits depict isolated individuals, concentrating them in their open eyes, whereas Munch's screaming face and body are shown within a realistic context of landscape and other background figures.

For me Schoenberg's "eyes" are pictorial realizations of the first layer of his artistic creed of 1910, eyes "wide open" as the "cry of despair" of the isolated individual, the artist attempting to grasp "world" and its mechanics, eyes wide open so as to "understand how it all works." These are eyes that are letting "world" enter — eyes, too, that leave the artist almost defenseless.

And I recall Schoenberg's remark, late in life, to Halsey Stevens: ". . . what painting meant to me. In fact, it was the same to me as making music." A painter friend of mine insists that these eyes are in fact "sounding," that they have an almost musical quality. The painted "cry of despair" can be aurally perceived. Indeed, there seems to be a strong connection between eye and ear in Schoenberg's perception of his world; seeing "world" and hearing "world" are linked, almost identical.^[14] Schoenberg once remarked that a professional painter would always be able to express the entire person through the eyes, whereas Schoenberg himself, as an amateur painter, felt that his capacity in this field was limited, the "eyes" being primarily confined to representing only one side — that is, emotions, the expressive inwardness of their subject. That may well be true. But the active, confronting directness of these eyes indicates to me, in addition, a reflecting, critical quality, reflection as the basis for a critical distance, an assessment of both world and self.

The second level of Schoenberg's aphorism — close the eyes and listen to the world within — calls to mind Hegel's definition of the lyric:

In lyric . . . it is feeling and reflection which draw . . . the objectively existent world into themselves and live it through their own inner element, and only then, after the world has become something inward, is it grasped and expressed in words. In contrast to the spread of epic, lyric has contracted concentration [Zusammengezogenheit ] for its principle.^[15]

Schoenberg's 1910 aphorism is like an expressionistic specification of this general perspective on the lyric; even the vocabulary is strikingly similar. Lyrical introspection is Schoenberg's Viennese answer to the artist's inability any longer to embrace and grasp the "world."

This introspection could be demonstrated in compositional terms. Strategies as applied to Schoenberg would include the antimonumental, antisymphonic poetics of the "critical years" around 1910; his speaking out against the representation of the "world" in Mahler's symphonies, his pointed withdrawal from the large genres and large, complicated formal constructions of the Viennese and German tradition; his rejection of the symphony, symphonic poem, and oratorio (this impulse would return later, but both the oratorio Die Jakobsleiter and the opera Moses und Aron would remain fragments). Rather would there be a predominance of lyrical genres such as lied and character piece. The subject of Viennese atonality around 1910 is a lyrical one. There are a chamber symphony for solo instruments (op. 9), a string quartet (op. 10), lieder (opp. 14 and 15), lyrical piano pieces (opp. 11 and 19), character pieces for orchestra (op. 16), and the mono drama Erwartung.^{[ 16]}

Hegel's Zusammengezogenheit (contracted concentration) as a compositional category quite obviously coincides with Schoenberg's, Webern's, and even Berg's seemingly short pieces from around 1910, those intense moments of inwardness that are in fact contracted, compressed long ones. Erwartung is the paradigmatic work, and Marie's death in Wozzeck is its concentrated reflection. I could demonstrate similar strategies in compositional and dramaturgical details. Take, as one example only, the light-and-storm scene at the center of Die glückliche Hand. Schoenberg's stage directions instruct the Man to act "as if" the crescendo of light and storm originates in himself; in other words, the events of the outer world are mere projections of an inner world.

It is illuminating to note, in this context, that Schoenberg's lieder belong to a very specific period in his compositional output — namely, the period from his early works to the freely atonal ones: that is, the time leading up to World War I. From the 1920s onward Schoenberg abandoned the genre of the intimate musical lyric, and his later oeuvre, his vocal music in particular, is located beyond the realm of the lyric as a paradigm of contemporary thought.

Among Schoenberg's numerous self-portraits from around 1910 one painting is of specific interest for our discussion of inwardness as the second layer. It is the well-known Self-Portrait from Behind, painted in 1911.^[17] The composer is walking, obviously on a sidewalk, arms crossed behind the body, holding a walking stick and a cap (it does not, unfortunately, seem to be a sketchbook); the shadow shows that the sun is behind him. The gesture of the moving body suggests that the walker is concentrating, meditating,

Fig. 12.
Schoenberg, sketch for Self-Portrait from Behind. Reproduced courtesy of
Lawrence Schoenberg.

thinking. One particular aspect of the genesis of this painting interests me at this point. There is a pencil sketch, a drawing, that precedes the oil painting (see figure 12).^[18] Here the artist is walking in the inner city, approaching an intersection with people and traffic. We see tall houses, two streetcars, a Fiaker, and two women and another man, either going in the opposite

direction or crossing. Though the artist is already isolated in the sketch, an important decision is made in the step from sketch to final painting to exclude reality, the "world outside" — or, viewed positively, to concentrate on the isolated individual and, with that, and within the context of the Viennese "psyche," on the problem, the crisis, of the Self. Thus the genesis of the self-portrait follows Bloch's "inner way."

The third layer of Schoenberg's artistic creed is concerned with the breakthrough of the work of art from its inner existence to the world outside. This step entails the question of representation or communication. Schoenberg's problem seems to lie in the finding, or defining, of the message or goal of his art; in a letter to Rudolf Kolisch he refers to "what it is " overriding the "how" of artistic communication.^[19] During these Vienna years, the need to go ahead, to walk, and the direction of the path seem clear; what is not clear, at this point, are the ends (the quasi-Nietzschean "the new man" in Schoenberg's Harmonielehre defines them in an abstract manner). In the words of the Archangel Gabriel in Die Jakobsleiter, "Whether right or left, forward of backward, uphill or down, one must go without asking what lies behind or ahead."^[20]

There are well-known compositional strategies to realize the Durchbruch and to communicate the message "from within," particularly those strategies related to the nineteenth-century symphonic plot archetype. These include not only formal processes but structural dispositions as well. Schoenberg made use of such strategies throughout his career. Characteristic of his Viennese free atonal period, however, is the uncertainty about the "what" of the artwork, the final destiny of the artist's engagement.

The early Gurrelieder defines the grandiose climax of the work's massive choral ending as "Panic" nature; it is, to use Rudolf Stephan's term, "Weltanschauungsmusik " in the post-Gründerzeit spirit, deeply influenced by prevailing ideas from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.^[21] Mahler's Third Symphony seems to indicate a similar, though more sophisticated, philosophical stance. Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, with its purely aesthetic goal of a new musical language ("Ich löse mich in tönen " — I dissolve myself in sounds), characterized with Stefan George as "luft von anderem planeten" (air from another planet), combines its aestheticism with the proclamation of the artist as a prophetic voice at the climax of the last movement: "Ich bin ein dröhnen nur der heiligen stimme" (I am only a rumble of the holy voice). The monodrama Erwartung then ends with a utopian gesture toward an unknown and uncertain future. The Woman's last words are "Ich suchte. . . .," which close without identifying, or allowing us to identify, what she is searching for. And the orchestral wedge with which the two lines disappear in the highest as well as deepest registers — breaking off, not ending — leaves the final musical motion wide open; the "what" remains unspecified indeed. Ernst Bloch would call this gesture "Sich ins Blaue hinein bauen" (to

build oneself into the unknown future); it appears here, at the open end of Erwartung, as a similar searching for "the true, the real, where the merely actual disappears"^[22] without the certainty of the "incipit vita nova." What remains at this point is the artist's reflection of his own situation: his being an object only of the world's dissolution (for which a particular sensitivity must have existed in the capital of the fading Hapsburg empire), limited to an expressive, perhaps prophetic, statement but unable to offer a goal, let alone any advice for actually changing the course of the external world. The open eyes — the orchestral wedge — "ich suchte . . ." — in search of meaning.

Here Schoenberg's Self-Portrait from Behind can again come into play. I should like to make a few iconographical remarks — quite incomplete, given the complex history of this image. I will not even touch on the gothic figures from behind, or the baroque repousseurs, or Tischbein's Goethe at the Window in Rome — to name just a few more distant examples. But the nineteenth-century history of the Rückenfigur can be illuminating for my purpose. And certainly Caspar David Friedrich must be mentioned. I offer three examples: Friedrich's Traveler Looking over the Sea of Fog, painted in 1818; Woman in Front of the Setting Sun, also from 1818; and the later Evening Landscape with Two Men, from the early 1830s.^[23]

Depicted are isolated back-view figures resting before a silent landscape, preferably in the twilight. They are alone, solitary, sometimes in pairs, confronting nature, sometimes as though sanctified by the spectacle of nature. It is an important formal quality of the Rückenfigur in general that the back view has the tendency to draw the beholder into the canvas, tempting the beholder to assume the protagonist's place. The traditional scholarly interpretation of Friedrich's paintings, renewed by Jens Christian Jensen, stresses the unifying quality of the silent conversation with nature and includes the beholder in this assessment:

These figures do not so much stand in front of the picture, they are part of the picture. Man and nature meet: the divine universe unfolds in the tableau of nature, it manifests itself in transcendental infinity. . . . The individual's solitude is replaced by the fusion of contemplation, visibility and thought, the arrival of the godly in the infinite and the entrance of man into this unearthly realm. One might generally say that Friedrich's back-view figures fulfilled a demand which he himself called perhaps the greatest demand on the artist: "Thus it is the artist's great, and possibly greatest, merit to stimulate the viewer spiritually and arouse thoughts, feelings, and sensations."^[24]

This reflects the Romantic quest for the unity of man and creation, the traditional interpretation of Friedrich's Rückenfiguren already expressed by his contemporaries, Carl Gustav Carus in particular; further, this interpretation extends its claim of a unifying experience of "man and nature"

to include the beholder too (the perspective on the viewer is already present in Friedrich's own statement as quoted above by Jensen). It views the beholder as being drawn, through the Rückenfigur, into the picture and thus becoming part of the divine tableau of nature. A new and contrasting, destabilizing, and more skeptical approach to Friedrich's landscape paintings, most recently developed by Joseph Leo Koerner, takes its criteria from another contemporaneous source, Heinrich von Kleist's essay on Friedrich, published jointly with the dialogical review of a Friedrich painting by Achim von Arnim and Clemens von Brentano. Koerner stresses the ambiguity of an experience of the paintings that tries to mediate the solitary back-view figure with the landscape it is facing. For Koerner this experience results not in unity but in separation. Or rather, in an explication of Romantic irony, the experience of both, figure and beholder, remains ambiguous, remains the motion of entering the picture and bringing figure and nature closer together, at the same time as it explicitly distances figure and beholder from nature because the separation between them seems unrevokable. "The Rückenfigur," says Koerner, "indeed draws the beholder into the canvas, making the landscape seem closer and more immediate, yet his otherness to landscape makes nature something experienced only from afar, from the standpoint of the Burger who has lost a natural bond to the land and seeks it now with his gaze. His gaze, which defines his surroundings not as his home but as something `beautiful,' distances him from the landscape."^[25] Schoenberg's Self-Portrait from Behind too depicts an individual distanced from, or distancing himself from, his surroundings.

I move on to two other examples from the rich arsenal of nineteenth-century Rückenfiguren, examples much closer to Schoenberg's time — namely, Edvard Munch's The Lonely Woman, a woodcut from 1896, and The Lonely Ones, a mezzotint engraving from 1899.^[26] Again, like Friedrich, the I and nature. But now the emphasis is clearly not on spiritual unity. Expressed in these works are isolation, loneliness, and alienation. If there is a pair, as in The Lonely Ones, the two are separated (despite the fact that in this painting the man seems ready to take a step toward the woman); this is most poignantly seen in the oil-painting version of The Lonely Ones from 1908, which is on loan in Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum.

Schoenberg's Self-Portrait from Behind, with its concentration on the self, the isolated subject, is in this pictorial tradition. Here, too, the structural, compositional strategy of the figure from behind seems to draw the beholder into the canvas, into moving along with the protagonist. But this protagonist is not confronting nature; rather, he is part of a modern city — a street scene, so to speak. And the man is not standing still, not resting in contemplation, but walking forward, even uphill, while thinking. This motion within the picture away from the beholder counteracts the possibility of an identification in a way different from Friedrich's Rückenfigur. The

beholder, even if seemingly drawn into the canvas, will never reach the protagonist, who will always be ahead; the beholder will be able to do no more than follow. In Schoenberg's self-portrait as the "upright walker" (I allude to Bloch's later metaphor of the "aufrechter Gang" and its ethical connotations),^[27] placed within the tradition of the nineteenth-century Rückenfigur, we have the artist presenting himself as a divinely inspired, moral leader; he proposes that he is leading to the new, to the realm of the future, or — in Schoenberg's words from his 1911 Harmonielehre, with its strong Nietzschean resonances — anticipating in art the "new man," announcing a renewed human world through the "new sound."^[28]

There is also another source for Schoenberg's identification of the isolated Rückenfigur with the modern artist. It is a popular one, and it gives his back-view figure a specifically musical and, as such, a specifically Viennese component. I refer to drawings depicting Ludwig van Beethoven walking through the streets of Vienna. Among them there is one from behind, an isolated figure whirling his walking stick; there is another one from the side, Beethoven wearing a hat, his arms crossed behind him (as are those of Schoenberg's pedestrian), with buildings in the background and a couple watching from the distance; and there is a third one, also with a hat, but again isolated and from behind. These drawings refer to Beethoven's well-known habit of composing, thinking in music, while walking in and around Vienna, lost in thoughts and in his sonorous inner world.^[29]

The image of the walking composer originated in the early nineteenth century; it became prominent within the emerging public middle-class culture of the big cities, and is first tied to Beethoven as its paradigmatic figure. It developed from there and became very popular toward the turn of the century, iconologically as part of the prevailing Beethoven reception, particularly in Vienna. Depicting a composer as a lonely pedestrian on the streets of the city placed him in the great Beethoven tradition; its was an act of legitimation — in our case, of self-legitimizing. Like the pictures of conducting musicians, the image also played its role in caricature and satire. There are pictures of Bruckner walking through Vienna with his umbrella (with little Hanslick, Kalbeck, and Heuberger following him), as there are of Bruckner conducting. We have Brahms, with his cigar and his heavy tread, on his way to the "Roter Igel" restaurant.^[30] And we continue into the age of photography with the late Brahms "from behind" (again with arms crossed behind him — a photo that was clearly staged and thus refers to Beethoven), and with Direktor Gustav Mahler walking around his Viennese Hofoper.^[31]

There is yet another source for the tradition of the reflective walker. I would very much like to think that Schoenberg knew this drawing. Unfortunately I cannot prove it. Wilhelm Busch, the north-German caricaturist, drew the old Schopenhauer "from behind," also with his arms crossed be-

hind the body, a stick in one hand, a hat in the other, with an almost bald head, and in addition with his beloved poodle.^[32] Despite its ironic distancing (already as a picture within a picture, as if it were a sheet of paper, torn out of a notebook), this drawing adds the philosophical thinker to our series of reflecting Rückenfiguren. Moreover, it adds the one philosopher who, both because he identified musical art with the universal principle "will" and because Wagner championed his ideas, meant so much to Schoenberg and his fellow composers at the turn of the century.^[33]

In his painting Schoenberg sees himself in the Viennese tradition after Beethoven,^[34] as the reflective artist leading his generation, at a critical moment within the historical process and through the paradigmatic art form music, into the future. The question, however, remains: Where is he leading to; what is the content of his message to be followed? The self-portrait poses the same questions as the compositional strategies of the Durchbruch. And again the questions remain open at this point.

It is obvious that almost all the "plots" of Schoenberg's free atonal works deal with the dark side of life and the psyche, with distress, disorder, even madness and destruction, and at best with no more than a longing for a positive solution:

— the Second String Quartet, op. 10, with its "nimm mir die Liebe — gib mir dein Glück" (take love from me and give me your bliss);

— the George Songs, op. 15, with the crisis of the "I" in no. 14, and the isolation and loneliness at the end;

— Erwartung, op. 17, with the experience of death, disorder, and madness, and the unanswered "Ich suchte . . .";

— Die glückliche Hand, op. 18, with its last words of pain and longing: "Und suchst dennoch. Und quälst dich, und bist ruhelos" (And nevertheless you search. And torture yourself, and are restless);

— Pierrot lunaire, op. 21, with the self-sacrifice and self-destruction of the artist in no. 11, the exact center of the twenty-one melodramas.

Thus at the end there is, as a final word for this stage, Pierrot the fool, the Hanswurst, or better, the ironic mask of the artist, who, knowing the truth, can survive only as a fool. Schoenberg's dedication letter of the Pierrot score to Zemlinsky, dated Christmas 1916, explicitly makes this identification:

It's banal to say that we're all such moonstruck fellows; yes, the poet thinks that we insist on trying to scrub the stubborn moonbeams from our clothes, as we pray to our crosses. We should be happy that we have wounds; because from them we gain something that helps us, and that is not to set much store by material things. Out of the contempt for our wounds comes the contempt for our enemies, comes our strength to sacrifice our lives for a moonbeam. We become suddenly solemn when we think about the Pierrot poem. But, for heaven's sake, isn't there more than the price of grain?^[35]

This immediately calls to mind Robert Schumann's illuminating remark on Berlioz and "the spirit of the day, which tolerates a burlesque Dies Irae. . . . For a few moments in an eternity, Poetry has put on the mask of irony to cover her grief-worn face. Perhaps the friendly hand of a genius may also one day remove it."^[36] Schumann's commentary, from around the beginning of the "historical century," rightly understands the artists's alienation as a historical phenomenon, as caused by history. But history did not bear out the mild optimism Schumann expresses at the end of the passage. On the contrary, what Schumann indicated was in fact the beginning of "modernism," the movement of an age for which alienation, suffering, and sacrifice were fundamental artistic experiences. Looking at the twentieth century and at Schoenberg's life, it seems that there were an eternity of grief and at best a few moments of Glück. Schoenberg's lifelong striving for the "new" in art and society can be seen as an attempt to overcome this situation, to enable the artist to "remove" the mask of irony, to anticipate eternal Glück in a world of peace and outer as well as inner freedom.

With this diagnosis as a background, a third look at Schoenberg's Self-Portrait from Behind may offer another perspective on the painting. (A premise for this would be to accept the actual realization of the various pictorial elements at face value as aesthetic qualities and to put in abeyance, for a moment at least, any doubts about Schoenberg's craftsmanship as a painter.) Wolfgang Rihm, in a conversation I had with him, insisted on the skeptical, "broken" quality of Schoenberg's portrait. Indeed, the walking composer does not, on the surface, show an optimistic, self-confident attitude, is not moving forward with his head held high as did Beethoven or even Brahms. Instead, he is walking with a stoop, the shoulders as if weighed down by a heavy burden. In addition, the coloring of the entire painting is subdued, a mixture of gray and pale blue. Acknowledging this self-presentation as a bundle of compositional strategies, I see these "shadings" as indications of the "nevertheless," "in spite of everything" in Schoenberg's creed, discussed earlier. Metaphorically, even if confronted by a wall of difficulties, the walker is moving on; even if the outward appearance seems to indicate a skeptical mood, he continues inwardly upright. Ernst Bloch's "aufrechter Gang" does not refer to a physical stance, but is an inner category, a moral imperative.

Thus "Schoenberg's Vienna" provides the basic structure for his life and work; "Vienna" poses the central questions. The 1920s would develop Schoenberg's "Vienna project" as an answer to this basic configuration.

Schoenberg in Berlin

Here I will be brief and extremely general. My starting point for an assessment of Schoenberg's work in the twenties, and of the twenties in general,

is Schoenberg's 1922-1923 correspondence with Vasili Kandinsky. In his letter of 20 July 1922 he writes:

I expect you know we've had our trials here too: famine! It really was pretty awful! But perhaps — for we Viennese seem to be a patient lot — perhaps the worst was after all the overturning of everything one has believed in. That was probably the most grievous thing of all.

When one's been used, where one's own work was concerned, to clearing away all obstacles often by means of one immense intellectual effort [Gewaltakt ] and in those 8 years found oneself constantly faced with new obstacles against which all thinking, all power of invention, all energy, all "idea" [Idee ], proved helpless, for a man for whom everything has been "idea," this means nothing less than the total collapse of things.^[37]

And it is at this point that Schoenberg introduces religion. The "overturning of everything one has believed in" refers not only to Schoenberg's pre-World War I artistic or aesthetic principles but to conditions of his human existence in general. The twenties, the decade after the collapse, were to be, or were intended to be, or had to be, a period of stabilization. (In addressing attempts at stabilization, I will not talk about concrete political and social aspects, though the term stabilization, probably first used by Adorno for music of the twenties, aims at bridging artistic and social matters.)

As for the artistic perspective, from our present view Schoenberg's formulation of rules governing composition — that is, the foundation of his twelve-tone method — is in its general historical signification an act of stabilization not unlike Stravinsky's neoclassicism or the younger Hindemith's neobaroque. But there was more than an artistic method at stake. In the wording of Schoenberg's letter to Kandinsky, the pure belief in "idea" had been falsified by history and therefore a much deeper and more concrete fundament had to be laid out. Schoenberg was aiming at a law, a unifying law for both life and art — that is, for his actual and real, as well as for his spiritual and artistic, existence.

I see his work of the 1920s following a double strategy. There is on the one hand the foundation and expanding application of his new method of composing. Retrospectively we witness a carefully designed approach, incrementally extending to include all genres, from the soloistic and monochromatic piano to different kinds of chamber ensembles to the large orchestra and the stage. There are, first, the piano works, opp. 23 and 25; there is, then, music for chamber ensemble: the Serenade, op. 24, Wind Quintet, op. 26, Suite (with piano), op. 29, String Quartet, op. 30; parallel, there are chamber ensembles plus voices, opp. 27 and 28; then comes the orchestral score, op. 31; and, finally, there is the stage work Von heute auf morgen, op. 32. (One remembers the sequence of genres around 1910: lied,

piano piece, orchestra piece, stage work; and one recalls the famous examples in music history: Beethoven's "new way" with piano and violin sonatas, piano variations, the Eroica symphony, then Fidelio; Schumann with the years of piano works, then the realm of song, the orchestral dimension, chamber music, oratorio, and opera; and Brahms with his careful approach to the grand symphony over more than two decades.) And there is, at the same time and running in parallel, Schoenberg's preparing for another dimension — namely, the realm of the artist as Homo religioso-politicus, the political prophet. This thread is represented by the text of Der biblische Weg, by some of the vocal pieces from opp. 28 and 35, and by the Hauptwerk — that is, Moses und Aron.

The cause for this double strategy and for the concretization of Schoenberg's artistic creed is to be found in the political conditions in 1920s Europe, especially in Germany and Austria; for Schoenberg in particular it is the growing threat of anti-Semitism. I see this development as follows. At the same time that Schoenberg was intensely working on the conceptual and practical stabilization of his art (following the collapse of the "project Vienna"), an eroding destabilization of his personal existence took place. The 1921 Mattsee experience^[38] and the offensive anti-Semitism he encountered in Berlin after being appointed Preussischer Kompositionslehrer questioned not only his artistic integrity but the very basis of his human existence; this sharpened his political mind as well as his awareness of being a Jew. The 1923 letters to Kandinsky reveal that Schoenberg had a clear vision of what Hitler and the Nazi movement were striving for: the exiling or even extermination of the Jews. I shall quote one paragraph only from his 4 May 1923 letter to Kandinsky:

But what is anti-Semitism to lead to if not to acts of violence? Is it so difficult to imagine that? You are perhaps satisfied with depriving Jews of their civil rights. Then certainly Einstein, Mahler, I, and many others, will have been got rid of. But one thing is certain: They will not be able to exterminate those much tougher elements thanks to whose endurance Jewry has maintained itself unaided against the whole of mankind for 20 centuries. For these are evidently so constituted that they can accomplish the task that their god has imposed on them: to survive in exile, uncorrupted and unbroken, until the hour of salvation comes!^[39]

This is a diagnosis and, in the second part of the passage, a program: to survive and to prepare for salvation. And this program was to be transformed into an artistic project. In the plot of Moses und Aron — that is, the Exodus — Schoenberg's project was to receive its first artistic realization. The metaphor for his program is to be found in an unpublished letter to Alma Mahler. Written on 19 January 1929, Schoenberg's letter refers to the scandal surrounding the 1928 premiere of the Variations for Orchestra, op.

31, with Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic. The central passage, in translation, reads as follows:

Since the scandal at Furtwängler's I have lost all joy and interest in living in Berlin. Berlin has had almost no other advantage for me, than that there are a good many people one does not need to see; at the same time it is possible to perform Wozzeck undisturbed. The latter privilege could not be transferred to me [the following image is untranslatable, so I continue in the original German] denn mit mir ist es ein Hakenkreuz: ich bin ein schuftiger, unverständlicher Jude.^[40]

The traumatic experience of a violent anti-Semitism is turned into a horrifying image, a metaphor of biting irony. Schoenberg's command of language forces together the popular everyday simplification of the Christian cross metaphor (colloquial sayings such as "Es ist schon ein Kreuz mit dir " or "Jeder hat halt sein Kreuz zu tragen ")^[41] with the Nazi Hakenkreuz, or swastika. This is similar on the surface to, but quite different in essence from, Brecht's song text about the swastika, with its cabaretlike tone: "das Kreuz hat einen Haken" (the cross has a catch to it). And Schoenberg's subsequent explanation of the metaphor is very carefully composed, combining a moral judgment ("schuftig" — that is, "rascally" or "mean") with an aesthetic one ("unverständlich" — that is, "incomprehensible," which certainly refers to the critical reception of his music).

Schoenberg's acts are metaphorical in a demonic way. A Jew, being persecuted by the Nazis, tacks their emblem, the swastika, on himself: "mit mir ist es ein Hakenkreuz. " But this ability of the victim to name, to denounce the torturer is intended to ban the threat, and bans it. The act of intellectual defense is a sign of spiritual victory. It is in this sense that I see Schoenberg's Hakenkreuz metaphor as the new decisive signature for his future life and work. It is reflected in his various serious attempts to devote his life and artistic activities to politics, to the foundation of a Jewish party, a Jewish state. And it is reflected in his Spätwerk, the late works. The case of Jewry becomes a central focus; artist and Jew are seen as identical. And the artwork must express this identification.

This is a dramatic change for the composer. The 1916 Pierrot letter to Zemlinsky, with its devotion of the artist's life to the moonbeam (as the image for artistic creation and spirituality), the proudness in being wounded — this Pierrot interpretation was still primarily concerned with artistic rejection and alienation. But now, in the 1920s, a new situation has arisen, one fundamentally much more dangerous: to be denied as a German, as a Homo politicus, as a human being. This is indeed an attack on his entire existence and becomes a question of life and death. And for Schoenberg, the political conservative and German musical nationalist, it is of the utmost importance that his membership in the great German cultural tra-

dition is threatened. The 1926 first version of the preface to the Satires, op. 28, is entitled "No longer a German" and addresses precisely this denial. Now it seems no longer possible to think in terms of a purely aesthetic creed. Out of this situation grows the new focus of Schoenberg's artistic production. It can be observed in his compositions with text, his choice of plots and topics, and his turning to his Jewish faith and to politics. All this governs his late work.^[42]

Schoenberg's late work utters the voice of Verbannung (exile) and of victory. Acts 1 and 2 of Moses und Aron, the only ones composed, end with Moses' spoken words: "O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt" (Oh word, that word that fails me). But these words are spoken to the most expansive, most expressive melody Schoenberg ever wrote, played in unison in the first and second violins. The melody is anticipatory, projecting something that still cannot be pronounced in words.

Schoenberg in America

As with "Berlin," I will be very brief. As is well known, Schoenberg's American output differs from that of the two European periods in various respects. One tendency defining the American works could be labeled classicism; the turn to traditional genres of the concert repertory, such as piano concerto or violin concerto, belongs here. And there are the works displaying a strong retrospective attitude: the Variations on a Recitative for Organ, op. 40, with their tonal orientation; or the Second Chamber Symphony, op. 38, begun in Vienna and only now completed. Here, too, belong the Brahms instrumentation and the German folk songs for a cappella choir, op. 49. Closely related to this group are the compositions with pedagogical intent: the Variations, op. 43, and the Suite in Old Style for String Orchestra. Besides those there are commissions such as the Prelude, op. 44 (originally for a projected Genesis film); even the Fourth String Quartet, op. 37, resulted from a commission. As a highly personal, intimate piece of chamber music, the String Trio, op. 45, stands isolated in this period; only the Fantasy for Violin with piano accompaniment, op. 47, comes close to the sphere and the language of the Trio. Central for the American period, however, are the religious and political compositions, which give the Spätwerk its unique physiognomy: Kol Nidre, op. 39, Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, op. 41, A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46, the works for choir, op. 50 (A, B, and C), and the continuing attempts to complete Moses und Aron. For my understanding of Schoenberg's life and work, it is in these works of a religious-political engagement that his path reaches its goal and fulfillment. It is no accident that Moderne Psalmen is his last word.

To characterize this Spätwerk it must suffice to concentrate on one work only. I take A Survivor from Warsaw as an example. In this, Schoenberg's

most explicitly political work, the composer uses his own prose text and concludes with the Jewish prayer "Schema Israel." As stated in the text itself, the seven-minute work is a memory of the one "moment," brief but loaded with history. It is constructed as the report of one surviving witness — that is, a story told in the first person — as a sequence of a preceding reflection and a following narration, the story's perspective alternating between direct reportage and more distant reporting. The work is, from the very beginning, directed toward the "grandiose moment" where the melody of the old prayer, the "forgotten creed," emerges out of the holocaust and transcends this situation of bestiality and desperation into a moment of political eschatology. The work ends with the hymnlike prayer, sung in unison, and does not return to the narration. This again is the Durchbruch. The grandiose moment of A Survivor is in line with the formal strategies mentioned earlier, connected to Gurrelieder, to op. 10, and to Erwartung. The Durchbruch here is in the same tradition indeed — but with a new and precise goal and statement. As with the Hakenkreuz metaphor, Schoenberg takes the position of the victim who will be victor.

Late style has been characterized by Goethe as "stufenweises Zurücktreten aus der Erscheinung" (stepwise retreat from the phenomenon) and "sich selbst historisch werden" (seeing oneself historically). Schoenberg's late style is not a "Zurücktreten." Schoenberg did not "paint the velvet in a symbolic manner only," as the old Goethe believed both he and Titian were doing ("Tizian, der den Samt nur symbolisch malte. ") Schoenberg's late style is a "Hineintreten" and an "Eintreten" in the twofold sense of the latter: "entering" or "facing," and "representing" or "standing for." But the older Schoenberg looks back at his own compositional career, sees himself historically, and "uses" formal strategies, textures, and stylistic elements of his expressionistic and his earlier twelve-tone periods for specific representational purposes.^[43] The first part of A Survivor, with its broken textures, "fields" of colors, and motivic fragments, its dispersed "shocks" and illustrative gestures, is very close to the textural principles of Erwartung. The second part, beginning with the triumphant entry of the prayer melody, displays stable textures, a cantus firmus, and a coherent melody with accompanying figures. Christian M. Schmidt here sees a historical perspective on Schoenberg's own development, a critical commentary by Schoenberg about his free-atonal period versus his twelve-tone composition. I believe that in addition there is a broader perspective.

First, this design represents Schoenberg's "quest for language," his concern and insistence that music be language — understandable, conceivable, communicable, able to express, to transport ideas. To me the prayer, the music of liberation and of salvation, is this language. It conveys a message; even if the words were not added, tone, texture, plot, formal position, and entry would deliver this message of liberation.

Second, there are several levels of presentation in the text itself, and there are three verbal languages being spoken: English (by the narrator), German (by the sergeant), and Hebrew (by the Jews, singing the Prayer). Even more pointedly, the Sergeant speaks in a Berlin dialect. This refers back directly to Schoenberg's experiences during the twenties and to the Hakenkreuz metaphor. And in the formal gesture of A Survivor with the prayer hymn at the end, the program from the 1923 letter to Kandinsky now seems fulfilled: "to survive in exile, uncorrupted and unbroken, until the hour of salvation comes!"

Schoenberg's late works, the Ode to Napoleon and A Survivor from Warsaw in particular, are the fulfillment of his "Vienna project"; here his early artistic creed finds its appropriate plot and realization. From this perspective the prayer at the end of A Survivor, music as "language" again, is the corrective to Moses' "word that fails me," since it is the fulfillment of the great anticipating melody that counteracts these words.

With this, in a sort of coda, I can return to the staring eyes and the walking artist. In his late Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen (Theses on the philosophy of history), completed in 1940, Walter Benjamin gives an interpretation of a 1920 painting by Paul Klee. Thesis IX reads as follows:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees only one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.^[44]

Here again are the staring eyes, again wide open, as we remember, and they certainly are "experiencing the fate of mankind." But, to be more precise, they are, in Benjamin's view, looking back, and they are looking at the debris of the world, viewing a catastrophic development of which they themselves are a part.

Benjamin's text gives a contaminated view of historical materialism and Jewish messianism.^[45] Within this conflation the collective and abstract power of the violent storm — that is, the view of "history" as an irreversible process — is Marxian. There is no subjective factor; the subject seems to remain powerless, reduced to an impulse of thought. But the notion of the

Paradise is Judaic: the storm, though blowing "irresistibly," comes from Paradise. One might want to assume that naming "Paradise" in this context already sends a signal of hope. (And Gershom Scholem in his commentary on thesis IX does exactly that, with a quasi-cyclical understanding of Benjamin's imagery.)^[46] But I do not see that a messianic appearance is mentioned in, or could be concluded from, Benjamin's text. The storm blows from Paradise toward the future; it blows, and continues to blow, over the remaining debris of the world, which has already reached Heaven and continues to grow; the angel has his back turned to the future, and the future is, at best, unknown and cannot be anticipated. There may be an emotional-intellectual impulse toward the future hidden behind the text, but the text itself does not allow for such an assumption. Though the storm blows, moves forward, the angel remains in a quasi-fixed position. This indicates to me that Benjamin's thesis IX indeed represents the "Dialektik im Stillstand" (dialectic at a standstill),^[47] a carefully designed position between the poles of political pessimism and spiritual optimism. The "Dialektik von Zukunft und Vergangenheit, von Messianismus und Eingedenken" (dialectics of future and past, of messianism and remembrance) that Peter Szondi refers to in his congenial essay on Benjamin^[48] is brought to a halt, as if frozen in stone. Benjamin's thought "looks" back to see the future, because only in the past, in its origin, is the utopian idea of the future preserved, preserved as an undistorted promise. For the present this image is perverted, obliterated, ruined.^[49] However, "[t]he angel would like to . . . make whole what has been smashed. But. . ." (Benjamin). A critical assessment comparing Benjamin's late text with his earlier essays would certainly acknowledge a touch of melancholy in this view, a melancholy^[50] born of skepticism, if not pessimism, created at the strange crossroads of hope and despair.

In sharp contrast, Schoenberg's message in A Survivor is decidedly messianic. It carries the positive image of the artist as leader into the future through all political and spiritual breakdowns and, as such, articulates an old-fashioned, individualistic, nineteenth-century optimism. Schoenberg's image remains the artist as the leader into the future, the walking composer, to be seen by his contemporaries only from behind. But now, toward the end of his life, the direction and goal of the walk are finally defined. The artist, now bound to his roots, is the political prophet. Thus Schoenberg maintains his Viennese artistic creed of the Durchbruch to the better world, now as the anticipation of paradise, confined to his Jewish constituency. The Viennese creed for an aesthetic culture is redefined as the quest for a political culture based on religious grounds. As such Schoenberg's late work and word are not Leverkühn's Dr. Fausti Weheklag and the "Zurücknahme," they are not the revocation of the Ninth Symphony. The Durchbruch in A Survivor, the "grandiose moment," is political eschatology — almost another, a modern "Ode to Joy," born out of the deepest desperation and terror of

the twentieth century. The truly conservative Viennese individualist has become a commentator on matters of world politics. Composing and proposing this, the artist is back walking on the street, no longer lonely and isolated, but singing and strolling with his contemporaries. Will he be heard, and can he be understood?