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?