CONTEXTS

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

Leon Botstein

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

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two
Assimilation and the Emancipation of Historical Dissonance

Alexander L. Ringer

Few twentieth-century composers, if any, have been as closely examined by musical theorists in recent decades as Arnold Schoenberg, whose very name invariably evokes the "method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another" that in the wake of the World War II exerted such startling fascination on countless musical minds desperate for relief from their nagging creative malaise. Why, however, of all the great talents of his generation this largely self-taught descendant of a modest Austro-Hungarian Jewish family should have been the one to alter the course of twentieth-century music in such decisive ways remains a rather obvious, though admittedly complex, question that has hardly been seriously asked, let alone meaningfully answered. Indeed, were it not for some strikingly self-revelatory statements in Schoenberg's own published writings, what enabled him to pursue his lonely path so doggedly against all historical and purely aesthetic odds might yet be shrouded in even greater mystery than it undoubtedly is.

Talk of spiritual development seems rather beside the issue where an unreconstructed purist is concerned whose philosophical outlook barely changed in the course of a long creative life. The implication of some kind of steady evolution in Schoenberg's dauntless quest for truth simply does not square with his oft-expressed, unshakable, and infallibly proven faith in the essential immutability of all fundamental precepts. Organic change was a central aspect of his creative approach, sustained as much by the precipitous events of the disturbing times in which he lived as by that intangible inner necessity he felt compelled to obey. By the same token, however, that very quality served to reinforce the overarching sense of lawful unity at the heart of all of his varied artistic responses to a world in turmoil.

A relentless drive for unity and a well-nigh ascetic passion for self-imposed restraint emerged early on as hallmarks of Schoenberg's artistic per-

sonality. "At the very start I knew that restriction could be achieved by two methods, condensation and juxtaposition," he recalled in 1948.^[1] Seven years earlier he had conluded his University of California lecture titled "Composition with Twelve Tones" with the suggestion that "when Richard Wagner introduced his Leitmotiv — for the same purpose as that for which I introduced my Basic Set — he may have said: `Let there be unity.'"^[2] So consistently did this deeply embedded creed determine his work and thought that already in 1937 he felt compelled to tell an American audience: "I have not discontinued composing in the same style and in the same way as at the very beginning. The difference is only that I do it better now than before; it is more concentrated, more mature."^[3] But then, he had long since reached the conclusion that truly creative visions will always be conceived "in harmony with the Divine Model."^[4]

Schoenberg's absolute commitment to rigorous discipline and structural unification became in a sense a condition of inner survival, given the disquieting climate of psychological and social dissonance in which he grew up and spent the first quarter century of his productive life. What distinguished him more than anything else from other intellectually and artistically gifted contemporaries of similarly assimilated Jewish background was his remarkable ability to turn such shared sociocultural liabilities into decisive creative assets. Thus it was that his uncanny "emancipation" of the insidious "historical dissonance" affecting all but the most insensitive of "modern" Jews brought to full fruition what the much heralded emancipation of musical dissonance had merely promised: a seemingly inescapable element of perpetual unresolved tensions, unconditionally accepted as such, now furnished the liberating ethical wherewithal for aesthetic exploits of an entirely new order.

That this crucial feature has been so sorely neglected is no doubt due at least in part to the decidedly Gentile nature of historical musicology, a scholarly daughter of Romanticism raised on philological models at the behest of a thousand years of Christian musical civilization. Assimilated Jewish music historians, beginning with Gustav Mahler's close friend Guido Adler, readily fell into line, if only because the study of a Christian art did seem to call for Christian expertise and perspectives. Christianity had, after all, seen to it that Jews remained excluded from European musical life well into the nineteenth century. A musical past that was for all practical purposes judenrein hardly cried out for any intrinsically Jewish input. Then, too, historians almost by definition rely extensively on documentary evidence. Although Schoenberg's published essays do offer occasional hints regarding his general state of mind in certain contexts, they reveal little about his day-to-day preoccupations, let alone his more intimate musings. He did, of course, write copious notes to himself and from time to time made a personal matter the subject of a letter to a trusted friend. His dramatic ex-

change of letters with Vasili Kandinsky in April 1923, on the other hand, forms an exception in almost every way. For one, it reveals his profound consciousness of the assimilated Jew's historical dilemma in unusually forceful terms. Above all, however, the fearful predictions of the fate awaiting those unable or unwilling to draw the inescapable conclusions from their ominously dissonant existence turned out to be terrifyingly prophetic.

"What made young Arnold run" in this direction in the first place can only be inferred from what is generally known about turn-of-the-century Jewish Vienna in conjunction with the more specific conditions of his maturation into a feeling, thinking human being who was resolutely oriented toward action. Attempts to dig below the obvious surface are beset with interpretive pitfalls. Apart from the need for a host of "objective" data, any such attempt calls for a measure of empathy with Jewish culture, religious as well as secular, that is apt to elude even otherwise highly qualified scholars, for most of them are accustomed to dealing with musical works of art primarily in splendid isolation, as structural entities answering only to their own intrinsic laws. Musical anthropologists recognized long ago that as a form of symbolic behavior music is always inextricably bound up with the sociocultural factors that engender and nurture it; traditional musicology by contrast still prefers to leave "extraneous" considerations of this kind to general historians with a taste for the arts, whose comments may or may not be incorporated into the requisite erudite footnotes. Nor should it be forgotten that academic musicology treated the twentieth century until quite recently as a wayward stepchild preferably left to the care of professional theorists, not a few of whom turned out to be "note counters" of the sort that incurred Schoenberg's repeated wrath. Last but by no means least, anything smacking even remotely of Geistesgeschichte is bound to get short shrift this side of the Atlantic, where the historical falsifications and vilifications of National Socialist and Stalinist ideologists are still keenly remembered. As a historical phenomenon, however, Arnold Schoenberg, a victim as well as vocal opponent of these aberrations, can hardly be understood without proper reference to the humanistic premises and contributions of Geistesgeschichte. Surely, as long as familiarity with New England transcendentalism or American individualism is considered indispensable for a meaningful appraisal of Charles Ives and his particular mission, Arnold Schoenberg, his exact contemporary and eventual fellow American, deserves equally serious attention in equivalent Jewish terms.

The Schoenberg household differed very little from many others established in Vienna during the second half of the nineteenth century by Jews from the far-flung reaches of the empire seeking a better future in the big city. Though for the most part traditionally religious — Arnold Schoenberg's ancestry included rabbis as well as cantors — Vienna's Jews nevertheless succumbed quite readily to the lures of assimilation and, in more extreme

cases, equated the desired opening to Austrian society at large with wholesale renunciations — indeed, denunciations — of Jewish religious practices or customs. What religious observances Samuel Schönberg had endeavored to maintain apparently fell into disuse soon after his untimely death. His son's later helplessness in dealing with Hebrew texts would suggest that he lacked even that minimum of Jewish education generally accorded twelve-year-old boys in preparation of their first public reading from the Torah — the central part of the bar mitzvah ceremony, whereby they become full-fledged members of their religious community. Whether Arnold Schoenberg ever assumed his religious duties in this time-honored manner is still an open question. For all we know, his "confirmation" involved something like the family party described by Arthur Schnitzler, whose "modern" parents went out of their way to behave "like everybody else."^[5] Unfortunately, "everybody else" did not necessarily respond positively to those earnest strivings of a minority but recently emerged from centuries of involuntary separateness. Rising fears of "unfair competition" and, far worse, rumors about an alleged Jewish plot to bastardize the Aryan race (that mythical brainchild of post-Romantic apostles of purity touting misbegotten evolutionistic theories), not to speak of the still festering blood libel, continued to preclude broadly based social acceptance. The very improvements in the legal and material position of Central European Jewry, tokens of outward progress, also contained the seeds of ultimate destruction.

Arnold Schoenberg was barely seven years old when the German Reichstag seriously debated a proposal to rescind substantial portions of Jewish civil rights that had been granted less than two decades earlier. In imperial Russia the assassination of Czar Alexander II unleashed a chain of murderous pogroms. For who but those unholy servants of the Antichrist could have committed this heinous deed? Vienna witnessed the realization of one of Richard Wagner's fondest wishes when hundreds of Jews were among the many victims of the fire that engulfed the Ringtheater during the sold-out second performance of Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. Wagner, of course, had imagined a Jewish holocaust at a performance of Lessing's Nathan, the Wise.^[6] Still, he might have been cheered a few months after the Vienna disaster by the news that Dresden, the city where he had nurtured his incipient hatred of everything Jewish, was hosting the founding congress of organized political anti-Semitism. Actually, at that point Wagner himself began to have second thoughts, albeit too late. The aging sorcerer had clearly lost control, and his eager apprentices, boosted by the "scientific" claims of the new racism, lost no time setting in motion the notorious Antisemitenstreit of Berlin's leading historians. Eventually, not to be left behind, ranking French army officers staged the bogus treason trial of Captain Henri Dreyfus that turned the Viennese journalist and playwright Theodor Herzl, once like Gustav Mahler a proud member of Vienna's pan-German Wagner-

Association, into the progenitor of modern Zionism. Other Jewish activists meanwhile carried their fight against domestic anti-Semitism straight into the Austrian political arena. One of their most prominent leaders, Josef Bloch, even won a libel suit against a dangerous agitator fittingly answering to the name Rohling, who had publicly asserted that Jews killed Christians as a sacred duty mandated by the Talmud.

The novel phenomenon of Jews fighting back was hardly lost on Arnold Schoenberg, who heard the pros and cons passionately debated in his favorite coffeehouses no less than at home in Leopoldstadt. Here the events of this seemingly endless drama created far greater concern than, say, the unexpected failure of a Schnitzler play. Those hardworking Jewish residents were anything but strangers to anti-Semitic harassment, in particular from that traditionally bigoted section of the petite bourgeoisie that Adolf Hitler later gratefully remembered for its contribution to his early awareness of the pernicious Jewish influence on Austrian society. Hitler shrewdly linked that crucial awakening with his consuming hatred for the Hapsburg monarchy, which, unlike its Russian counterpart, was happy to take advantage of the Jewish population's talents and far-flung connections, the very qualities that had induced Joseph II in Mozart's day to issue his famous Toleranzpatent for the benefit of a limited number of economically "useful" Jews. Seen in this light, Arnold Schoenberg's occasional nostalgia for the Austrian imperial house betrayed a healthy dose of political realism rather than the simple reactionary tendencies often ascribed to him by left-leaning critics who view the world pointedly through non-Jewish glasses.

Socially suspended, as it were, between the interests of the state and the animosity of many of its citizens, not to mention that of the extremely powerful Roman Catholic clergy, Austria's Jews, while still barred from state employment by imperial decree, contributed far more than their proportional share to the free professions, whether medical, legal, literary, or artistic. But their very successes in these and a number of other walks of life encouraged a false sense of security that proved their undoing in the long run. In the meantime, though, growing numbers of conservative businessmen as well as radical intellectuals celebrated the consummation of their assimilation by deserting the Jewish community altogether. Some, like the famous Adler brothers, embraced socialism as a new religion that promised the elimination of all social distinctions, including those between Christians and Jews. Others, with more serious spiritual concerns but woefully ignorant of their own religious heritage, persuaded themselves that Judaism was too old-fashioned for the modern world and accepted Protestantism as a viable alternative to the official state church. Still, as Heinrich Heine put it when Jews were first led to believe that their future depended on rapid assimilation, if not outright conversion: Jewishness is not easily "washed off." This well-documented truth caused a few to carry the gospel of progress so

far as to agree in essence with Richard Wagner's conclusion, first stated in the final sentence of his "Judaism in Music," that it would be in the best interests of all concerned if the Jewish people once and for all vanished from the earth.

Arnold Schoenberg became a Protestant in 1898, presumably under the influence of his Lutheran friend Walter Pieau. However, this official act changed his overt religious behavior as little as did his solemn declaration of returning to the Jewish fold as a refugee in Paris thirty-five years later. Important Christian holidays had long since become festive occasions of a general nature, and nonbelievers, too, hoped for universal peace on earth. Thus nearly ten years after his baptism Schoenberg still bypassed the Gospels in favor of a nineteenth-century poem in his musical appeal for Friede auf Erden. Clearly none of the religious institutions of his time, let alone their often rather self-glorious representatives, proved a match for the spiritual challenges this genuine believer derived from his close reading of the Hebrew Bible, albeit in Martin Luther's German translation. Thrice alienated, much like his mentor Gustav Mahler — as a Jew among Austrians, a Christian among Jews, and a musical secessionist among his peers — he actually never ceased to identify with the manifest destiny of those ancient wanderers in the desert to whom, as he explained to his cousin Malvina at the mature age of sixteen, all civilization owed its moral and social foundations.^[7]

Earlier in the century, during those heady post-Napoleonic days when Central Europe's Jews expected confidently to join the majority culture, Heinrich Heine was only one brilliant representative of his generation to elect conversion as a token of sociopolitical progress. Some, among them Felix Mendelssohn, were taken to the baptismal font by anxious parents hoping to protect their youngsters from continuing anti-Jewish abuse. Others, like Adolf Bernhard Marx, turned Lutheran only after years of earnest soul searching. Typically, though, both Marx and Mendelssohn, who later became close friends, always regarded their Jewish roots with pride, drawing heavily upon the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, for lifelong inspiration. With his best-known work, Moses, Marx in fact anticipated Schoenberg not merely in writing his own oratorio text but, interestingly enough, also in allowing its composition a prolonged incubation period. Like Schoenberg, too, Marx was a prolific theorist and teacher whose devotion to the cause of Bach and Beethoven shaped the musical outlook of many a German composer. It was in fact the discovery of Mozart's Requiem and Handel's Messiah that induced him to study the Bible seriously for the first time, which ultimately led to his baptism — against the wish of a loving father who, despite his own distinctly rationalist leanings, remained loyal to his Jewish heritage. It is no wonder that under these by no means rare circumstances the younger Marx continued to be guided as much by "the

genuine message of Judaism" as by the spirit of the Gospels,^[8] the twin foundations of Schoenberg's early thought as well. And Schoenberg surely knew Marx's pioneering Beethoven studies, the first to stress the "Zug nach dem Ganzen " (drive toward the whole) as a central trait of all large-scale musical structures.^[9]

By the end of the nineteenth century, at any rate, it may well have looked as if

cultural commonality and occasional contact had shaped a common basis for the Jewish minority and the non-Jewish majority. Under these conditions the change of religion was no leap over an abyss. To many Jews, especially in the higher social, intellectual, and artistic circles, the conversion to Christianity marked the completion of their incorporation into the dominant culture, in the shaping of which they took part.^[10]

The majority population did not always see it that way, however, treating in particular Jews who had undergone baptism "without any religious experience" with a good deal of suspicion, if not outright cynicism. And lingering conflicts of this sort, personal as well as collective, inevitably reinforced the Jewish sense of existential dissonance, with often devastating consequences. Budding intellectuals unequipped to cope in more traditional terms often retreated into seemingly unassailable radical positions, while others, the precocious genius Otto Weininger among them, were driven to suicide once their irrational public expressions of self-hatred failed to provide tangible relief. Max Brod's protégé, the talented young composer Alfred Schreiber, did remain faithful to his Jewish background. But the dissonant clash of his hopes with the reality of the Jewish situation proved too much, and he, too, put an abrupt end to his budding creative life.

With growing interest Arnold Schoenberg, ever constructive in thought and deed, watched the rash of Jewish political activity — Josef Bloch's fight for official recognition of Austria's Jews as one of the empire's many minorities no less than Theodor Herzl's relentless efforts on behalf of an independent Jewish state in the biblical land of old. Ultimately he made his choices unswayed by any of the principals in the great debate surrounding the "Jewish question." Given the Viennese cultural scene of the early twentieth century, his personal and professional contacts naturally involved many individuals of Jewish descent whose thinking, speech, and general attitudes inevitably reflected the early impact of Jewish lore and customs, if only in their propensity for self-deprecating Jewish jokes. In short, one way or another Schoenberg confronted his Jewish origins every day. Had he wished to look the other way, the outside world would have interfered, though perhaps not always as brutally as in the summer of 1921 at Mattsee, the Austrian resort town that barred Jews under the new political order as it had under the old. Characteristically, Schoenberg refused the requested

proof that he and his family were proper Christians. Instead he accepted a Jewish friend's offer of sanctuary in Traunkirchen, where a surprised Josef Rufer first learned of the new method of composing with twelve tones. One wonders therefore whether the composer's rejoinder that this ensured Germany's musical supremacy for another hundred years did not in those circumstances contain a strong admixture of irony. At any rate, given the specific nature of the twelve-tone technique, it could hardly have referred to Wagner or even Brahms, whose "progressiveness" Schoenberg was yet to discover. More likely he had the melodic-rhythmic outlook of the same Johann Sebastian Bach in mind whom Joachim Quantz once cited in support of his prediction that German music would always be based on a mixed, as opposed to a uniquely national, style. Beethoven, the true executor of Bach's musical bequest as well as of that of the French Revolution, certainly proved the point. Schoenberg, pursuing that grand tradition further and further, for his part finally reached that step on his personal Jakobsleiter where air of another planet rendered conventional forces of musical gravity as inoperative as those historical dissonances in the despairing hearts and minds of so many of his contemporaries.

The chain of traumatic experiences from the Dreyfus trials through the humiliating Judenzählung of 1916 (the official census of Jewish soldiers in response to charges that Jews had managed to avoid their military duty; the census proved the opposite) on to Mattsee and beyond reflected a kind of perverse logic to which Schoenberg reacted, logically as always, with a thorough reevaluation of his own dissonant socioreligious past in light of the mandates of his artistic mission. As he told Kandinsky the year after Mattsee, the strength that permitted him to persevere on his chosen path came entirely from religion, "though without any organisational fetters."^[11] As evidence he referred to his Jakobsleiter text. Yet by 1923 it was no longer a generalized matter of faith:

For I have at last learnt the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year, and I shall not forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely even a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me), but I am a Jew."^[12]

In 1921 the London Times had managed to unmask the virulently anti-Semitic "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" as nothing but a series of "clumsy plagiarisms," a thinly disguised parody of the 1865 French political pamphlet "Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu." But this hardly diminished the flow of anti-Semitic propaganda through a Gentile world looking for convenient scapegoats in the aftermath of a disastrous war.^[13] And Schoenberg's explicit statement that he was thenceforth perfectly content to be a Jew and no longer wished to be treated as an excep-

tion actually reflected a growing general tendency among artists and intellectuals of Jewish descent. The year 1921 saw no less than three major literary figures of decidedly different backgrounds and orientations reasserting their Jewish pride in print. Jakob Wassermann in a short but unsparing autobiographical essay entitled Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude, which he dedicated to his close friend Ferruccio Busoni, came to the firm conclusion that as long as the rest of the world was determined to find fault with them, regardless of what they did or did not do, the Jews would simply have to go it alone.^[14] Franz Kafka's friend Max Brod in his magisterial Heidentum, Christentum, Judentum drew attention to the disastrous consequences of the historical alliance of Christian otherworldliness and pagan materialism in comparison with the traditionally Jewish concerns for a dignified life in the present for all created in God's image.^[15] Finally, Jacob Klatzkin, taking issue with the emphasis of his own teacher, Hermann Cohen, on Judaism's worldwide messianic mission, in his Krisis und Entscheidung im Judentum insisted rather on land and language as indispensable prerequisites of any meaningful Jewish future.^[16] Not surprisingly, it was Klatzkin with whom Schoenberg corresponded while working on Der biblische Weg, the spoken drama spawned by the tragic events of an era that witnessed the brazen assassination of, among others, Walter Rathenau, the Jewish foreign minister on whose prestige and skill the fledgling Weimar Republic had placed so much hope for its future.

Unlike Hans Stuckenschmidt and, for that matter, Willi Reich, the late Michael Mäckelmann accepted the thesis of the paradigmatic significance of Schoenberg's Mattsee experience sufficiently to make it the starting point of his on the whole impressive doctoral dissertation. Inexplicably, though, he referred to that brief, if decisive, episode as a pogrom. In so doing he conveyed an erroneous impression not only of what actually happened but also of the nature and appropriateness of the composer's reaction.^[17] For, despite the fact that White Russian as well as Polish soldiers and peasants had turned on Jewish communities within their reach as soon as the Czarist and Hapsburg regimes collapsed, it was an act of mental rather than physical violence that sensitized Schoenberg to the fragility of the conditio judaica in post-World War I Europe.^[18] By then, to be sure, the name of the Cossack leader Petlura had become a symbol of rape, burning, looting, and the collective death of those who found themselves in the path of the undisciplined hordes roaming the Eastern European countryside in search of Jewish victims. On 16 June 1921, about the time Schoenberg and his family vainly sought peace and quiet in Mattsee, Koitschitz, a town near Minsk, suffered a grievous extension of the pogroms already visited upon Homel, Vitebsk, and Minsk itself. "The cruelty and barbarism can be gauged from the fact that while only fifty people were wounded, eighty-

seven Jews were killed, among them an infant and his mother . . . [and] a few women were violated," reported the American Jewish Committee. Nine days later an armed band

attacked the railroad station at Staravee, district of Bobrouisk, disarmed one of the two policemen, and robbed and pillaged the Jewish houses. They killed twelve Jews, including a boy of nine and a man of sixty, violated and killed a girl of nineteen, and wounded eleven Jews, among them two little girls.^[19]

In Poland roving bands of soldiers made a special practice of attacking Jews on trains and in railroad stations. It took a stern American protest for the army's commanders to issue an explicit countermanding order.

Like most of his friends and colleagues, Schoenberg had taken little notice of the misfortunes of those strange-looking Ostjuden from beyond the new Austrian Republic's eastern border. Thousands of impoverished refugees were passing through or had settled in Vienna, glad to have escaped with their lives. No doubt Schoenberg, too, had heard and perhaps even repeated derogatory stories about those wretched souls whose unfamiliar garb and behavior lent themselves to jokes in poor taste. He soon recognized, however, that these for the most part strictly Orthodox creatures were the ones who perpetuated what Adolf Bernhard Marx had called "the genuine message of Judaism," a message so firmly imprinted on his mind that nothing could erase it. Emanuel Swedenborg's Christian gnosticism, as the composer understood it from his reading of Balzac's Séraphita, may actually have reinforced long-standing cabalistic tendencies — for example, in its rejection of clear distinctions between the realms of nature and the spirit. If proof were needed for Schoenberg's intrinsically Talmudic modes of reasoning and acting, the very first sentence of his Harmonielehre of 1911 should do nicely. "Dieses Buch habe ich von meinen Schülern gelernt" (This book I learned from my students)^[20] amounts to a concise paraphrase of that wellknown saying attributed to Rabbi Chanina: "I learned much from my teachers, from my colleagues even more than from my teachers, but from my pupils more than from all of them together."^[21] Schoenberg's manner of teaching likewise recalls those rabbis of old, intensely engaged with their disciples in a never-ending search for new meanings and a better understanding of the Law's intricate meanings. As Schoenberg himself declared: "The teacher who does not exert himself because he tells only `what he knows,' does not exert his pupils either. Action must start with the teacher himself; his unrest must infect the pupils. Then they will search as he does."^[22]

If there was a trenchant difference between the author of the first edition of the Harmonielehre and that of the third, published in 1922, it reflected in no small measure the eternal lesson of the Jewish experience that words alone won't do — that, with survival at issue, thought must

be matched by action. As he pointedly asked Kandinsky, now clearly no longer oblivious to the plight of Eastern European Jews, "What is anti-Semitism to lead to if not to acts of violence? Is it so difficult to imagine that?"^[23] In August 1921 Adolf Hitler spoke before a gathering of the radical right on the subject "Why we are anti-Semites." Soon thereafter the Völkischer Beobachter, the official newspaper of the National-Socialist Workers Party, gleefully reported his solemn pledge not to rest until all Jews were safely locked up in concentration camps. And when the first storm-troop battalions took to the streets, the die was cast. Yet very few among Germany's intelligentsia appreciated the horrendous truth in Arnold Schoenberg's well-nigh clairvoyant apprehensions.

Irrevocably convinced that the historical experiment of assimilation was doomed to failure and that the sociocultural dissonance it had generated was likely to remain forever unresolved, Schoenberg unconditionally accepted the inner as well as outer contradictions of Jewish existence as fundamental aspects of the fate and mission of a unique people chosen, as he saw it, for the sake of a single abstract proposition: the divinely ordained idea of unity. In this, its emancipated form, historical dissonance became as effective a source of creative energy as it had been in the days of old, when the children of Israel chose to abandon Egypt's fleshpots for that "biblical road" which, though obviously fraught with dangers, also promised beyond sheer physical escape from the perennial pharaohs of this world a future truly consonant with the spiritual aspirations of those who, "having left behind everything material," wish only to be permitted to dream their ancient "dream of God."^[24]

Three
Evolving Perceptions of Kandinsky and Schoenberg:
Toward the Ethnic Roots of the "Outsider"

Peg Weiss

In a letter written two weeks after witnessing what his new friend the Russian-born artist Vasili Kandinsky might have called a "thundering collision of worlds," Franz Marc linked the names of Kandinsky and Schoenberg with observations on primitive art and "Oriental" music, which, he said, had retained its intrinsic "primitive" characteristics.^[1] As is well known, that metaphorical thundering collision had taken place at the beginning of January 1911, when Kandinsky and his friends had celebrated the New Year by attending a concert of Schoenberg's music.^[2] They heard the First String Quartet in D Minor, op. 7, the Second String Quartet in F-sharp Minor, op. 10, and the Three Piano Pieces, op. 11. Kandinsky's response had been immediate: within two days he had moved from the first sketches to the completed painting Impression III (Concert), a work that with its aggressive yellow visual blast (like the fanfare of trumpets, in Kandinsky's color language), anchored by the ironic black form of the instrument, so brilliantly echoes the concert's aural impact on an artist for whom synesthetic perceptions could be shattering (see figure 1). Black, he wrote in his manifesto Über das Geistige in der Kunst, is "musically represented by a completely closing pause after which a continuation follows as if at the beginning of another world, because what is closed by this pause is ended for all time: the circle is closed."^[3] In that passage he went on to compare black with the silence imposed by death but concluded that, although "externally the most soundless color," black was the one color "against which every other color, even the weakest sounding, sounds stronger and more precise." Thus, in choosing to pit strong yellow against black, the artist had unleashed the loudest coloristic sound he could imagine — like the lash of a whip — while heralding the "beginning of another world."^[4]

In his letter of 14 January 1911 to August Macke, Marc had exclaimed:

Image not available.

Fig. 1.
Kandinsky, untitled study for Impression III (Concert), January 1911. Charcoal on paper, 10 x 14.7 cm. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. From Kandinsky, ed. Christian Derouet and Jessica Boissel (Paris: Musée National d'Art Moderne, 1984). Copyright © 1996 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Can you imagine a music in which the tonality (that is, the holding to some kind of tonal system) is completely lifted? When listening to this music, which lets every tone struck stand for itself (a kind of white canvas between the color spots!), I had to think continually of Kandinsky's great Composition, which also allows no trace of tonal system . . . and also of Kandinsky's "leaping spots."

At that point Marc knew the great Composition II that had first attracted his attention to Kandinsky when it caused an uproar at the second exhibition of the Neue Künstler-Vereinigung the preceding autumn. Although local critics castigated the artist not only as "Eastern" but also as "insane," and the work as a failed craftsman's "design for a carpet," Marc had written an open letter to the director of the gallery declaring Kandinsky's "Compositions" — regarded strictly as "pictures" — more than a challenge to the great Persian tapestries then on view in the famous Mohammedan exhibition, exclaiming: "What artistic insight does this unique artist harbor!"^[5]

Marc's January letter to Macke continued: "Schoenberg starts from the principle that the conceptions of consonance and dissonance do not exist at all. A so-called dissonance is only a consonance that lies further apart."

Image not available.

Fig. 2.
Kandinsky, Romantic Landscape, 3 January 1911. Oil on canvas, 94.3 x 129 cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Copyright ©  1996 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

And Marc outlined how in his painting he, too, wanted to operate with independent primary colors free of bondage to the paradigm of the prism. Primary colors may be spread out across the canvas, he wrote, in a sense creating "partial dissonances" that in the overall effect of the entire painting would actually create a new consonance, or, as he adds parenthetically, "harmony." Marc had at this time very likely begun work on his Blue Horse I.^[6]

Little notice has been taken of the fact that on that same postconcert day Kandinsky's hypercreativity had resulted in yet a second painting, Romantic Landscape, with its trio of horsemen careening across a barren landscape ambiguous in time and space (see figure 2). Whereas the downward plunge of the horsemen is abruptly halted by the upward thrusting form at left, any sense of three-dimensional space suggested by the difference between the scale of this form and the great black form at the right on the one hand and the riders on the other is abolished by the swath of white that brings its brilliant vermilion sun smashing forward again to the plane of the canvas. It is a dizzying space, at once dense and immense, a space in which asteroids, too — Kandinsky's "leaping spots" — seem to inhabit the air. One feels indeed the "air of another planet."

In fact, it would seem that the poetry of Stefan George had served as a

kind of springboard both for Kandinsky, whose own early work often echoed the poet's words and concepts, and for Schoenberg, whose Second String Quartet, played that day in Munich, closed with two movements that were essentially settings of two poems from George's The Seventh Ring cycle: "Litany" and "Ecstasy." It was the latter that seems most to have captured Kandinsky's imagination and to have inspired Romantic Landscape, which also contains echoes of poems from George's earlier Algabal series.^[7] Is it any wonder, then, that Schoenberg — who had set fifteen other poems of George's — was, on seeing this painting for the first time the following December at the Neue Secession in Berlin, immediately attracted to it and wrote to Kandinsky: "The one that pleased me most was Romantic Landscape."^[8]

The Schoenberg quartet and the George poem underlying its last movement have other dimensions — other subtexts, as it were — that parallel dimensions in Kandinsky's experience. These are expressed in the painting Lyrical, and in the series of folkish All Saints Day paintings, all from the same year, 1911.^[9] A key to these connections is hinted at in Marc's perceptive January letter to Macke, in which he combines observations on the theoretical relationships between Kandinsky and Schoenberg with ruminations on another and parallel experience that he described as "shattering":

I have been thoroughly through the Völkermuseum in order to study the artistic means of "primitive peoples" (as . . . most contemporary critics put it when they characterize our efforts). Finally I found myself caught up, stunned and shattered, before the carvings of the Cameroons. . . . In this short winter I have become quite another person.

Indeed, the Cameroons House Post from Munich's great anthropological museum — an institution with which Kandinsky had been familiar since long before his arrival in Munich — was subsequently reproduced in Der Blaue Reiter almanac.^[10] Marc described the "jolt" given him by the Schoenberg concert and its inspirational effect upon his artistic thinking but concluded that the real goal would be to bring forth a new art not out of theory but instinctively, in the manner of "the primitive peoples." Schoenberg, he surmised, seemed to be "convinced of the relentless dissolution of European laws of art and harmony, and grasps after the musical means of the Orient, which have (to date) remained primitive."

Here two chords are struck: the notion of primitive art as "shattering," even transformative, because it was somehow "instinctual"; and the equation of this "primitive" with the concept "Oriental." For it is clear that both Kandinsky, the Russian in whose veins flowed Mongolian blood, and Schoenberg, the Jew, were perceived as "Oriental," as we see by the words of critics and friends alike. Alexander Ringer has demonstrated the "Oriental" ramifications of Schoenberg's Judaic grounding and pointed out that

in musical criticism since the nineteenth century the epithet Oriental often served as a synonym for Jewish.^[11] Kandinsky, too, whose father had been born in far eastern Asia among the Mongols and Buriats of Kyakhta, was labeled Oriental and thus situated by the critics in that metaphorical Eastern diaspora — equated even, as one Munich critic would have it, with the "kannibalischstische Naturvölker" (cannibalistic nature-peoples).^[12] As my research demonstrates, Kandinsky's own ethnographic expedition into the far reaches of Vologda Province in 1889 had been motivated at least in part by a desire to trace his own roots among the Finno-Ugric Zyrian (Komi) peoples. It was also an attempt to get in touch with the roots of those ancient members of his father's clan who had emigrated from the Ural mountain area of the Ob River, from the place known as Kondinsk, to far eastern Siberia — first to Yakutia and then to the even more eastern areas of Kyakhta on the Mongolian border, and Nerchinsk, areas inhabited by the Buriat and Tungus peoples. Ethnic mixing was not uncommon in the vast Russian empire, and there is genealogical evidence of a Buriat intermarriage in the Kandinsky family. Many nineteenth-century ethnographers and linguists thought there were ancient links between the Finno-Ugric and Mongolian peoples, a theory that drove expeditions such as those of Andreas Sjögren and Alexander Castrén, whose reports Kandinsky cited in his own ethnographic writings. Kandinsky himself believed in his Oriental origins and often boasted that he had Mongolian blood in his veins; indeed, the faintly Oriental features of Kandinsky's visage were frequently mentioned by his friends and acquaintances.^[13]

The fact is that both Kandinsky and Schoenberg were "outsiders" struggling to find their individual voices in a hostile environment. No wonder they were drawn to one another. No wonder they sought to transcend their environments by similar means, relying on that inner springboard of the human spirit that Kandinsky called "inner necessity." And no wonder Kandinsky found Schoenberg's outward-turning Visions discomfiting and openly admitted to the composer that he much preferred the landscapes and the Self-Portrait from the Back (also known as Self-Portrait from Behind; see figures 3 and 4), in which he found "things as they are and living `as such' innerly," or, as he also phrased it: "pure `fantasy' in hardest material."^[14] He recognized in these paintings a primal force that made "things as they are" live, and he equated them with his own in terms of inner power. Indeed, on the very page in the Blaue Reiter almanac on which the Self-Portrait was reproduced appeared Kandinsky's famous equation: "Realism = Abstraction, Abstraction = Realism. The greatest difference in the external becomes the greatest likeness in the inner. "^[15] It is a witty visual and verbal pun, for the portrait encountered here — the "greatest difference" from what we expect — does not gaze out at us but rather walks away and, in turning its back to our gaze, jolts us into recognition of that inner "abstract" essence. In fact,

[Full Size]

Fig. 3.
Schoenberg, Vision, as reproduced in Der Blaue Reiter
(Munich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1912). Oil on canvas, 32
x 20 cm. From Der Blaue Reiter, facsimile reprint (Munich: R.
Piper & Co. Verlag, 1979). Reproduced courtesy of Lawrence
Schoenberg.

[Full Size]

Fig. 4.
Schoenberg, Self-Portrait from the Back, as it was illustrated in the almanac
Der Blaue Reiter. From Der Blaue Reiter, facsimile reprint (Munich: R.
Piper & Co. Verlag, 1979). Reproduced courtesy of Lawrence Schoenberg.

examples of both types of Schoenberg's paintings were reproduced within Kandinsky's essay "Über die Formfrage" ("On the Question of Form"), along with other examples of "naive" realism such as works by Henri Rousseau, Bavarian Hinterglasmalereien and "miracle pictures," children's paintings, and, tellingly enough, one of Matisse's Music paintings.^[16] Not surprisingly, of course, Kandinsky concluded that there was no question of form; any form might be appropriate so long as it arose out of inner necessity.

No wonder both Kandinsky and Schoenberg were drawn, though at different times, to seek their voices in their own roots. Indeed, Kandinsky could laugh up his sleeve at his uneducated critics, being himself a trained ethnologist well read in the universal lore of folk mythology as well as in such specialized areas as Finno-Ugric and Siberian shamanism. Schoenberg's reference in the second movement of the Second String Quartet to the old Viennese folk tune "Ach du lieber Augustin" would instantly have caught his attention, for he knew that the text was an ethnographic relic that, slight as it was, with its seemingly innocent, fragile, poignant tune, referred to earth-shattering occurrences: the Great Plague and the recurrent "end time" prophecies of apocalyptic tradition. He himself had played on simple Bavarian folk-art tradition to express millennial concerns, as in his Hinterglasmalereien; this method at the same time allowed him to reaffirm his own grounding in old Russian mythology and folklore and to explore his fascination with dvoeverie, that characteristic synthesis of pagan and Christian belief systems that he had made the core of his own ethnographic studies.^[17]

This is perhaps most easily demonstrated in a watercolor study for his 1911 glass painting All Saints Day II (see figure 5). In this benignly duplicitous depiction of "saints" we can easily detect at the upper right Saint Elias, or Elijah, and his chariot — a saint who, among the Finno-Ugric peoples, with whose beliefs Kandinsky was familiar, was identified with the pagan god of thunder Perun, or Thor. Pointedly, Elias/Thor drives a Russian troika. At the lower left is Saint Simeon Stylites, a double reference to Simon or Semyon of the Russian folk tale "The Seven Semyons": it was Semyon who forged the iron pillar (a shamanic device) from which to survey the world and foretell the future; and the saint of the same name was noted for his conversions of the pagans. Note that he stands here in close alliance with a horseman hitherto identified only as Saint George but who actually lived a double life as another horseman of Finno-Ugric lore, known as the World-Watching-Man — always depicted, as we shall see, with outstretched arms on horseback. And, lastly, at the lower right, there is the figure of the Zyrian shaman Pam, whose confrontation on the banks of the Vychegda River with Saint Stephen, the bishop of Perm — the cleric responsible for converting the Zyrians — was part of a legend Kandinsky knew from his own visit to the Vychegda River area of Vologda Province, the center of his re-

Image not available.

Fig. 5.
Kandinsky, sketch for the glass painting All Saints Day II (also known as Composition with Saints), 1911. Watercolor, ink, and pencil. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Copyright © 1996 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

search as a student of ethnography in the summer of 1889. Here Pam, in his distinctive sorcerer's hat, rows off in a boat, pursued by rusalki, Zyrian water sprites, one of whom tries to climb into his boat. Sorcerers in pointed caps or in magic flight, often with arms outflung, appear elsewhere in Kandinsky's work, as in more than one vignette in Klänge (Resonances), his 1913 book of prose poems and woodcuts (see figure 7).

This expressed interest in folklore can be compared both to Schoenberg's exploration of mythic lore in Gurrelieder and to Kandinsky's devotion to the legendary saga of the Finns known as the Kalevala, a copy of which had accompanied him on his expedition into the farthest reaches of Vologda Province to study the beliefs of the Zyrian (or Komi) peoples in that fateful summer of 1889, at the height of his ethnographic career. Indeed, it was his devotion to the Kalevala that later inspired him to invite the Finnish symbolist painter and illustrator of the Kalevala, Axel Gallen-Kallela, to exhibit with his Phalanx society in Munich in 1904.^[18] A particularly interesting demonstration of Kandinsky's vast knowledge of northern folklore can be found in the Russian version of his essay on stage composition, published in 1919, where he compared Wagner's use of the leitmotif to the Lapps' distinctive "musical motif," the vuolle, that each family was said to possess and by which each was identified.^[19]

But there is yet another ramification of the Second Quartet's last movement that we have not explored. It is the fact that the George poem that begins "I feel the air of another planet" was entitled "Entrückung," which has been translated as "Transport" but which also bears the translation "Ecstasy." The ancient and almost universal myth of ecstatic flight was immediate in Kandinsky's imagination, for he was intimately familiar with a wide range of ethnographic literature on Finno-Ugric and Siberian shamanism. That consciously or subconsciously he should have related Schoenberg's music to ecstatic shamanic experience is hardly surprising in view of his ethnographic interest in the phenomenon of shamanism.^[20] Evidence for this can be found in an observation Kandinsky made a decade later in a proposal submitted to the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow. There, in outlining what he termed the "parallelism" of sound and color, he recalled:

I once happened to see how Arabs used the continuous parallelism of sound (a monotone drum) and primitive movement (a pronounced, rhythmic kind of dancing) to achieve a state of ecstasy. Even a simple, schematic [arrangement of lines] could never produce such a result. I also happened to observe the audience during one of Schoenberg's quartets, in which the manipulation of the line of the instruments, and, in particular, the incorporation of the voice, produced the impression of the lash of a whip. It is interesting to note that Arnold Schoenberg introduced the flow of parallel lines into some of his compositions with (at least for musicians) virtually the same revolutionary effect.^[21]

Earlier in the proposal he urged the investigation of movements employed in ancient cultures for the purpose of "expressing primitive feelings" before they are forgotten, including those used in "rituals" and "religious rites," noting that even some of those gestures that are distinguished by "extreme sketchiness" may possess "superhuman power of expression."

What has not been noted before and seems particularly convincing in this context is that Kandinsky painted what is perhaps his most compelling homage to the shamanic legend of magical flight on 11 January 1911, just nine days after the Schoenberg concert and seven days before his first letter to the composer. In the painting Lyrical the shaman, as described in the ethnographic literature, flies above treetops and mountaintops on his journey to other worlds.^[22] He has already "freed himself in tones — circling — weaving" ("Ich löse mich in tönen, kreisend, webend" ). As the canvas itself becomes the singing skin of the monotonal drum, the rider becomes, as the closing line of the poem suggests, "a droning of the sacred voice" ("Ich bin ein dröhnen nur der heiligen stimme" ). The painting is aptly named to denote the unity of the magical flight and the Klang or resonance of the drum.

The folklore of the northern Finno-Ugric, Lapp, and Siberian peoples, including the iconography of the shamanic drum and the legend of magical

[Full Size]

Fig. 6.
Design for a sacrificial blanket depicting Mir Susne Khum
(World-Watching-Man). Mansi (Vogul), 19th century.
Watercolor on paper. From S.V. Ivanov, Materialy po
Izobrazitel'nomu Iskusstva Narodov Sibiri XIX-nachala XX v.
(Moscow: Akademi Nauk, 1954).

flight, was to remain a driving force in Kandinsky's work to the end of his life. In these motifs, so often linked to the quest for regeneration, he expressed his own search for roots, as Schoenberg in his later devotion to Judaism would express his search for rootedness and affirmation of his Jewish heritage.

Among the most ubiquitous of these ethnic motifs for Kandinsky was that of Saint George, whose image was synthesized with that of the northern mythic god known as World-Watching-Man. In the ancient folklore of the Voguls and Ostiaks, among others, this god, son of the great sky god Numi Torem, served as an intercessor between the gods and humankind, flying across the sky at night on his magical horse to keep an eye on the world. He was always depicted on horseback, with arms outflung — as in the characteristically stylized Vogul (Mansi) design for a sacrificial blanket (see figure 6). But the shaman preferred for his flight a piebald, or spotted, horse, so Kandinsky's magic horsemen rode piebald horses. This can be seen in the vignette for Klänge, and in an early drawing for his first Composition, where he had already adapted the arms-outflung figure of World-Watching-Man to the piebald horse (see figures 7 and 8).

Image not available.

Fig. 7.
Kandinsky, vignette to the poem "Blätter" in Klänge (Munich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1913). Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Copyright © 1996 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

In the transformational language of Kandinsky's Bauhaus period, a time when he stripped his arsenal of forms to the bare bones of geometry — in parallel, one might say, to Schoenberg's development of the twelve-tone method — the multisignificant figure of Saint George/World-Watching-Man/shaman also underwent a transformation. This can be observed in an untitled drawing of 1924 (see figure 9), where the horse is reduced to a thrusting hooked stick representing the leaping animal's back and bent foreleg. The figure on his back has been reduced to the circular drum form, but with the same arms-outflung posture, triangular head, and an eye on his chest to remind us of his identity as World-Watching -Man. The serpent conquered by the hero in his Saint George alter ego writhes about the horse's body.

Lest the reader remain skeptical of this apparently drastic transformational language, we can see the same terms employed in major paintings of this era, including In the Black Square of 1923 and Black Accompaniment of 1924, which represent Saint George on his horse confronting the cosmic

Image not available.

Fig. 8.
Kandinsky, drawing for Composition I . Pencil on paper, 11.3 x 18 cm. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Fonds Kandinsky, Paris. Copyright © 1996 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Image not available.

Fig. 9.
Kandinsky, untitled drawing, 1924. Ink on paper, 23.5 x 32 cm. From Pierre Volboudt, Die Zeichnungen Wassily Kandinskys (Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, 1974), no. 49. Copyright © 1996 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

dragon.^[23] In Black Accompaniment there is nearly the same disposition of forms as in the earlier painting, but with a self-parodying humor: the horse reduced to a rearing lancelike back and bent foreleg (similar to that in the untitled drawing, which may, in fact, have been a study); the chin-strapped saint looking rather surprised, as the goggle-eyed dragon at the lower left lolls on its back below the horse's feet just as it had done in the version of saint and dragon more than a decade earlier, the 1911 St. George III. This hieroglyphic shorthand had in fact been suggested to Kandinsky in large part by the schematic representations of gods and animals on Lapp and Siberian shaman drums.

This brief demonstration shows not only the development of a brilliant new visual vocabulary but also the persistence of a richly symbolic imagery representing the artist's continuing quest for and affirmation of the roots of his personal heritage. Also evident is the continuity of an idealistic, Utopian vision that had from the beginning promised him the salvation of a decadent and evil world through art.

By 1923 Kandinsky had lived through the horrors of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the ensuing plague of famine and disease; he had survived alienation, two emigrations, and a great personal loss in the death of his son Volodia, born in the midst of world catastrophe and dead at the age of three. Now back in Germany and firmly ensconced at the Bauhaus, once again surrounded by admiring students and colleagues, he sought to reestablish the vanguard of the old days by contacting his old friend Arnold Schoenberg. Their first exchange in July 1922 was as warm and cordial as ever, and both expressed the wish to meet again.

But when Kandinsky a year later invited Schoenberg to join him in Weimar, the latter's attitude had changed, and a bitterly poignant exchange ensued. Given our knowledge of how everyday life affected Kandinsky's painting and the extent to which his work expressed symbolic meaning, it will be informative to examine the paintings that bracket the 1923 exchange between Kandinsky and Schoenberg.

Just a few weeks before writing to Schoenberg with his proposal that the composer consider taking on the directorship of the Weimar Musikhochschule, Kandinsky had finished a new Saint George painting called Through-Going Line, of March 1923, anticipating the Russian celebration of Saint George's Day on April 24.^[24] It is a confident, life-affirming picture in which the schematized but clearly recognizable figure of Saint George, riding a stick horse, unites the heavenly regions of the left-hand side of the canvas, in true shamanic style, with the worldly side on the right. According to Kandinsky's aesthetic vocabulary, the direction of his leap, from left to right, is "toward home." The symbolic serpent writhes well below, effectively trampled by the horse's legs.^[25]

On 15 April 1923, a few weeks after completing this painting, Kandinsky wrote to Schoenberg with his proposal regarding the Weimar Musikhochschule.^[26] Thereafter followed, in quick succession, Schoenberg's pointed letter, dated 19 April, accusing Kandinsky of anti-Semitism and rejecting the invitation on the grounds that, as a Jew, he understood (on the basis of rumors apparently spread by Alma Mahler) that he would be out of place at the Bauhaus; Kandinsky's stricken and poignant reply of 24 April; and finally, on 4 May, Schoenberg's long and tortured analysis of his condition as a Jew and human being, condemned by a society determined to recognize either the Jew or the human being but not both as once.

Kandinsky's house catalog lists the painting Schwarz und Violett as having been painted in April 1923. Thus it is safe to postulate that this painting was created between the time the artist received the first and second Schoenberg letters (in his response of 24 April, the Russian Saint George's Day, Kandinsky mentions that he had received Schoenberg's first response the previous day). Schwarz und Violett presents on the left the head of Saint George as a black mask, with its characteristic curved and "feathered" helmet, a motif Kandinsky used frequently. However, here one white eye is pierced by a triangular "arrow," while another triangular form, similar to the sails of the "boats" at right, pierces the cheek of the mask, lending the eerie face a tearful aspect. The other eye, half closed, is set askew. To the right — the "earthly" side of the painting, according to Kandinsky's own theories — two boatlike images seem storm-tossed on a tilting, purple plane. In Über das Geistige in der Kunst Kandinsky had described the color purple (Violett ) as "a cooled-off red in the physical and the psychic sense. It has thus something sickly, quenched (like coal slag!), something sad about it. . . . The Chinese use it specifically as the color of mourning."^[27] Here, then, the boatlike forms representing the two artists are tossed on a sad and slag-colored sea of rumor, misunderstanding, and deceit. The arrow piercing the eye is a reference to the Lapp myth, which Kandinsky knew well, of the Ganfliege, or arrowlike missile, sent magically by one shaman to harm another.^[28]

When Schoenberg hurled his personal frustration and anger at his old friend Kandinsky, it is certain that he could not have guessed the artist's own tortured experiences of war and revolution, famine and disease; nor could he have known of the Kandinskys' lost child, for they kept that a secret all their lives. Schoenberg, desperately wounded, had written from the heart. Difficult as it may have been for him, Kandinsky, though stricken himself, had the wisdom to remain silent. He was forced to recognize that the halcyon Munich days were lost forever; the world was blacker than he had ever wanted to know. For succor he turned once again to the beloved

image so intrinsic to his heritage and so powerful in its promise of regeneration and hope, to his own leitmotif, Saint George. The painting that immediately followed the exchange with Schoenberg was In the Black Square, of June 1923.

According to Kandinsky's theory, black was that "nothing without possibility," that "nothing after the quenching of the sun, an eternal silence without future and hope."^[29] But Kandinsky did leave a slight opening for hope in pronouncing black also the color against which all others resonate most strongly. His resonant, regenerational Saint George in his watchful and healing roles as World-Watching-Man and shaman soars on a white trapezoidal plane that is bound to rise beyond the black silence. And indeed, as we know, a reconciliation of sorts did eventually take place between Kandinsky and Schoenberg in the summer of 1927.

Kandinsky too was soon to suffer the fate of artists driven from Germany by the Nazis. His paintings were stripped from the museums and shown in Hitler's exhibition Decadent Art, and he was forced into yet another exile, to end his life in Paris.^[30] Perhaps it was merciful that he did not live to know that he had also been expunged from the memory of his own people and was not to be recognized by them again until 1989, one hundred twenty-three years after his birth.^[31]

Both Schoenberg and Kandinsky have been seen as pioneers of the modern, inventors of new languages — in the one case of music's twelve-tone system, in the other of "abstraction" in art. Yet in both cases it has been difficult to interpret their later works within the context of twentieth-century critical insistence on "pure" formalism. Critics failed utterly either to see or to comprehend the shamanic imagery and symbolism of Kandinsky's later works such as Open Green, also of 1923, with its soaring Saint George shaman, or the great shaman-drum series that includes Oval no. 2 of 1925, which is based directly on the paradigm of the Lapp shaman drum. Nor have they noticed that the deceptively geometric Peevish, of 1930, actually holds a richly ethnographic subtext dealing directly with shamanism.^[32]

It remains to analyze one last interaction between Kandinsky and Schoenberg, which is documented by the last letter Kandinsky addressed to the composer, a response, dated 1 July 1936, thanking Schoenberg for a note that had been delivered by a mutual acquaintance, Louis Danz.^[33] Kandinsky's next painting once again seems to carry a subtextual reference to his old friend. In this painting, Triangles, there are two personages constructed of triangles, facing each other. According to the iconographic clues I have developed, both the circle signifying the shamanic drum and the waving ribbonlike form at the far left, which is a reference to the shaman in magical flight, point to an identification of this figure as the artist himself, who appears to offer a palette of colored objects to his visitor.

Perhaps what is suggested here is an exchange of gifts. A closer look at the figure at the right reveals that it is made up of two triangles superimposed, as in the star of David. In this case the triangles are neither equilateral nor symmetrical, but slightly askew; nevertheless, I think there can be no mistaking the implication that the artist's visitor is his Jewish friend Schoenberg, who carries what might be described as a shaman's staff and whose internal world is equally colorful. Indeed, the two "shamans" appear to stand on equal footing. Poignantly, they are separated by a thin (perhaps now insignificant?) snakelike form evoking the dragons of evil in the world.^[34]

A drawing that may date from the same period, one that has a motif of a shaman and ladder, may carry a hooded reference to Schoenberg's Jakobsleiter, which the composer had mentioned years earlier, in a letter to Kandinsky of 20 July 1922. Particularly compelling is a "lyrelike" form dangling from the figure of the shaman.^[35]

The best the critics could do, even until very recently, with such late works of the Paris period as Around the Circle and The Green Bond was to use the terms Oriental, Byzantine, and Scythian. This is to ignore the fierce, almost fanatical, resolve of the artist to embrace the heritage of Siberian shamanism with near-textbook imagery based on ethnographic sources. In his preparatory drawing for the right side of the painting The Green Bond there is the figure of the artist as shaman, the agent of healing and intercessor between mankind and the heavens, climbing the sacred tree that grows from the summit of the cosmic mountain toward the heavens, symbolized by a cloud. He wears a feathered headdress characteristic of the Siberian shaman but also of that old Blue Rider Saint George of yore, and is accompanied by his magic drum and ladle-shaped beater, which float just to the left of his head and shoulder. He wears his ribbed breastplate — a symbol of his immortality — on his back. He looks back over his shoulder to observe a pointed-head idol, characteristic of the Ostiaks, a northern Russian Finno-Ugric tribe, floating in its shroud and bound with thread, in accord with the beliefs of the Zyrian peoples Kandinsky had studied, who believed that the dead shaman had to be tied up to prevent his soul form known as the Ort from wandering.^[36]

Thus did the artist, in the last year of his life, confirm in one of his most "Oriental" paintings the multicultural inheritance of his personal genealogy. The Green Bond represents a grand synthesis of Russian Orthodox, Finno-Ugric, and far eastern Asiatic shamanic belief systems. And we have recently come to appreciate the full extent of Schoenberg's Judaic grounding and his final embrace of his own Oriental heritage, expressed especially in the the last years of his life in works like Kol Nidre and A Survivor from Warsaw.

Only now that we can begin to understand the strength and creative

energy that each of them, both artist and composer, was able to distill from his status as outsider and from his individual Oriental heritage can we perhaps consider the breach between them healed at last.

Four
The Émigré Experience:
Schoenberg in America

Alan Lessem

In 1935, some two years after arriving in the United States as a refugee from Hitler's Germany, Arnold Schoenberg delivered a short lecture to which, with characteristic irony, he gave the title "Driven into Paradise."^[1] He told his listeners that he was not prepared to talk about the horrors he had left behind, since he had come here to forget them. Unlike the biblical snake, driven from paradise to crawl on its belly and eat dust, he announced, he had been driven into paradise: "I have come to a country where I am allowed to go on my feet, where my head can be erect, where kindness and cheerfulness dominate and where to live is a joy, where to be an expatriate of another country is the grace of God." Despite some initial setbacks — his less than satisfactory teaching position at the Malkin Conservatory, the bitter East Coast winters — he held out the highest hopes in this first period for a fresh start in the New World, as indeed did many of his fellow émigrés. Such expectations for his personal future were linked to a positive assessment of America's musical prospects; there is here, he affirmed, "an extraordinarily large amount of talent, inventive ability, and originality, which in my opinion justify the highest hopes."^[2] The evidence around him, especially in regard to the spread of musical education and the proliferation of musical performances, led him so far as to believe that "hegemony" in music (as he called it) would shift westward, from Europe to America — a development that at the time he seemed to welcome.^[3] Naturally, his influence and teaching would contribute significantly to that shift!

The belief that European culture could be rescued as cargo from a sinking political ship and transplanted to terra firma in America was, as one might expect, widespread among those who were now bringing it with them, but there were Americans of the same mind too. Roger Sessions,

most notably, spoke of Europe's loss as America's gain, and called for a "genuine collaboration . . . in building gradually a real and profound musical tradition on our side."^[4] Yet he also had his doubts: American culture was still far from having reached maturity, as could be seen most obviously in the absence of any integration of musical life with institutional functions;^[5] similarly Mark Brunswick, though commending the universities for their leadership role in offering a haven to the émigrés, believed that America as a whole was not yet ripe enough to take advantage of what European musical culture was now bringing to its doorstep.^[6] Brunswick spoke quite bluntly about the "commercial and artistic gangsterism which seems to pervade the radio and concert world,"^[7] a complaint the émigrés soon began to voice themselves. Schoenberg, for one, was to make no bones about an all too typically American laissez-faire and the lack of principled leadership in the sphere of the arts. At the same time he proudly underlined his own resistance to such conditions: He himself "made no concessions to the market."^[8]

Those émigrés who took a more realistic view of opportunities available to them — most obviously the Korngolds, Steiners, and Rozsas in Hollywood — as well as those who more reluctantly permitted the exploitation of their talents to tide them over difficult circumstances, can well be said to have made a more palpable contribution to American culture, or at least that part of it that is represented by the development of distinctive popular idioms. It was they who in effect created the music of the Hollywood motion picture. Yet by the same token it would be wrong to assume that those who refused the temptations of Mammon, and also insisted that transplantation in no way compromised their integrity as composers, were unaffected by an environment in which considerations of worldly and material success overruled all others. For one thing it is evident that a number of the émigrés, discouraged by the unresponsiveness of publishers, performers, and audiences alike — what Krenek called the Echolosigkeit of the American musical milieu — indeed composed significantly less than before and went through some quite lengthy periods of silence, especially during the war years. More significant than this quantitative falloff was the tendency of their work to become more sharply divided between public and private, practical and ideal, prosaic and poetic. Hanns Eisler wrote film music for money but for himself composed songs the texts of which express nothing but contempt for the values of Hollywood society. Schoenberg, too, presented a public face, identifying in his correspondence with conductors and performers what could be considered to be his "popular" works (among them Verklärte Nacht, Pelleas und Melisande, the First Chamber Symphony, and his various orchestral arrangements), and urging that at least they be heard so as to open the door to his overall oeuvre. In all, as Krenek wryly remarked,

America had a sobering effect on the Europeans: it sharpened their sense of reality, but at the cost of what Robert Musil had called the "sense of possibility."^[9] In 1941 Schoenberg told Erwin Stein that his affairs as a composer were in a distressing state. He was receiving no income from Europe, and American publishers were interested only in a quick return on their investments. Performers, and in particular conductors (most of whom, of course, were émigrés themselves), were also part of what he called the "commercial racket." Taking stock a few years later, in 1944, Schoenberg lamented that Wallenstein in Los Angeles had performed nothing of his in six years, that Klemperer had ventured only some of his arrangements, and that Koussevitsky (ostensibly a champion of the moderns) had played only his accessible Variations, op. 43, and badly at that. After the war he became increasingly distrustful of the musical establishment, convinced by now of a conspiracy all around to suppress his music. He spoke of the "malice" directed against him by his "enemies," the New York critics, of decrees issued by public institutions against difficult music such as his own, of professional jealousies that isolated him even within the university. Above all, he saw himself as the victim of a cultural nationalism now given a renewed impetus by the Allied victory and the American presence in Europe. Although Schoenberg had from the beginning repeatedly declared his support for the cause of American music, he was inclined to see this latest development less as a legitimate nationalist aspiration than as yet another manifestation of political and economic opportunism: as he put it, less "an emotional necessity of the soul" than "an attempt to conquer a market."^[10] Inevitably it was himself that he saw as having been dealt a particularly hard and unjust blow.

Just like the racket of concert agents, there is now a racket in the making which intends to suppress gradually all European composers. Though I was probably the first European composer to speak and write publicly in favor of American composers, establishing their rightful claim to a place in American concert programs, the thanks for my attitude seems to be that I have been elected to be the first victim of the nationalistic movement, with others to follow.^[11]

The origin of the postwar developments referred to by Schoenberg was the increasing prominence already given to American music during the war period itself, when Americans tended to turn inward and cultivate their own resources in answer to what Elliot Carter called the "brutalizing forces released by Europe's conflict."^[12] Though most Americans naturally welcomed this external stimulus to the homegrown product, there were also those like Sessions who sympathized with the plight of the Europeans now suffering, as a result, comparative neglect. Sessions spoke of the "aggressive

self-assertion" of Americans, which "at least for a time poisoned the musical atmosphere and made it one of exclusiveness."^[13] Although such remarks may have been somewhat exaggerated, there was no question of the by then very considerable infiltration of American music and musical life by the new wave of immigrants, and the growing measure of suspiciousness and mistrust engendered by such a development. This is reflected, for instance, in public debates such as that published in the pages of the Musical Courier through several of its 1940-1941 issues. American participants in that debate argued that the foreign influx would "leaven" the substance of a national music; more generally, it was alleged that having to accommodate the émigrés would result in a neglect of obligations to home-trained musicians. One contributor went so far as to propose that we take into the country only a handful of the very best among the Europeans — that, after all, we have enough nonentities ourselves.

The influence of German and Austrian émigrés came to be looked upon with especial ambivalence: Did not, surely, the insidious traits of Teutonism lie at the very heart of the atonal idiom, more particularly of twelve-tone music? Regrettably enough, xenophobia clouded the judgment of many, including some of the country's most eminent composers and critics.

With the end of the war American cultural nationalism appeared to Schoenberg to have become more arrogantly self-assertive than ever. By way of retaliation he accused Americans of adopting an imperialist policy of cultural domination rivaling its Stalinist counterpart in Soviet Russia in its determination to colonize the entire civilized world. Ironically enough, the hopes he had earlier expressed for American hegemony in music had become, for him, a grim reality. Over the next few years Schoenberg attacked not only institutions and organizations but also individuals. American critics and conductors, and even composers, were forced to defend themselves against his allegations. A characteristic instance was the exchange with Aaron Copland, one that began in the press and then moved into a private correspondence that remains as yet unpublished. Virgil Thomson's column in the New York Herald Tribune of 11 September 1949 carried Schoenberg's "birthday blast" (as Thomson put it) against opponents of his music. Copland is not only counted among them but seen as the instigator of a policy of discrimination; as such he must be coupled with Stalin. In his reply to Thomson, published in the same newspaper two weeks later, Copland defends himself as in fact a Schoenberg supporter who helped disseminate some of Schoenberg's music, and he suggests that Schoenberg's linking him with the infamous Russian dictator may have had something to do with his photographed appearance with Shostakovich during the latter's recent visit to the United States. Copland now insists on dissociating himself from Shostakovich's attack, made during the Soviet composer's visit, on modern-

ists such as Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Schoenberg. Replying a few months later, Schoenberg brushes all that aside and takes another tack altogether. He is distressed to learn that

Mr Copland had given young students who asked for it the advice to use "simple" intervals and to study the masters. Much damage had been done to an entire generation of highly talented American composers, who . . . were taught to write a certain style. It will certainly take a generation of sincere teaching until this damage can be repaired.

And only in this respect did I couple Mr Copland with Stalin: they both do not consider musical composition as the art to present musical ideas in a dignified manner, but they want their followers to write a certain style, that is to create an external appearance, without asking about the inside. This I must condemn.^[14]

Copland responded with a personal letter to Schoenberg, in which he again defended himself against what he considered unfair charges, arguing that he had adopted pedagogical principles essentially no different from Schoenberg's, for he had never imposed compositional formulas or stylistic choices on his students but had rather let their own capacities and interests determine the directions they took.^[15] The next letter from Schoenberg is, at last, conciliatory, declaring his admiration for Copland's music and conceding that he may have been the victim of "gossip" in respect to whatever Copland may have said about him.^[16]

This particular peacemaking gesture aside, Schoenberg's long battle against the French neoclassical influence on American music and, more broadly, against nationalist aspirations as such must be taken seriously, since both were connected in his own mind with the American fixation on creating a product, the values and purposes of which were external to the process of developing musical ideas from the "inside" — that is, out of material that itself was rooted in and evolved uninterruptedly from tradition. As is well enough known, his antipathy toward neoclassicism, whether of Stravinskyan or more generally Latin derivation, dates back to the 1920s, when he felt that his influence was being challenged by the tonal (in his view, pseudotonal) music of composers who refused to acknowledge the importance of his advances into new territory. In the United States, subsequently, Schoenberg saw his position with regard to the enemy camp to have become even more tenuous; students there, lacking any deep sense of his tradition, were all the more susceptible to musical instruction given, as he put it, "in the manner in which a cook would deliver recipes."^[17] Young Americans, in other words, were being encouraged to look to the means rather than the ends, and in so doing leaned too heavily on abstract precepts and theories. When provided with principles of musical composition, Schoenberg complained, these students "want to apply them too much

`on principle.' And in art that's wrong. . . . musical logic does not anwer to `if —, then —,' but enjoys making use of the possibilities excluded by if-then."^[18] Furthermore, it worried him that Americans demanded results too quickly, a visible return in short order on the money they invest in their education. They had neither the time nor the patience for the lengthy, slow process of learning by the emulation of model and example, which inevitably requires the discipline of steady practice. Schoenberg was to find this problem especially acute among professionals who sought to take advantage of his presence in Los Angeles. Oscar Levant described the situation succinctly at the time:

There is hardly a period in Hollywood when all the orchestrators and most of the movie composers are not studying with one or another of the prominent musicians who have gone to live there recently. At one time the vogue was for Schoenberg, who came with a great reputation, of course, as a teacher. However, most of the boys wanted to take a six weeks' course and learn a handful of Schoenberg's tricks. They were sorely disappointed when they discovered that it was his intention to give them instruction in counterpoint, harmony and chorale, which meant that they would have to expend considerable effort themselves in doing assigned work.^[19]

Not surprisingly, most of these seekers after quick fixes were to find themselves rejected by the master. "I am not one of those," he said, "who can teach . . . a number of effective tricks in a short time. I only teach the whole of the art."^[20] And his concern with the whole of the art meant, in turn, a rejection of any hard and fast system or simplified method of teaching it.

In this regard it is interesting to compare his approach with that of fellow Europeans such as Toch and Krenek. For those two composers, transplantation sparked the desire for some fresh thinking about their musical heritage; moreover, the very different teaching conditions from those back home had them reconsider how students might best be instructed in that heritage. Toch began to look for ways of freeing instruction from fossilized "theory," and of linking it more closely to contemporary needs. The avowed aim of his Shaping Forces in Music^{[ 21]} was to impose a focus on the past from a contemporary viewpoint and to lead from that to a "universal core of thought which would serve as a starting-off point for young composers of today."^[22] Similarly, Krenek found that his teaching activity stimulated him to reflect, de novo, on the composer's relationship to the materials bequeathed to him by the past. Impatient to bring his students to the heart of the matter, he attempted to reduce older compositional criteria to a handful of general principles and then to proceed directly to contemporary means of expression. His twelve-tone counterpoint manual, which sprang from his own interpretation and drastic distillation of melodic elements in medieval music, was intended to provide the basis of a new métier. It was

dismissed by Schoenberg precisely because, in making use of the past for the purposes of historical precedent, it took leave of tradition. Yet insofar as it suggested a specific method of composition, Krenek's pedagogy was perhaps better suited to American conditions than Schoenberg's, which was rooted nonsystematically in the idea of traditional practice.^[23]

The spirit of Schoenberg's teaching was animated by a fervent belief in the crucial role that education would play in a country where a profusion of musical talent struggled with cultural immaturity. That endowment of, as it were, "resources" would require careful nurturing and guidance if it was not to be exploited and misused. For one thing, music lovers would have to be instructed in critical listening and their attention focused on strictly musical criteria and values rather than waylaid by the commercialized hype of the concert world and its performing "stars." For another, encouragement should be given to amateur music making, in order to counter the culturally damaging effects of excessive professionalism and the consumerism that went along with it. As far as the actual teaching of composition went, Schoenberg presented himself not as a theorist or pedagogue but as a master practitioner; he believed that his students would benefit most from acquiring a basic facility in generating simple musical ideas and elaborating upon them in ways appropriate to the character of those ideas and the kinds of demands made by them. For students, the majority of whom could not be expected to approach the heights of true creativity, the analysis of masterworks (to which Schoenberg gave much emphasis) would serve to point up the qualitative differences between the imaginative solutions of genius and their own modest exercises. Even more important, comprehension and appreciation of an ideal represented by great achievements of the past went beyond a training in composition to form part of a moral education that developed the whole personality. If successful, such an education would give students "the courage to express what they have to say."^[24]

As Hindemith was brought to Yale, or Krenek to Hamline, Schoenberg was welcomed to UCLA in 1934 with the understanding that the appointment would lend prestige to the institution, and that the new faculty member could expect the university's assistance with major reforms and improvements in the music curriculum. Yet many of Schoenberg's proposals were rejected, and one suspects that the ruffling of professional feathers may have had as much to do with that as with any lack of funds needed for implementing the proposals. Moreover, those proposals, advanced with an aggressive bearing of authority that was hardly politic coming from a newcomer and foreigner to boot, were nothing less than sweeping. On finding that his teaching effectiveness was inhibited by large classes of students with very different levels of ability, he suggested a new structure that would divide courses into basic and advanced types of instruction. He insisted, at the same time, that those teaching the beginners be his own, more ad-

vanced students. Basic training must be "in the hands of an instructor who is entirely familiar with my system. It is literally impossible to work successfully with students who come to me without being trained in this system."^[25] Not surprisingly, he was accused of attempting to set up what amounted to a school within a school, based on a European model. But so convinced was Schoenberg on this issue that, as an alternative, he considered setting up a private school, the "Arnold Schoenberg School of Composition," with himself as director and three of his pupils as associates, who would contribute from their earnings to meet expenses. The associates he had in mind were Hanns Eisler, Gerald Strang, and Leonard Stein; their function would be to prepare students for advanced study with him. As to the role of the director, Schoenberg was quite unambiguous. In all that pertained to the establishment, administration, and development of the school, the director was to have "dictatorial powers."^[26]

Much has been made in the biographical and critical literature of Schoenberg's authoritarian and high-minded idealism. Less has been said, however, about some quite different and complementary character traits that provide a more balanced picture. Chief among these was a down-to-earth pragmatism, which his encounter with America seems to have called into particular prominence. Not that Schoenberg bowed to circumstances to the extent that many of his fellow émigrés did. Nevertheless, he did attempt to provide for what he saw to be the practical needs of American musicians; not only did he compose for the college orchestra and amateur wind band, he also provided harmony, counterpoint, and composition manuals suited to American students with little prior training. Striking, in these texts, is his adaptation to circumstances, reflected in the omission of the kinds of philosophical speculation that had characterized his European books, among them the Harmonielehre and the unfinished Der musikalische Gedanke, und die Logik, Technik und Kunst seiner Darstellung. Now theoretical matters are reduced to a minimum, and rules for writing music presented as a distillation of practice. It is the doing that counts; the rest will come later.

Nor, for all the contempt he felt for its rampant commercialism, does the practically minded Schoenberg entirely disregard his Hollywood milieu. Among his unpublished papers is a proposal, addressed to the Academy of Motion Pictures, under the title "School for Soundmen." In it he notes that American films are careful in their handling of visual detail but sloppy and insensitive in their treatment of music and the relationship between music and dramatic event. The proposed remedy is a training for "soundmen" that will give equal emphasis to studio techniques and the necessary musical rudiments, the latter to include ear training and the ability to read a score. Nothing appears to have come of this proposal.

Teaching from the ground up, so to speak, was a precept to which

Schoenberg adhered uncompromisingly throughout his American years. The majority of his students were treated by him, as he once admitted, in a manner that "showed them I did not think too much of their creative abilities"^[27] but instead helped to give them the musical foundation they so sorely needed. Beyond that his overall bearing was to them an example of high moral principles, and this example did not go unappreciated, at least among the more gifted and perceptive of his students, to whom it served as a guiding light during artistically troubled times. Lou Harrison, who for a short period attended some of Schoenberg's classes at UCLA, later wrote him the following words of gratitude:

No person has given me so much confidence in myself, and I have had much need since then, in the face of fads and fashions, of just that intense and real belief in the importance of honesty towards oneself and honesty towards the art which I profess that you seemed to give me.^[28]

In his closing years such appreciation was joined by an awakening of genuine interest in Schoenberg the composer, rather than merely Schoenberg the inventor of a revolutionary "method" of composition. After the long years of neglect there began to be more performances of both recent and earlier works in New York and even in the until then recalcitrant Los Angeles. A small band of younger Americans began to write to Schoenberg about being won over to the music and about finding in it, as Sessions put it, "a source of deep comfort and faith . . . an immensely renewed faith in the relevance of one's own efforts, as well as renewed courage to be making them."^[29]

A gratifying response, surely, even if coming to the composer at such a late stage. Yet it appears to have done little for the cloud of mistrust and suspicion that shrouded his relationship to his American environment and sat heavily upon him until the end. As late as 1950 he wrote a circular letter to several of his older pupils, asking them to protest what he considered official propaganda directed against him, in particular, a CBS ban on his music for being (so he had heard) too "controversial."^[30] From the moment he set foot on American soil Schoenberg had applied himself to the task of helping to bring his adopted country to musical maturity, but it would seem that in the end, when all was said and done, he felt he was still far from having accomplished that goal. True enough, he could look back on an active and in some ways successful American career as an educator and publicist for his own musical values and ideas. He had given many American students the technical grounding they so sorely needed, and, beyond that, secure artistic and moral direction. To a variety of lay audiences he had spoken with extraordinary forthrightness on many of the leading issues — musical, aesthetic, and cultural — of his day. As a composer, moreover, loneliness and a deep sense of isolation had not prevented him from

stepping into the limelight with music that addressed (or alluded to) contemporary sociopolitical concerns. The rhetoric of works such as the Ode to Napoleon and A Survivor from Warsaw brings them squarely into the realm of publicly oriented "protest" music.

Nevertheless, the gap between public and private could only widen with advancing age and the accumulation of disappointments. In late works such as the String Trio and the Fantasy for Violin with piano accompaniment, we find a retreat from the greater classicizing ambition of the first mature twelve-tone works and a return to the pithy, aphoristic, loosely structured manner of pre-World War I expressionism. Abandoned with such music is the attempt at an all-encompassing synthesis, and left unanswered, in the unfinished Jakobsleiter and Moses und Aron, are the fundamental questions raised by humanity's struggle with destiny. Schoenberg could only withdraw deeper into himself. With his last composition, the Moderne Psalmen, he conversed in music with his God, with whom he had been left alone.