Six
The Refractory Masterpiece:
Toward an Interpretation of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, op. 9
Walter Frisch
It has often been remarked that in the early part of this century Schoenberg forged his path to the new music not primarily in the modern genres of music drama or symphonic poem, but in the tradition of chamber music.[1] The series of works he composed mainly in Vienna between 1899 and 1908 dramatically rerouted the mainstream of Austro-German music. Verklärte Nacht, op. 4; the First String Quartet, op. 7; the First Chamber Symphony, op. 9; the Second String Quartet, op. 10: each of these pieces brings to the fore — problematizes, one might now say — fundamental questions of genre, form, harmony, and thematic style in ways that were decisive not only for Schoenberg himself but also for much of the music that followed in the twentieth century.
The Chamber Symphony is arguably the key work, and the most dialectical, within this group. The tensions embodied in it may be represented broadly as follows:
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These oppositions must be explored in order to develop an appropriate understanding of how the Chamber Symphony fits into Schoenberg's musical, intellectual, and cultural world.
I
Schoenberg was not the first to use the title "Kammersinfonie." In 1905 a composer in Berlin, Paul Juon, had published with that title a work for
strings, woodwinds, and piano.[2] Several more similarly named pieces were to appear over the next decade or so.[3] But unlike the chamber symphonies of his contemporaries, Schoenberg's may be said to have created a new genre, in which two previously separate traditions, those of chamber and symphonic music, merge — or, more precisely, collide. Reinhold Brinkmann has aptly called op. 9 a "gepresste Sinfonie," a compressed symphony;[4] it might be equally considered a piece of "explodierte Kammermusik." The best way to get a sense of this dialectic of chamber/symphonic, which in turn incorporates some of the others mentioned above, is through the interpretive frameworks developed by Paul Bekker, Theodor W. Adorno, and Carl Dahlhaus, upon which I draw in the following discussion.
From the late eighteenth century the two streams of chamber and symphonic music, though independent in many respects, had tended to share instrumental structures such as the sonata form. Over the course of the nineteenth century they began to diverge both sociologically and compositionally. Symphonic music, especially as embodied in the symphonies of Beethoven, tended to address a large public audience. Beethoven's symphonies were conceived, Bekker asserted, in the spirit of human liberation and brotherhood — Menschheitsbefreiung and Menschheitsverbrüderung.[ 5] As such, they are authentically gesellschaftsbildend, community forming. For Adorno, the Beethoven symphonies were "orations to mankind."[6] Chamber music, on the other hand, was aimed at a more select, sophisticated audience — at first, from the Renaissance through the late eighteenth century, an aristocratic one; then, after the late eighteenth century, an educated, musically cultivated bourgeoisie.
These social aspects had compositional ramifications. As a public genre, and like a public oration, the symphony tended toward bolder, blunter effects. This is not to suggest any lack of compositional sophistication in the symphonies of Beethoven, but, as Adorno says, "in principle, they are simpler than chamber music despite their substantially more lavish apparatus."[7] Chamber music — and here the late quartets of Beethoven are probably the paradigms — has a more inward and intricate compositional language. Adorno defines chamber music as being characterized by the principle of "motivische-thematische Arbeit," or motivic-thematic working.[8] Dahlhaus adds to this definition the technique of "obbligato accompaniment," in which ostensibly secondary parts take on great thematic importance. He asserts also that chamber music became "intimately bound up with" a further compositional principle, that which Schoenberg called developing variation, the procedure of spinning out large, continuous spans from the constant transformation or reinterpretation of very reduced thematic or motivic material.[9]
As exploited by German composers from Haydn to Schoenberg, all three of these principles — motivic-thematic working, obbligato accompaniment,
and developing variation — led to increasing compositional sophistication and, concomitantly, greater technical and interpretive demands on players. The result was a radical, perhaps even paradoxical, transformation of the status of chamber music. As it became too demanding both intellectually and technically for the private amateur player, chamber music was forced out into the public concert hall and into the hands of professional ensembles. String quartets — from the Schuppanzigh in Beethoven's day, down through the Hellmesberger in Brahms's, to those of Rosé and Kolisch in Schoenberg's (and now the Arditti and Kronos in our own) — were formed in large part to bring the music of modern composers before the concertgoing public.
From Beethoven's late quartets through the works of Brahms and Schoenberg, chamber music became a kind of refuge for the most advanced compositional techniques. In the case of Brahms, the complexity of the music and the comprehension of the public seemed still to coexist in a delicate balance. But with Schoenberg's early chamber works, a crisis point in this development was reached. In Adorno's words: "The requirements of Schoenberg's chamber music could not be reconciled any more with Hausmusik, with the ambience of domesticity. They were as explosive in content as in technique. They obliged chamber music to make its definitive move to the concert hall."[10] And as is well known, the public reaction to Schoenberg's early chamber music was mainly hostile. Dahlhaus captures the paradox: "The isolation into which Schoenberg fell is to be understood primarily as the distancing of the chamber-music composer from the chamber-music listeners, from the musically cultivated audience."[11]
II
Schoenberg's First Quartet, op. 7, and First Chamber Symphony, op. 9, were premiered within a few days of each other in Vienna, on 5 and 8 February 1907, respectively. The report filed in a local paper on 11 February by a critic identified only as "rbt" is characteristic of much of the public and critical response:
Still more painful than the String Quartet was the Chamber Symphony for 15 solo instruments. Just think: Schoenberg and 15 solo instruments! Oh, when they are let loose! Each of them plays away frantically, with no concern for the other. Schoenberg deliberately avoids the natural consequences of individual voices coming together at a harmonic resting point. He sees it openly and earsplittingly as true counterpoint, which refrains completely from harmonic consideration, and he believes that the true harmony is that which places itself above all laws of euphony and musical logic. The new harmony instruction, which he has figured out, knows only one rule: consonances are to be used only in passing and then only seldom. Not one in ten listeners
can endure even for a moment compositions based on this maxim, and thus a portion of the public fled during the cacophonies of the Chamber Symphony without awaiting the end.[12]
On one level, these remarks, with their condemnation of unbridled polyphony and harsh dissonance, are just a vivid example of the kind of critical fustian heaped upon so much new music at the turn of the century. But the conjunction of the Chamber Symphony and the comments of "rbt" can also open a broader window onto cultural-intellectual aspects of the period.
In his fine article from 1977 on what he calls the geschichtlicher Gehalt, the historical content, of the Chamber Symphony, Brinkmann has suggested that the polyphonic density that disturbed listeners and critics is representative of the crisis of subjectivity felt throughout Austro-German culture around 1900.[13] Many leading artists and intellectuals felt it was no longer easy, or even possible, to perceive (and thus project) a comfortable or reassuring unity in the world around them. Brinkmann persuasively adduces passages from two of the best-known Viennese writers of the period, Hermann Bahr and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Bahr, who always had his finger on the pulse of his age, saw contemporary literature dissolving by 1891 into the communication of "sensation, nothing but sensation, unconnected and momentary imprints on the nerves of rapidly occurring events."[14] Hofmannsthal, in the famous Lord Chandos Letter of 1902, describes the fragmentation of thought and language that became known at the turn of the century as the Sprachkrise. The implied author of the letter confesses that he can no longer engage in creative writing: "I have utterly lost my ability to think or speak coherently about anything at all." He describes how he came to this point, how the world around him crumbled perceptually: "Everything fell into fragments for me, the fragments into further fragments, until it seemed impossible to contain anything at all within a single concept."[15]
For both Bahr and Hofmannsthal, experience and art are characterized by a lack of coherence and continuity. They share with other writers of the Jahrhundertwende a strong sense of isolation and individualism.[16] Brinkmann sees these attitudes and circumstances trickling down to Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony:
The historical position of the First Chamber Symphony is evident in the renunciation of an epic worldview and in the withdrawal into the subject. The artistic subject of this symphony no longer sees itself in the position to experience reality as a unity, to perceive its broad outline, and to transcend it. Rather, the subject seeks to preserve its identity exclusively through an extreme submersion in the self, through the location of the source of artistic production solely in the isolated subject.[17]
The sonic manifestation of this subjectivity is, for Brinkmann, precisely the intense profiling of the individual voices in the Chamber Symphony that "rbt" identified.
One might argue that the analogy of polyphony and subjectivity is too simple, too essentialist. What about the dense counterpoint and independence of voices in the music of J.S. Bach? Are these technical features necessarily reflective of an Identitätskrise in eighteenth-century Saxony? Caution is always necessary when relationships between notes and people are being proposed. Yet there can be little question that both "rbt" and Brinkmann are onto something: there is an air of crisis and urgency about Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, however we may wish to define it.
Another name has often been attached to the musical traits identified by "rbt" and Brinkmann: expressionist, which we normally take to mean a style prevalent in the arts primarily in Germany and Austria in the two decades after 1900, and in which an individual artist's expression and representation of some "inner necessity" (Kandinsky's term, also taken up by Schoenberg) takes precedence over traditional formal-structural considerations. Brinkmann suggests that "if any work in the realm of music should be called expressionistic, it is this Chamber Symphony, op. 9, by Arnold Schoenberg."[18]
This view has intriguing consequences for traditional music historiography. In standard accounts, the Chamber Symphony is seen as part of a group of works by Schoenberg (and other early-twentieth-century composers) that retain strong ties to late-Romantic forms and styles, especially those of Liszt and Strauss. It is Schoenberg's atonal works of 1908-1909 — the Three Piano Pieces, op. 11; the Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16; and especially the monodrama Erwartung, op. 17 — that are normally considered the "classic" expressionist compositions, in which outward form is (or seems) completely determined by the content. Identifying the Chamber Symphony of 1906 as "expressionist," a position not without merit, can cast a rather different light on music at the turn of the century. Above all, what the attachment of such a label reveals is that our conventional historicalstylistic categories for music around 1900 (as for many other musics) are largely arbitrary, and they are inadequate to the task of representing the powerful crosscurrents that constituted musical "reality" at the time.[19]
There is a further perspective on the Chamber Symphony that construes its subjectivity in a much less extreme or drastic fashion than does Brinkmann or "rbt." This viewpoint emerges from a remarkable review published by Elsa Bienenfeld on 12 February 1907 in the Neues Wiener Journal. Bienenfeld, a musicology student of Guido Adler, taught music history at the same Schwarzwald School in Vienna where Schoenberg had given lessons in harmony and counterpoint in 1903. Bienenfeld's reviews of Schoenberg's
works from this period are consistently the most balanced and thoughtful. Unlike most critics, who are a priori hostile, she starts from the belief that Schoenberg's works are serious, expressive contributions to a tradition. In her review, which covers both the Chamber Symphony and First Quartet and merits quotation at length, she grapples with the relationship between these works and the past:
The gap that separates Schoenberg from his forebears consists not in the content of what he is representing. Sorrow, repentance, longing remain always the same emotions and will always constitute the problems of art. Rather, the distinction lies in their outward form, in the possibility of their representation. Longing for peace can be incorporated in poetry such that only the charm of valleys, only the loveliness of a gentle evening is depicted: Eichendorff's poetry or the style of Mörike. Others, though, in ways that neither elevate nor diminish the value of their work, are obliged to represent the struggle and the conflicting ecstasies that precede peace and have it as their goal. He who loves Goethe, he who reads Knut Hamsun, will long since have recognized that. But there is still a third possibility open: to represent feelings in persons each of whom has different character traits yet all of whom experience equally sorrow that is unfortunate, different, but for each inevitable. Each [sorrow] is itself both goal and necessity; and only he who sees all the characters at once will perceive a harmony that gives all these passionate figures a common middle point and a common compassion. This is the manner of representation that Dostoyevsky, living in a more confused emotional state, employed in order to convey the single essential and sublime aspect of his ideas out of the multiplicity of characters and the momentary quality of situations. Schoenberg, working in a different art, with other means, seems to me to want to attain the same thing. Whether the public wants to grant him the achievement of this goal remains up to the pleasure of each individual listener.[20]
Like her contemporaries Bahr and Hofmannsthal, Bienenfeld seems to acknowledge a crisis of subjectivity in her culture, or at least within the culture that art represents. But for her the crisis is able to be overcome, and indeed is so in Schoenberg's works. It is striking that Bienenfeld compares Schoenberg with a novelist like Dostoyevsky or Goethe, who must manipulate many different characters. For Bienenfeld, the extreme subjectivity of Schoenberg's piece, as represented by the different "characters," must be perceived as a collective whole in order to be understood properly.
What is also interesting about Bienenfeld's remarks is that they present the Chamber Symphony as an essentially Romantic work, one in the tradition of the great novelists. For her, the piece occupies an expressive sphere in which reconciliation and closure are real possibilities. For Brinkmann and the critic "rbt," as we have seen, the Chamber Symphony inhabits a very different world, where no such transcendence or unity is achievable.
III
Still another historical-critical perspective on the Chamber Symphony is that offered by Adorno in his 1955 essay on Schoenberg in Prisms. This passage, to my mind the most stimulating (but also the most difficult) written on the piece, merits citation and consideration at some length:
Yet the compulsion to purge music of everything preconceived leads not only to new sounds like the famous fourth chords, but also to a new expressive dimension beyond the depiction of human emotions. One conductor has felicitously compared the area of resolution at the end of the big development section to a glacier landscape. For the first time a break is made in the Chamber Symphony with what had been a basic stratum of music since the age of the basso continuo, from the stile rappresentativo, from the adjustment of musical language to the significative aspect of human language. For the first time Schoenberg's warmth turns around into the extreme of coolness, whose expression consists in the absence of expression. Later he polemicized against those who demand "animal warmth" of music; his dictum, which proclaims that what music has to say can only be said through music, suggests the idea of a language unlike that of human beings. The brilliant, dynamically reserved and yet barbed quality which increases throughout the First Chamber Symphony, anticipated almost fifty years ago the later objectivity, without any preclassical gestures. Music which lets itself be driven by pure, unadulterated expression becomes irritably sensitive to everything representing a potential encroachment on this purity, to every intention to ingratiate itself with the listener as well as the listener's reciprocal effort, to identification and empathy. The logical consequence of the principle of expression includes the element of its own negation as that negative form of truth which transforms love into the power of unremitting protest.[21]
If for Bienenfeld the Chamber Symphony was essentially a Romantic work and for Brinkmann a protoexpressionist one, for Adorno it is proleptically neoclassical in its anticipation of the new "objectivity" or Sachlichkeit associated with Hindemith and others in the 1920s.[22] What Adorno identifies as "objective" in the Chamber Symphony is the work's brittle, almost anti-expressive quality. The path by which he arrives at this characterization is intriguing and — for this listener, at any rate — leads to real insights about op. 9.
For Adorno, expression in the Chamber Symphony is so extreme, so naked ("pure, unadulterated"), that it short-circuits (my metaphor, not his) and thus becomes transformed into its opposite, the lack of expression. This is the "coolness" he identifies, "whose expression consists in the absence of expression." As he says, summing up the dialectic or the paradox, the principle of expression contains within itself the element of its own negation. For Bienenfeld the musical language of the Chamber Symphony, like that of a nineteenth-century novel, clearly manifests the "animal warmth" that
Example 5.
Arnold Schoenberg, Chamber Symphony no. 1, op. 9, mm. 355-359; 364
allowed for communication with and about human beings. But for Adorno the human element is stripped away from the language of the Chamber Symphony.
Adorno's language may be extreme, but his characterization (by way of an unnamed conductor) of the end of the development section of op. 9 as a "glacier landscape" seems particularly apt. Here the principal fourthstheme of the work is presented in a dizzying series of crisscrossing, interlocking statements that eventually "freeze" at measure 364 into a six-part simultaneity of stacked fourths (see example 5). At the outer extremes of this chord are the pitches E and F, which as key areas have played a crucial role in the Chamber Symphony to this point. This remarkable chord, which is repeated fff over four measures and utterly resists being perceived tonally as related to a key, is indeed without human warmth. It is a sonority with which a listener cannot easily identify or empathize, to use Adorno's terms. The chord can be said to embody a dialectic between the tonalities of E and F that is as central to the piece as those tensions listed at the outset of this article.
IV
Although compelling, Adorno's vision of the Chamber Symphony requires some adjustment. The piece does not, of course, end on the frozen chord at the end of the development section: that sonority thaws into a series of ascending fourths, which then set the recapitulation in motion. Eventually, in an exhilarating coda, E major is confirmed as the tonic. Schoenberg probes one last time the E-F tonal dialectic that framed the frozen six-part chord. The tonalities of E and F had already been juxtaposed at the very outset of the Chamber Symphony, where a cadence to F major (measures 1 through 4) is followed by one in E major (measures 8 through 11).[23] The
Example 6.
Arnold Schoenberg, Chamber Symphony no. 1, op. 9, mm. 582-584; 593
central pitches of these keys are then, as we have seen, superimposed at the climax of the development section. At the very end of the piece, Schoenberg pits the two tonalities against each other, and the conflict is now resolved decisively in favor of E, to which F or an F-major chord moves again and again (see example 6).
What these resolutions suggest is that for all its dialectical rhetoric, the Chamber Symphony is ultimately an affirmatory work; it reasserts the power of tonality to unify, organize, make coherent. In this sense Bienenfeld's interpretation of an overarching "harmony" that brings together the different "characters" is closer to the mark than either Brinkmann's or Adorno's more pessimistic interpretations, in which subjectivity prevents any Welterfassung. One might say that the oppositions set out above are resolved in favor of the first element: symphony, public, communal, homophonic, objective.
Schoenberg's own remarks of 1937 on the Chamber Symphony suggest that at the time of composition he very much shared the optimistic viewpoint:
After having finished the composition of the Kammersymphonie . . . I believed I had now found my own personal style of composing and that all problems which had previously troubled a young composer had been solved and that a way had been shown out of the perplexities in which we young composers had been involved. . . . It was as lovely a dream as it was a disappointing illusion.[24]
These comments imply that what followed in Schoenberg's development represented a significant break. And indeed, the works of 1907-1909 differ radically in style from the Chamber Symphony.
Immediately after completing op. 9 in the summer of 1906, Schoenberg began another chamber symphony, for a slightly larger ensemble (eighteen
instruments). Progress was slow and sporadic. Although Schoenberg managed to complete most of the first movement by the fall of 1908, the Second Chamber Symphony was to remain a fragment until 1939, when it was published (in two movements) as op. 38. The portion written in 1906-1908, which makes up most of the first movement, is a lyrical masterpiece in an advanced and very subtle tonal idiom.[25] But there is little engagement with the intense dialectics of the First Chamber Symphony. Perhaps for this reason — because there was more to say about the issues raised in op. 9 — the Second Chamber Symphony failed to advance and became displaced in Schoenberg's workshop in 1907 by the Second String Quartet, op. 10.[26]
This quartet, which was to be the last of the early series of chamber works, revisits some of the dialectics set out in the First Chamber Symphony. In the remarkable finale to op. 10 the pull is again between individuality and collectivity, now cast much more specifically than in op. 9 in terms of atonality versus tonality. The opening of the movement, in which the four different instruments successively take up the main melody, is resolutely — and famously — polyphonic. The linear independence then gives way after a few minutes to the very harmonically, even triadically, conceived setting of "ich fühle luft von anderem planeten."
The individual/collective dialectic also forms the premise of the George poem "Entrückung" that is sung in the movement: the persona floats alone, set free from his earthly context. Yet this liberation, representing apparently the ultimate degree of subjectivity, soon turns into its opposite, as he dissolves his identity into music's collectivity: "ich löse mich in tönen." At the end, in the last line, he becomes "ein funke nur vom heiligen feuer. . . . ein dröhnen nur der heiligen stimme" (only a spark of the holy fire, only a roar of the holy voice). The individual is thus completely subsumed or absorbed by a greater force.
This paradoxical negation or reversal — liberation becoming enslavement — is analogous to that posited by Adorno for the expressive (or anti-expressive) world of the Chamber Symphony. But in the Second Quartet, as in the Chamber Symphony, the process can be given a positive spin: transcendence is possible, and in this case brings with it a sweeping, indeed interplanetary, worldview.
It could be argued (though it is not possible to do so here) that Schoenberg never lost the goal of transcendence articulated musically in the Chamber Symphony and the Second Quartet, that he never succumbed to the pressures of subjectivity so prevalent in his Viennese culture (and in his music) at the beginning of this century. Throughout numerous Kulturkrisen, geographic displacements, and two world wars, he might be said to have retained the affirmatory vision and found different ways of communicating it in his compositions for half a century.