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In his fine article from 1977 on what he calls the geschichtlicher Gehalt, the historical content, of the Chamber Symphony, Brinkmann has suggested that the polyphonic density that disturbed listeners and critics is representative of the crisis of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.