INTRODUCTION

The second half of this century will spoil by overestimation whatever the first half's underestimation left unspoilt.
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, 1949

In many ways the second half of the twentieth century has been preoccupied with sorting out the shock waves of the first, which included two world wars, countless struggles for national and ethnic independence and autonomy, political and economic upheaval, and genocide, population dislocation, and emigration on an unprecedented scale. Since 1950, however, the political and economic structures that emerged following the Second World War have been undergoing not violent shifts but rather a process of expansion, decay, and transformation. Inherited ideologies, critically evaluated, have gradually been modified or abandoned, barriers have disintegrated, and certain issues once thought parochial have assumed global import. This phenomenon is no less evident in the arts, where the first half of the century brought revolutions of material and language, of media and means of dissemination, and of the interrelationship between artists, their audience, and their craft. By midcentury an array of "isms" had crystallized around a few fixed reference points.

One of those fixed points was Arnold Schoenberg. By the time he died in 1951 Schoenberg had come to be regarded as one of the pivotal figures of twentieth-century musical culture. An entire generation of younger composers was bred upon the dogma of a musical progress in which Schoenberg's innovations were a necessary and inevitable consummation, and even that other central figure, the archneoclassicist Igor Stravinsky, adopted Schoenbergian twelve-tone and serialist techniques in his last years. Now, nearly half a century later, Schoenberg and his music have become the object of reappraisal. Although a number of major figures still build upon the foundations of Schoenberg's method, others have abandoned serialism or ignore it altogether. Moreover, many of Schoenberg's principal twelve-tone works have yet to find a place in our concert repertory comparable to that

enjoyed by the mature works of other twentieth-century masters such as Berg and Bartók. How then are we to evaluate Schoenberg's contribution to twentieth-century culture?

The partisan battles of the inter- and postwar years created an image of Schoenberg as a lonely, isolated figure — a latter-day prophet preaching in the wilderness of contemporary culture. Such an image obscured the ways in which the composer's life was an integrated part of some of the central experiences of twentieth-century history. The very stations of his professional biography — from the hothouse ambience of turn-of-the-century Vienna to the frenetic environment of the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, and on to exile in Los Angeles — reflect the representative quality of his life. Of course, mere chronological and geographic coincidence would be of little significance if the scope of Schoenberg's intellect and curiosity had not penetrated so many facets of contemporary life. Schoenberg was an articulate observer with strongly held and often idiosyncratic opinions on virtually any subject. His energy and vitality, his forceful presence, are documented in his music, letters, essays, and books. What is more, his passion for preservation insured the survival of the artifacts of his life, from a richly annotated library to a massive body of correspondence spanning sixty years. It is the controversial and often problematic position that Schoenberg has occupied in twentieth-century music history that compels historians to examine and reexamine his legacy. Beyond that, the wealth and quality of the source material provide the scholar with unmatched resources for taking the measure not only of the man but also of his time. Together these strands of inquiry make possible a critical evaluation of Schoenberg and his relationship to twentieth-century culture as well as of our relationship to the inherited structures that we are now in the process of transforming.

Schoenberg is often referred to as a conservative revolutionary, and as a product of Hapsburg Vienna he could hardly have been otherwise. The retrospective cast of Viennese intellectual thought is balanced, however, by a critical spirit that could be at once ironic and pedantic. Schoenberg was inspired by such Viennese contemporaries as Karl Kraus and Gustav Mahler to draw radical consequences from his profound identification with his musical heritage. Much has been written about the prophetic qualities of prewar Vienna — a testing ground, as Kraus wrote, for the "end of the world." But did a world come to an end, or was it taking shape from the energies of a newly self-confident middle class? The energies of that class were nourished not only by a critical assessment of the past but also by a head-on confrontation with the present. For Schoenberg that confrontation with the present was most intense during his years in Berlin.

Schoenberg lived in the German capital during three periods of his life: as an untried novice (1901-1903), as a radical revolutionary (1911-1915), and, finally, during the last years of the Weimar Republic (1926-1933), as an established master, increasingly out of touch with the younger generation. On each occasion he was attracted by prospects of financial security and wider resonance for his works. It was here that he was most directly confronted with the bracing and not always salutary winds of the present — new literary impulses and technological wonders on the one hand, economic chaos and political madness on the other. The works Schoenberg wrote in Berlin and those that were influenced by his sojourns there — from his cabaret songs of 1901 to the Pierrot settings of 1912 and his film music of 1929 — reflect this encounter with the "present." It is also in Berlin that Schoenberg was increasingly compelled to take a stand on the social, moral, and ethical issues confronting modern society.

Schoenberg was among the first to recognize the futility of remaining in Nazi Germany, and in 1933, at the age of fifty-nine, he became an exile in America. Welcomed, like many of his fellow émigrés, as a master from the Old World, he soon learned that he had to adjust to a new set of cultural assumptions. His American experiences enriched his creative thought (although performances of his music remained in inverse proportion to his growing reputation as a "modern enigma") and gave him new outlets for his teaching (it was in America that he wrote his principal practical textbooks and exerted the widest influence as a pedagogue). And yet, during the very decade in which Schoenberg and others arrived from Europe, indigenous American artistic culture was taking wing. Did the wave of European émigrés enrich or retard that process of finding an "American" voice? The concrete and continuing influence of Schoenberg's teaching, and the teaching of other émigrés, poses questions about the tension between inherited and grafted culture, about the nature and relevance of the émigré experience, and about our present assessment of Schoenberg's relationship and pertinence to twentieth-century culture as a whole.

It is on the basis of these reflections, developed together with Leonard Stein, the founding director of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, that the conference "Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture," on which this volume is based, was organized. The conference was to be Leonard Stein's farewell to the Institute, the final event of an eventful seventeen-year stewardship of Schoenberg's legacy.^[1] It was Leonard's vision to offer a forum for synthesis and interdisciplinary discussion, in which the geographic sites of Schoenberg's professional career — Vienna, Berlin, and Los Angeles — were to serve as a

framework for exploring his relationship to crucial themes of twentieth-century culture. Analysis of individual works or compositional method was to take second place to an examination of the historical, aesthetic, and intellectual issues that shaped Schoenberg's artistic philosophy as well as an assessment of our contemporary response to the modernist legacy of the first half of this century. It is a mark of the success of the conference, which took place at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute on the campus of the University of Southern California 15-17 November 1991, that much of the most stimulating interchange took place in the freewheeling discussions between papers and sessions, often late into the night. The present volume includes thirteen of the twenty-three papers delivered at the conference (in addition to one submitted subsequently) in a selection that the editors hope is representative of the goals and achievements of that event as well as a fitting tribute to Leonard Stein, whose imagination and enterprise made it possible. Given the time that has elapsed since the conference, most of the papers have been significantly revised to take account of recent scholarship as well as of the impulses generated by the conference itself.

The essays of the first section illuminate the trajectory of Schoenberg's creative and intellectual development through an investigation of cultural and biographical contexts. Leon Botstein explores the cultural fissures in turn-of-the-century Vienna as well as the overarching retrospective cast of the city's ideology of modernism. Alexander L. Ringer argues that Schoenberg's confronting and accepting the historical dissonance of his Jewish identity was a mainspring of his creative life and that it is an essential perspective for understanding the aesthetic consistency of his works. Questions of identity also underlie Peg Weiss's discussion of the ethnographic dimensions of Vasili Kandinsky's relationship with Schoenberg and the surprising degree to which that relationship resonated in Kandinsky's paintings. The late Alan Lessem paints a dark picture of Schoenberg's American years, emphasizing the dislocation of exile and Schoenberg's gradual withdrawal into a lonely isolation with his God.

In the second section the focus shifts to specific works and to the interplay between creative impulse and aesthetic articulation. The most tumultuous years in Schoenberg's creative life were those between 1908 and 1911, during which the composer not only broke with tonality but experimented with the radical rejection of inherited forms and structures. Ethan Haimo's close reading of the Harmonielehre of 1911 suggests ways in which the roots of Schoenberg's atonal thinking are embedded in his concept of tonal practice. Walter Frisch examines how Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, op. 9, served as a vehicle for confronting and transcending the dialectical tensions between the symphonic and chamber traditions of Viennese classicism. Questions of gender politics, psychological theory, and aesthetic philosophy intertwine in the essays by Bryan R. Simms and Joseph Auner on

the operas Erwartung (1909) and Die glückliche Hand (1910-1913), respectively — works of pivotal importance in Schoenberg's short-lived attempt to create an expressive language directly responsive to emotional impulse and unmediated by formal constraints. Jan Maegaard's reflections on his catalog of Schoenberg's incomplete works, fragments, and sketches remind us of that vast shadow land of discarded projects from the composer's fertile imagination. Patricia Carpenter and Severine Neff offer an overview of one of Schoenberg's most ambitious unfinished projects, a comprehensive theory and philosophy of composition, which occupied him in one way or another for most of his creative life.

The essays of the final section address Schoenberg's relationship to contemporary thought. My own essay on Schoenberg and the Canon argues that Schoenberg's lasting legacy may rest less on his having expounded timeless truths than on his having provided timely responses to issues of his age. Hermann Danuser demonstrates how Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff, or concept of art, with its dialectical opposition of tradition and innovation, heart and brain, is at once historically dated and surprisingly relevant to the creative dilemmas of our own time. Jonathan Dunsby's praise for Schoenberg as "the central architect of present-day theory and practice" likewise emphasizes his role as an "irritant to the orthodoxies" that are everywhere challenged by postmodernist perspectives. Reinhold Brinkmann suggests differing ways of approaching Schoenberg's career as a narrative telos that transformed language from an artifact of aesthetic self-reflection to an agent of moral engagement. What Brinkmann calls Schoenberg's Durchbruch, or breakthrough, in the works of his last years is in no small part a triumph of self-definition, a theme that resonates with several other essays in this collection.

In 1911 Kandinsky wrote of a fast-approaching time "of reasoned and conscious composition, when the painter will be proud to declare his work constructive."^[2] It is from this perspective of conscious creation that the conference and the resulting collection of essays draw their title. Schoenberg's emancipation of dissonance served not only to colonize new terrain within our universe of artistic expression but also to acknowledge that that universe might include irreconcilable difference as a constructive principle. If Schoenberg no longer occupies a central position in our musical discourse — a discourse that may no longer even have a center — his voice can still be heard among the plurality of voices, not least because he was among the first to anticipate their dissonance.

The editors wish to express their gratitude to all the participants who helped make the original conference such a stimulating and productive experience. The National Endowment for the Humanities provided vital financial assistance, as did the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, whose capable staff, including Associate Director Tom

Reese and Assistant Director for Visiting Scholars and Conferences Herbert Hymans, provided additional logistical support and advice. The smooth operation of the conference itself was made possible by the dedicated staff of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, among them Andrea Castillo-Herreshoff, Christian Kiefer, JoAnn Roe, and especially Assistant Director Heidi Lesemann.

Special thanks are due Wayne Shoaf, the archivist of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, for assistance in tracking down nagging source and reference questions during the preparation of this volume. We are particularly grateful to Nuria, Ronald, and Lawrence Schoenberg for their support and kind permission to reproduce pictures and musical examples from the Schoenberg legacy. A similar debt of gratitude is due to the Artists Rights Society for permission to reproduce the Kandinsky plates. Finally, our hearty thanks to Doris Kretschmer, Rose Anne White, and the University of California Press for their constructive criticism and encouragement.

CHRISTOPHER HAILEY
LOS ANGELES, 1996