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.